On the way back dropping off some DVDs from The Film Shop on Broadway market, I saw a massive hairy alsation leap up suddenly as a large crow swooped just over it's head. It accelerated really quickly and for a second seemed to be gaining and just about to snap it's teeth shut on the crow's tail feathers, but of course the crow was accelerating faster and swooped to safety.

"Wow," I thought, "that was cool. I wish I had got it on camera or something."

Then I thought, why the fuck? I just saw a very normal and mundane event take place, why should I wish that I had recorded it somehow. Is it not enough to just see things taking place? Why must everything be recorded, or re-presented?

Well, to record and exhibit ascribes an additional importance to witnessing something, I thought. It solidifies the status and importance of the act of witnessing things at all: "Look. I Was Here. This Happened."

And so it might generate conversation or response, and fight back for a minute the certain knowledge that this event was, in many ways, completely meaningless, as everything is.

So, is one of the primary motivations for photographing, filming, drawing, painting, whatever... to capture time for a moment, to take a second out of the tuimbling mass of time, and to somehow own it. To be seen to witness things or to capture them, rather than to just to impermenantly and fleetingly experience - does this offer some slim comfort, or bolster people's fear of meaninglessness and temporality?