Time bound as in theater is, however, it is not yet time-­specific in the sense of a reflective awareness of temporal context. An authentic, innovative time-­specific experience is instead being produced precisely in connection with the excess of digital images, and precisely using photographs. Christian Marclay’s video-­installation The Clock shows this in an exemplary way: it consists of a twenty-­four hour-­long montage of thousands of images of clocks in movies or on television, combined in such a way that the time shown on the screen always exactly coincides with the current moment of viewing, with the present time of the spectator.27 Seeing on the screen the images of distant places and moments synchronized with the present, Marclay says, “you’re constantly reminded of what time it is, ” so that “The Clock has the ability to make us present in the moment.”28 The viewers who observe the perspective of others reproduced by the images on the screen are led to reflect on their own perspective and their current context—­ reversing the tendency to digitally escape the present and their contextual experience.

In our society, we have the pressure of the present—it's the only time we can accomplish something, yet we are never attentive enough to do everything that should be done. We never have enough information to really work out control over what's going on.

So, you are there in the present at such an important moment. For example, at the Grand Canyon: you walk down for four hours and walk up for six. The experience is so heavy and overwhelming, and then the moment is gone. You never process the full richness of that experience. You are aware that a lot of things are gone, and then you are gone, too. Or think of people in museums looking at amazing pictures; there's so much you lose in the moment.

This awareness is a basic one for our society. I thought pictures seem to be a way to deal with that because, in the face of this pressure, you take a picture. The picture releases you from this pressure in a sense; you share it with someone else, you refer to a later time when you will probably never look at it again. So, it's a new way to try to escape the pressure of the present.

Digital tourists are not stupid nor ignorant, yet have a different relationship with images and their management. They do not produce an image to preserve it from the course of time—­ they produce it to escape the present. This attitude can be traced back to the “risk society” that overloads the present with responsibility for the construction of the future. “Risk” in this sense is not a future condition, but a problem of the present, generated when many possibilities are available and we ask ourselves today if and how the future we will have to face depends on our current behavior.

We live in a world that is increasingly saturated with images­. There are too many, and there is not space for all of them.