Conversation: Alicia Savage and Michael Pointer

Communication is the key to everything, so we are told. Relationships and business require that we know what to expect and know what others around us are thinking. Many have written of the distillation of ideas to tweets while bemoaning the trivial content. Telegrams were necessarily succinct and contained useful, pertinent information. Abraham Lincoln chided his generals for telegraphing too much and kept his own messages short. Twitter would have worked quite well for him. Nowadays we message about meals, bouts of constipation, and catching cold- a hooray for the mundane. The daily shares are so numerous that I can no longer remember what my friends are doing. Bless their hearts, I will not remember who has what when. The information no longer glows for me, a rare twinkle here and there, but more uniform graying toward useless information that I will not remember in fifteen minutes. They are my friends and I will abide with them in ten second bites read on the fly because I love them. They will have to remind me of the important snippets when next we speak. In a general sense, I might become unable to view the dollop of information and associate it with anyone I know. That may have happened already. I sometimes hope that all these bleeting people will lapse into aphasia for a bit, or go take a long nap. Here is the crux of the matter, I cease to respond with any kind of emotional attachment to much of the information I receive. My filter has become so effective that the effluent is like pure water- I see nothing in it. The gray water of Las Vegas irrigation rolls out and over the gravel lawn of my mind splashing straight through, my rocks all dry in a second or two.  

Alicia Savage and I have addressed this in our images. The hand to tree from the gray box of my mind to her overloaded senses becomes vague. Although associated, the panoply of information reduces significance in our communication. We hope that this does not occur with important people in our lives and yet it does. It is easy to listen and forget to hear if someone is prattling on no matter how cogent they may be.

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Arianna Sanesi and Georgia Lloyd, Conversation, Paris, France and Wisconsin, USA

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