I was listening to Umphrey’s McGee (shocking!) while brainstorming ideas for this assignment, when their cover of “Walking on the Moon” by The Police from a show I attended in NYC came on. This led me on one of those vortex Google sprees: first to find out the stats on how many times Umphrey’s had covered the song, and when/at which shows; then to other artists’ renditions of the song; then to random pages about The Police and Sting; and on and on. Finally I ended up on an image search of “walking on the moon” which brought up images from the first moon landing. I decided to somehow work this Google search trail and all of these ideas into this week’s assignment.

We already discussed in class (and Baron discussed in Archive Effect) how the moon landing can be a contested event, and that moon landing conspiracy theorists often use the “authentic” image to prove its in-authenticity. For this reason I thought it would be interesting to choose an image whose authenticity could be doubtful to begin with. The shadow and the flag are things that moon landing conspiracy theorists often point out in photo and video footage of the event, so I kept those elements of the photo and then layered some more shadows and potential light sources for those shadows. The primary background I chose for this image is a picture of lights from a live Umphrey’s show. The original photo features lights that are blue, yellow, fuscia, and a multitude of other colors emanating from the many lighting rigs. The variety of colors in the original image is (clearly) and purposefully not shown in the final image. The colors are a crucial component of any light show and I considered leaving only the lights in color in the final image, but I thought the absence of color here seemed more powerful and effective at creating more temporal disparity. I put myself into the foreground of the photograph, imagining some sort of interaction with the astronaut. The original photo of myself that I used was not taken at an Umphrey’s show, let alone the show the original background photo of the lights was taken at (the photo was taken in a hotel lobby on the way out to an Umphrey’s show in London). The interventions I made provided me the opportunity to play around with both intentional temporal and (enormous) spatial disparity.

This image and the entire process that went into creating it, though fun and not very serious, demonstrates a lot about the manipulation that is possible with digital and digitized materials. This was a very beginner’s attempt at using Photoshop, so it is easy for me to imagine how simple it is for professional and experienced users of Photoshop to reappropriate multiple images/layers into one new image, especially in the digital age. After seeing how easy it is to manipulate images, I will doubt any digital/digitized image’s authenticity even more. Although Baron did argue that Lossless forced us to realize we should “not tie ourselves to this mythical pure original” or authentic image (Baron, 158.) The “originals” of the digital images I used are all just a bunch of algorithms now anyway, zeroes and ones somewhere on the Internet with “internal expiry dates” (Ernst, 85).