:: LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS :: by Asha Tamirisa BA, Oberlin College, 2010 MA, Brown University, 2014 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Music and Multimedia at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2019 © Copyright 2019 Asha Tamirisa This dissertation by Asha Tamirisa is accepted in its present form by the Department of Music as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date: __________ _____________________________________________ Todd Winkler, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date: __________ _____________________________________________ Kiri Miller Date: __________ _____________________________________________ Ed Osborn Date: __________ _____________________________________________ Wendy Chun Simon Fraser University School of Communications Approved by the Graduate Council Date: __________ _____________________________________________ Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Asha Tamirisa is an experimental time-based media artist who works with film, video, sound, and digital media. Asha draws from media theory and critical studies trouble stable narratives of historical and technological progress to rethink how bodies and identities are produced through techno-scientific, historic, and cultural knowledge. Her work takes the form of audiovisual compositions, experimental video essays, abstract animations, and multimedia performances. Asha has presented her work at Bitforms Gallery, the ICA Boston, The Tank NYC, Boston Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, public parks, the sides of buildings, and many basements. Asha holds releases on Estuary Ltd., Pan Y Rosas Discos, and Private Chronology. She has been an artist in residence at UC Boulder’s Media Archeology Lab, artist-researcher in residence at Perte De Signal (Montreal, CA), and moving image artist-in-residence at I-Park Foundation. Asha has been invited to speak at the University of Michigan, Mount Holyoke College, Wheaton College, Oberlin College, and Le Laboratoire. Her work has been mentioned in the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, and in the 5th edition of Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music and Culture by Thom Holmes (Routledge). Asha holds a B.A. in High Honors in Musical Studies from Oberlin College and Conservatory, an M.A. in Computer Music and Multimedia from Brown University, an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, and a PhD in Computer Music and Multimedia from Brown University. Asha has taught courses at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Asha is a co-founding member of OPENSIGNAL, a group of artists concerned with the state of gender and race in electronic music and media practices. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my dissertation committee for their advice, feedback, and support throughout this process: Todd Winkler, Kiri Miller, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Ed Osborn. Thank you to Hannah Goodwin who facilitated an independent reading that inspired much of this work. Thank you to MEME faculty, including Butch Rovan, Jim Moses, Kristina Warren, and John Ferguson. Thank you to RISD faculty including Shawn Greenlee, Jocelyne Prince, Bryan Papciak, Paul Badger, and Lucky Leone. Endless thanks to the Granoff staff: Chira DelSesto, Sophia LaCava-Bohanan, Gregory Picard, Shawn Tavares, Paul Rochford, Carol, Katie Vincellette, and Lisa Lambright. Thank you to the Music and MCM staff: Kathleen Nelson, Jen Vieira, Ashley Lundh, Mary Rego, Madison Maynard, Drew Moser, Lauren Bitsoli, Liza Hebert, Susan McNeil, and Michelle Duncan. Thank you to Dean Ryan, Dean Ellis, and Dean Suarez. Thank you, Frances. Thank you to my MEME colleagues: Caroline Park, Akiko Hatakeyama, Peter Bussigel, Alexander Dupuis, Bevin Kelley, Brian House, Mark Cetilia, Jinku Kim, Luke Moldof, Stephan Moore, Jordan Bartee, Nicole Carroll, Amber Vistein, Martim Galvao, Marcel Zaes. A special thank you to my friends: Caroline Park, Akiko Hatakeyama, Kristin Hayter, Kate Bergstrom, Peter Bussigel, Alex Dupuis, Allie Trionfetti, Thorn Chen, Sophia Brueckner, Adeline Mitchell, Bridget Ferrill, Lizzie Davis, Celine Katzman, Claire Kwong, Brian House, Lucia Monge, Dora Ivanišević, David Kim, Kelli Adams, Brett Zehner, Thomas Pringle, Chris Novello, Claire Kwong, Tim Rovinelli, Trina Powers, Katie Gui, EDY, Sophie Solloway, Nina Ruelle, Noraa, Sonya Naganathan, Liz Seeman, Calder Singer, Ron Shalom, Bryce Roe, Sarah Hill, Dan D’Amore. You have kept me going. Finally, I am forever and ever grateful to my family. I love you Mom (Mithilesh Kumari Tamirisa), Dad (Kiran Chary Tamirisa), Anita, Anant, Ondrej, and Lukas. In loving memory of my late grandparents: Amamma (Yethiraja Valli), Mamma (Prabhavathi Tamirisa), Tata (Ranganatha Rao), Tatagaru (T.V. Krishnamachari), and MB, TJ, NGH, AW. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 1 CUT ............................................................................................................ 15 EDITING INTO THE FABRIC OF HISTORY ........................... 17 PROCESS .......................................................................................... 27 VITARANA................................................................................................. 35 VITARANA ....................................................................................... 37 PROCESS .......................................................................................... 44 VANISHING POINT ............................................................................. 51 PROJECTING THE PAST ............................................................ 58 PROCESS .......................................................................................... 65 RECORD ..................................................................................................... 71 READING & REFIGURING THE RECORD ............................ 73 PROCESS .......................................................................................... 80 LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS ................................................................ 