I'm
Increasingly
Pessoptimistic

Amnesiac

All of my travel plans for 2020 were cancelled to the pandemic nature of Covid-19. The only consolations I could get to that derived from either browsing old photos on my cell phone or scrolling around on Google Earth. As fingers pinched and scrolled on the screens of different sizes, the images related to the destinations were gradually blown up, with frequent visual glitches in the process that led to the distortion of the true forms of the subjects being viewed. As you can see, travelling virtually was not a relaxing experience. However, it indeed reminded me to re-examine the concept of “blowing up”. 

Ever since the 13th century, the use of magnifiers has been considerably popularized. Accompanying the popularization of magnifiers is the “blowing up” of the public’s trust and their infatuations over the very act of blowing up. As a consequence, the original construction of images is often discarded; and the focus points keep changing. People always want to believe that they can get indefinitely close to the truths of the world if they can get closer enough and observe more details. But that’s simply not true. The rushed curiosities of people have brought them to the scape of post-truth and further away from discovering the truth. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard suggests that what we have seen on mass media is not the real world, and that the real reality has disappeared. The collages of stretched images, the publications printed by dot matrix printers, as well as the tennis game that cannot be possibly described by words at the end of the film Blow-Up, are all illusions that could resemble the looks of realities to an indefinite extent, and yet are in fact vastly different from the truth.