Images and Memento Mori: Extending Susan Sontag's Vision

From Still to Motion

What happens when photographs begin to move? When we extend Susan Sontag's famous observation that "all photographs are memento mori" into the realm of moving images, we discover something profound about time, death, and artistic expression.

In video art, we might say:

All moving images are memento mori in motion. Where photography captures death in stillness, video art captures death in movement—the slow decay of time itself made visible.

Duration as Medium

In video art, duration itself becomes material. Unlike photography's instantaneous capture, video art works with extended time. A 10-hour video loop by Douglas Gordon or a real-time surveillance piece by Bruce Nauman forces viewers to confront time's weight.

This temporal extension transforms the memento mori from reminder into experience. We don't just see death's symbols; we feel time dying around us as we watch.

The Loop: Eternal Return of the Dead

Video art's signature technique—the loop—creates a unique form of temporal purgatory. Figures on screen repeat actions endlessly, trapped in cycles that never progress. This repetition becomes its own kind of death: death by endless repetition rather than cessation.

In gallery spaces, looped videos create "temporal sculptures" where past moments circulate endlessly, never moving forward, never truly alive.

Digital Decay and Glitch

Contemporary video artists work with digital decay as their memento mori. Glitched videos, corrupted files, and degraded signals become metaphors for mortality. Artists like Rosa Menkman and Phillip Stearns use digital artifacts as modern vanitas symbols.

The pixel becomes the new skull, compression artifacts the new wilted flowers.

Screen as Temporal Window

Unlike photographs that hang on walls as objects, video works create temporal windows. The screen becomes a portal through which we observe dead time in motion. This creates a different kind of melancholy—we're not looking at death, we're looking through death into lost time.

Digital Preservation vs. Analog Decay

Early video art dealt with analog decay—magnetic tape degrading, signal loss, physical deterioration of materials. Contemporary digital video art faces different forms of mortality: obsolete file formats, corrupted data, platform dependencies.

Both forms remind us that even our attempts to preserve time are temporary. The medium itself is dying as we watch.

Sontag's Vision Extended

Sontag saw photography as evidence of time's passage. Video art makes that passage visible and experiential. Where photographs say "this existed," video art says "this was dying, and you can watch it die, again and again."

The moving image becomes not just evidence of mortality but a machine for producing the experience of mortality.

Digital Afterlife

Today's video art exists in constant tension between preservation and obsolescence. Works stored on servers, displayed on screens, dependent on electricity and digital infrastructure—all reminding us of their own fragility.

Every video work is simultaneously an archive of dead moments and a fragile object moving toward its own death.

Conclusion

Video art transforms photography's static memento mori into dynamic meditations on time and mortality. In gallery spaces around the world, screens glow with dead moments brought back to life, creating temporal environments where we can walk through death itself.

Where photographs offer single instances of lost time, video art creates spaces of lost time—temporal architectures built from dead moments that continue to move, loop, and decay.

In this extension of Sontag's insight, we find that moving images don't just remind us of mortality—they make us inhabitants of mortality, walking through galleries filled with time's beautiful decay.