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198 The Collected Writings of Michael Snow introduces an internal paradox, seeming to close one of the time gaps by appearing to be photographs of actual landscapes (apprehension going "through" representation to subject). If you just photograph the paintings "straight," which in some cases I almost did, there is almost no time left from the camera's side. Of course there must actually be a time gap because it is a photograph but this aspect (in a completely "accurate" recording) would certainly be deemphasized to the point where one would go immedi­ ately past the photograph to the painting. The best reproduction would make you for­ get that there was any time involved in making it. So the best reproduction would be the actual original? Nothing can replace the original.A representation is a second­generation emphasis of some kind, atransformation. The subject can't represent itself. You have to be there ­ that's why the present becomes so important. If it didn't matter, then there wouldn't have to be recordings, if every subject could be its own subject in a way. Why is recording of any interest at all? I think it's part of the programming that we're in. Photographs, tape recordings and videotapes are an externalized or objective memory, a socialized memory. One should consider that in the making of an image. We are social primates and part of the unity that technology brings about has been a sharing of memories. When there was a small group of ape men, near men, Neander­ thal men, they shared tools and experience in order to learn how to survive and this is part of the same process: making memories more and more public so that the sharing of them produces a unification of the social body. The experience is on a level that is above or below personal interchange and it equalizes. I was watching television the other night and thinking that the relationship between it and what's represented is sim­ ilar to a pictograph or hieroglyph even though there are a lot more details. The image is abstracted enough to be discussed under the category of glyph which circles us back to pointingout the differences between representions and their subjects. That is part of the discussion in the bus scene in Rameau's Nephew. An interesting prospect is talked about there, which is that representation could arrive at a stage where you couldn't tell the difference between the representation and its subject. That certainly seems almost possible right now. Don't you think it would be like abolishing consciousness, in a way? Don't you think it could be like dreaming, where there is no criticism, there is no consciousness, in a way? Yes, I agree it would be like abolishing consciousness and it looks like it's going to happen. It might be what will happen if there isn't the catastrophe, one of the catastrophes or all of the catastrophies! There would be a kind of unification with a mirror image that would be a stasis between the inner and the outer. They would be locked. That might be the way the organism will solve its problem, not by going ahead but by pic­ turing itself! Do you see yourself as being a primitive, relative to that idea? How does your work relate to this idea? I'm trying to point out the reality of images, to take representation as a fact in itself in the world. So as long as there are differences, I'm interested in the differences. Pierre Theberge: Conversation with Michael Snow 199 If I were to work with holograms I'd still be working with the difference, even though holography is the same sort of thing as the achievement of film, which was to make the illusion of things move and make representation more realistic. Holograms give the impression of more three­dimensionality,and that's beautiful. I think it's not a technical or a technological thing but a way of clarifying the world and the world of its representations, though of course one includesthe other. So if you clarify one it helps to clarify the other, or can. Does it? Does the recent work (Painting) have to do more with a simultaneous presentation of states of time rather than with a clearly narrative content? Yes. In my other work, I've done several things that are sequences, often reading sequences, left to right; but...

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