Fixate from Aaron Sjogren on Vimeo.

Jana and friend

I just got back from LA, where my good friend Amy Jo had her birthday. Good times were had by all, as were some pictures. More after the jump.
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Genius.

New Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album coming out. Who’s stoked?

Thanks Zane.

Thinking about my last post.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know why yet, but I like to document the injuries that I have been accumulating as a result of my epilepsy, such as this one and a previous one. For the past year and half/two years, I have also been collecting the bottles of anti-convulsants that I have to take every day. To what end, I’m not sure. I’m sure that at some point, it will allow me some perspective, but in the immediate, I think that it allows me to work through a lot of things. I will be sure to post something if I figure any of this out.

Who loves low-res animated GIFs? That’s right, I do.

I ran across this article, and one quote caught my attention.

By turning the personal into the public, an entirely new aesthetic is coming into being — and a huge proportion of the invisible social interaction of a generation is being recorded forever. As Charles Stross notes, we are living at the end of “pre-history” — the last days of a patchwork human history. Tomorrow’s lives will be remembered by the historians of the day-after-tomorrow with astounding clarity and thoroughness, reconstructed through the midden of personal blips, twits, and chirps emitted by our social tools. By comparison, our own lives will be as opaque and unimaginable as the lives of the poor schmucks who inhabited the same cave for 200,000 years, generation after generation leaving no mark more permanent than a mouldering knucklebone lost in the soil.

I take issue with this because it is not a generation at-large who is being recorded, but those privileged enough to be on the prosperous side of the digital divide. I don’t take issue with the fact that the internet will be a recorded history, but who is being recorded and what is being taken as history. History is powerful weapon, and is not something to be taken lightly.

True, those who partake in online communities are forever having their social interactions recorded, but taking that as history does so at the expense of those who do not have the means to access the technology. We must remember that at this point, technologies such as the internet, while increasingly important, is still a privilege–of class, education, access–and to not use that privilege as a means of exclusion of others.

We are just recently moving away from the model of a Western-centric, patriarchal driven version of history, and it would be a big step back to fall back into this model again. Columbus did not discover America, and the internet is not an accurate, as of yet, historian of human history.

So, I finally got around to doing a overhaul on the site. It’s only been about a year or so. But the place has a new look, and I finally got around to updating some of the pictures in the portfolio section. Now I just have to get around to putting up some of the work that I am actually working on, as opposed to the photography that has turned into a hobby at this point. I have a lot of it up here already, just not organized in any sense. That will be for later…