LIVING PICTURE #3

Living Picture #3 explores jazz with the beautiful piece by composer and saxophonist Jan Garbarek "Rites". The piece is illustrated by two clips, rather dystopian, that build on the melancholic tone of the music. They reminded me of a text I had written in 2019, inspired by an image of a desolate landscape taken in Second Life :

"A team of researchers recently discovered that the cells of a corpse continue to live after death. Their activity was even greater than before. Some have seen, blinded by hope and dread, the proof of eternal life, but it is not so.

The activity of the cells corresponds to desperate signals they send, like bottles to the sea, to other cells. All the cells scream, but apparently none hear the others. They can no longer listen to each other, to coordinate. It is as if, what is dead,  is not a set of cells, but its consistency, the relations between them.

Are we, the human species, already dead ? We have never communicated so much, and we have never been so alone. Every second, thirty thousand billion bytes of information is emitted worldwide. Data, new data, data adjusted for seasonal variations, data on data, personal data, pornographic data, financial data, a lot of financial data, lolcats, spam, seflies, lots of selfies... These data scream "Hey! I'm here ! Why do not you hear me! "And the more data shout out personal information that never interests others, the more data they have and the more they scream.

Refugees in their little cabin, stood petrified in front of their makeshift radio. They were no longer receiving any message. Neither from Earth nor from the sky. The cells eventually die, too."