I used GIMP to erase the background of several images of myself from my early teenage years. This process of contextual erasure was peculiarly illuminating in the way that it allowed me to isolate something about myself from these images that I had never noticed before. I suppose part of it is that I had seen the images so many times before that they had lost their "punctual" potential, always arriving too early in my visual memory to initiate a genuine felt. But by erasing the scene, I began to see hints of the de-contextualized (deconstructed) version of my identity that had been inaccessible due to the noise of my surroundings. I was reaching closer to the objet petit a which, as Ulmer says, is simply "me."
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