Automatic for the People
In photography, the suffix -matic has been fading from use.
The etymology of -matic is from the Greek word matos, that means "willing to perform". The term "automatic" is a portmanteau of auto- (meaning self), and -matic (willing), i.e. "willing to self-perform", or "willing to let the self-perform". Combine that with the state of consciousness of the photographer currently, the automaticity is to feed images to the network (and now, neural networks), as an automatic posting or sync to the network.
As Vilem Flusser expounded so eloquently in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, we basically work for the camera to nourish a social media feed, unlike the days of the Instamatic, which was meant to simplify the technical aspects of photography to point-and-shoot, which have now redounded to having that simplification in the form of the "black mirror" or the "black box", which is the phone in your pocket.
People taking snaps can now only see the world through the camera and in photographic categories. They are not "in charge of" taking photographs, they are consumed by the greed of their camera, they have become an extension of the button of their camera. Their actions are automatic camera functions. A permanent flow of unconsciously created images is the result. They form a camera memory, a databank of automatic functions. Anyone who leafs through the album of a person who takes snaps does not recognize, as it were, the captured experiences, knowledge or values of a human being, but they automatically realize camera possibilities. (Flusser, VileÌm. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion, 2014. 58-59)
The etymology of -matic is from the Greek word matos, that means "willing to perform". The term "automatic" is a portmanteau of auto- (meaning self), and -matic (willing), i.e. "willing to self-perform", or "willing to let the self-perform". Combine that with the state of consciousness of the photographer currently, the automaticity is to feed images to the network (and now, neural networks), as an automatic posting or sync to the network.
As Vilem Flusser expounded so eloquently in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, we basically work for the camera to nourish a social media feed, unlike the days of the Instamatic, which was meant to simplify the technical aspects of photography to point-and-shoot, which have now redounded to having that simplification in the form of the "black mirror" or the "black box", which is the phone in your pocket.
People taking snaps can now only see the world through the camera and in photographic categories. They are not "in charge of" taking photographs, they are consumed by the greed of their camera, they have become an extension of the button of their camera. Their actions are automatic camera functions. A permanent flow of unconsciously created images is the result. They form a camera memory, a databank of automatic functions. Anyone who leafs through the album of a person who takes snaps does not recognize, as it were, the captured experiences, knowledge or values of a human being, but they automatically realize camera possibilities. (Flusser, VileÌm. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion, 2014. 58-59)
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