Labyrinth

McLuhan writes “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror… Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.” His present was obsessed with the past, with nostalgia. And media is still, in large part, preoccupied with its thirty-years-younger self. Look no further than the superhero revivals for evidence of that. Yet our present is also obsessed with its present. We look at the present through the lens of a smartphone camera, or the mirror-like image of a selfie. We look at our smartphones when we should be looking in our rear-view mirror, or better yet, the road in front of us.

To symbolize this obsession with the present at the expense of the future, I traveled to the grass labyrinth at Saint Norbert Abbey in Green Bay, WI. Walking the labyrinth is meant to be a meditative experience, but the subject of the video is impatient and skips straight to the center.