Mirrorcules of Anachronism (nextract)

Some inventions seem to defy the logic of the time they are invented in. While this much is obvious, as without this there would be nothing truly new or groundbreaking invented, it is possible for the logic introduced its invention to come from the future, an anachronistic retroactive insertion of a future logic.

It is as if a particularly modern sensibility is anachronistically detectable in artefacts at a time in our historical record, which changes our conception of this time and also the relation of this time to our own. As an example, let us look at old turn of the 20th century photography. There was a time when the only photography in 1800s and early 1900s was grainy, low-res, blotchy, cloudy and so forth. But nowadays with modern technology we can re-develop many of these old negatives and blow them up to super crisp HD resolution, albeit in black and white (but even here, there have been considerable improvements in colour reproduction). This shouldn't surprise us given what we understand of the physics of light and how photographic negatives work, new technics and techniques in the developing lab, however it seems (and I claim further than this) that it was the advent of HD and digital photographic methods which have somehow infected these early photographs, as if our modern expectations of photo-realism were applied to a context it has no right to apply to: this changes the way we see this time in history in an uncanny fashion. 

It's startling to see this 'wild west' era anachronistically rendered in super high definition, bringing into clear view images of a time we had hitherto left to fuzzy memories or even fuzzier photographs. But this 'clear view' of the situation seems fake in a way, because such a clear view did not exist at the time, and looking at these clearer images does not necessarily provide us with more insight about how the period really was like to experience. It is as though we are bringing our own 'ideological' baggage to this period of history, but somehow this also retroactively re-records over these apparently historical recordings.