redacting information

i've been correcting my painting as i transfer the image from digital pixel to painted pixel. it has occurred to me how ridiculous this is as there is absolutely no way anyone would know that i had made a mistake, but i'm intrigued by the way we always try to hide our mistakes and flaws. it used be somewhat apparent when we tried to cover these up, but with digital technology it's becoming easier and easier to make it seem like it never happened. this manual correction reminds me of wite-out (tm) in the way it deletes information while leaving a trail of the false step. it's so easy to correct something now and make it be/seem (are these the same?) absolutely perfect that it's somewhat exhilarating to admit imperfection.

thinking about wite-out reminded me of documents with redacted text. i suppose these blacked-out areas are the opposite of wite-out, but really it seems like it's all the same thing. perhaps the difference lies in the size of the mistakes or flaws. if it's a grammatical error, then we white it out. if it's a crime, we black it out. i guess this makes sense, but it comes down to the same thing: there's no room for error. we should all live flawless lives and be flawless people. hence botox and my job as a digital retoucher. we are a puritanical society that never really grasped the idea behind the scarlet letter. while i can understand the desire to try to make things better, i can't quite figure out why we'd want to become just like a machine.