“If we consider performance as of disappearance, of an ephemerality read as vanishment and loss, are we perhaps limiting ourselves to an understanding of performance predetermined by our cultural habituation to the logic of the archive? [...] in privileging an understanding of performance as a refusal to remain, do we ignore other ways of knowing, other modes of remembering, that might be situated precisely in the ways in which performance remains, but remains differently?” (Schneider 98)
In thinking about the Schneider article, we were struck by the idea that there might be a way to resist vanishing, and what it would mean to read a kind of text that has perspectival ephemerality--i.e. that one person views as naturally disappearing, but another saves for an archive of sorts. One of the more current examples is Snapchat, but we decided to dig up some 2009 goodness and give you Texts From Last Night, from Woman on the Edge of Time and The People in the Trees.
From Woman on the Edge of Time
From The People in the Trees
