Status Updates From On and Off-Screen Imaginaries

'It is as Trinh T. Minh-ha describes: "Truth never yields itself in anything said or shown. One cannot just point a camera at it to catch it: the very effort to do so will kill it."'

'As Dennis Lim observes in another context, inherent in cinema is a strong "kinship between ghosts and movies. Premised on illusion and promising endless reanimation, cinema has been called the ghostliest of mediums. Ghosts represent unfinished business, the persistence of the past."'

'The archival impulse also spells out the cost of being recorded.'

'And yet there is another, less visible front line of the crackdown: the bureaucratic process of censorship, which materializes in the regulation of public spaces and licenses, and the films and artworks the public does not hear about that are never screened or exhibited. You cannot know about what you cannot see.'

'As the confrontations between protesters and police are no longer seen in the streets, the front lines of conflict have materialized in a different form—one less able to sustain international news attention with spectacles of unrest.'

Marshall McLuhan: Everybody has become porous. The light and the message go right through us… When you’re on the telephone or on the radio or ok TV, you don’t have a physical body - you’re just an image on the air.