robZtv: The Struggle Against Forgetting

Join us for screening of robZtv:The Struggle Against Forgetting. Words from the artist at 7:30p followed by a Q&A. Robert Zverina presents robZtv: The Struggle Against Forgetting, a premiere screening of long lost cinéma vérité pocket video snapshots captured on the fly 20 years ago and then left to languish--unwatched--on a forgotten external hard drive. The recent rediscovery of these never before seen clips (none longer than 30 seconds) was like unearthing a time capsule, offering an idiosyncratic glimpse of life in the Pacific Northwest circa 2006. Given the rapid pace of technological and cultural change since then, the Seattle these candid clips reveal is both familiar yet strange. The title of this presentation paraphrases a quote from Milan Kundera: "The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." We live in an age of paradoxes, where the more we document and share, the harder it is to discern a narrative throughline of consensus reality. In a true democracy, this kind of scattershot subjectivity might organically produce a more just society, but when tech oligarchs have their thumbs on the scale with algorithmic shaping of public opinion, coherence gets lost in the bottomless feed as data scraping LLMs remix the past to push the agendas of self-serving elites. As George Orwell warned, "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Come for the nostalgia, stay for a discussion on the necessity of preserving the ability to observe, reflect, and remember for oneself. Backgrounder: robZtv is the ongoing street videography project of Robert Zverina, who since 2003 has shot tens of thousands of candid micromovies using the same cheap digital pocket camera (the legendary Canon PowerShot S200 Digital Elph). Custom curated for Mini Mart City Park, this selection focuses on Seattle in the early 2000s, from cherished landmarks to vanished hangouts. Mixing public events and private moments, this chronologically organized compilation presents an impressionistic pastiche of a time before smart phones, social media, and "artificial intelligence" rearranged our culture. robZtv episodes YouTube playlist: https://www.tinyurl.com/robztv robztv website: www.robZtv.com