Life Lived Backwards
Laurie Anderson
[Bicycle bells, passing cars and traffic horns.]
So many things are being recorded. Numbers, locations, names, dates, times, directions. Massive amounts of data are being collected and stored. What kind of information is this? Fragmented conversations, full of jump cuts and distortion. And what are the stories that emerge from these fragments? And why are they being collected?
And it's only when you commit a crime, that the data is put together. And your story is reconstructed. Backwards. A portrait of you – made up of data trails. The places you went. The things you bought. The pictures you took. The emails you sent
And like Kierkegaard said: "Life can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards."