Sometimes, late at night when I can't sleep, I'd put on my DVD of Andy Warhol's screen tests. I'd set the speed on my DVD player to simulate the 18 fps they're supposed to be projected at. Slowly, ghosts of people long past would flicker on, resurrected once more to gaze into our world from their world of embalmed time. Though Warhol certainly intended the flicker rate of film to be part of his aesthetic, I'm not sure he'd totally disapprove of video, which has made his images democratic, and endlessly reproductive. These people, some celebrities, some never known, can now be summoned into our living rooms over the world, looking over at our lives with a little curiosity, a little sadness.
The fact is, the superstitions of ancient Chinese and Japanese people were right all along - once our image is photographed, we are dead at the moment, our doppelgangers condemned to roam in a spirit netherworld. Looking at the faces in Andy Warhol's screen tests feels like visiting a graveyard; these lives from half a century ago, wrested out of time, waiting; a memory, preserved forever.
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