87 GLITCH/BLEACH: ........................................................................ 89 PROCESS .......................................................................................... 98 COMPLETE BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................... 103 APPENDIX ............................................................................................... 109 vi LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: JENNIFER REEVES'S LIGHT WORK MOOD DISORDER (2006) ............ 4 FIGURE 2: LIS RHODES LIGHT MUSIC (1975) ................................................... 4 FIGURE 3: JA’TOVIA GARY’S AN ECSTATIC EXPERIENCE (2015) ........................ 5 FIGURE 4: STILLS FROM CUT .......................................................................... 17 FIGURE 5: CUTTERS IN A FILM EDITING HOUSE ............................................. 19 FIGURE 6: STILL OF FILM REEL IN CUT .......................................................... 22 FIGURE 7: STILL OF SPINNING WHEEL IN CUT .............................................. 22 FIGURE 8: STILL OF YARN BEING SPUN IN CUT .............................................. 23 FIGURE 9: STILL OF WOVEN YARN IN CUT ..................................................... 24 FIGURE 10: STILL OF PROJECTION ON WOVEN SCREEN IN CUT .................... 25 FIGURE 11: ANNABEL NICOLSON PERFORMING REEL TIME (1973) .............. 26 FIGURE 12: MARY STARK FILM STRIP WEAVING ............................................. 27 FIGURE 13: MARY STARK PERFORMANCE....................................................... 27 FIGURE 14: 16MM PROJECTOR, LIKE THE ONE USED IN CUT......................... 29 FIGURE 15: WALKING WHEEL PROP IN CUT .................................................. 29 FIGURE 16: ATLANTIC MILLS IN PROVIDENCE RI ......................................... 29 FIGURE 17: YARN IN NARROW PLANE OF FOCUS ............................................ 31 FIGURE 18: CRAFT WEAVING LOOM ............................................................... 32 FIGURE 19: EIGHT-SHAFT WEAVING LOOM ................................................... 32 FIGURE 20: WOVEN SCREEN WITH PROJECTION ............................................ 33 FIGURE 21: WEAVING WITH PROJECTOR SETUP ............................................. 33 FIGURE 22: STILLS FROM VITARANA ............................................................. 37 FIGURE 23: STILL FROM VITARANA ............................................................... 38 FIGURE 24: STILL FROM VITARANA ............................................................ 39 FIGURE 25: STILL FROM VITARANA ............................................................... 40 vii FIGURE 26: IRREGULAR FILM ANIMATION ...................................................... 40 FIGURE 27: HANDPAINTED FILM THAT IGNORES FRAME REGISTRATION .... 41 FIGURE 28: ANIMATOR JODIE MACK'S FILM STRIPS ....................................... 41 FIGURE 29: STILL FROM VITARANA ............................................................... 42 FIGURE 30: STILL FROM VITARANA ............................................................... 43 FIGURE 31: SANKYO EM-40XL SUPER 8 CAMERA ......................................... 44 FIGURE 32: SANKYO EM-40XL INTERVALOMETER ....................................... 44 FIGURE 33: LIGHTING MATERIALS FOR SHOOTING VITARANA ................... 45 FIGURE 34: SETUP FOR VITARANA ................................................................. 46 FIGURE 35: MAXMSP PATCH USED IN VITARANA ....................................... 48 FIGURE 36: ANA MENDIETA'S BODY TRACKS (1974) ....................................... 62 FIGURE 37: JAMES COLEMAN'S SLIDE PIECE (1972) ...................................... 62 FIGURE 38: ORGANIZING SLIDES FOR VANISHING POINT .......................... 65 FIGURE 39: RECORDING THE SLIDES WITH A DSLR . .................................... 66 FIGURE 40: STILL FROM RECORD.................................................................. 73 FIGURE 41: EDISON’S PHONOGRAPH PATENT AT THE EDISON MUSEUM ..... 74 FIGURE 42: STILL FROM RECORD.................................................................. 77 FIGURE 43: STILL FROM RECORD.................................................................. 78 FIGURE 44: FIGURE FROM ESSAY #9 OF CHAVEZ'S BOOK .............................. 80 FIGURE 45: MARIA CHAVEZ PERFORMING ..................................................... 80 FIGURE 46: TURNTABLE SETUP FOR RECORD .............................................. 81 FIGURE 47: STILLS OF ASCII ANIMATION FROM RECORD .......................... 83 FIGURE 48: CLEAR LEADER WITH LETRASET ................................................ 84 FIGURE 49: EXAMPLES OF LETRASET ON FILM DIGITIZED ........................... 84 FIGURE 50: STILLS FROM LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS.................................... 88 FIGURE 51: STILLS FROM ROSA MENKMAN'S THE COLLAPSE OF PAL ........... 89 FIGURE 52: (WATER DAMAGE ON ACETATE FILM ......................................... 92 vii FIGURE 53: NITRATE BASE DECAY .................................................................. 92 FIGURE 54: ACETATE FILM MAKEUP ............................................................... 92 FIGURE 55: LIDELL BEFORE AND AFTER 1,000 YOUTUBE COMPRESSIONS ... 93 FIGURE 56: STILL FROM LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS ..................................... 96 FIGURE 57: EXAMPLES OF HAND-ALTERED FILM .......................................... 98 FIGURE 58: DIGITIZING 16MM FILM WITH OPTICAL PRINTER AND DSLR ... 99 FIGURE 59: MAXMSP PATCH FOR VIDEO COMPRESSION ............................ 100 FIGURE 60: SETUP FOR PUBLIC PRESENTATION ............................................ 109 FIGURE 61: PROGRAM FROM PUBLIC PRESENTATION .................................. 110 vii DOCUMENTATION: :: CUT :: https://vimeo.com/298238951 :: VITARANA :: https://vimeo.com/298265253 :: VANISHING POINT :: https://vimeo.com/298248005 :: RECORD :: https://vimeo.com/298261224 :: LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS :: https://vimeo.com/298251679 viii :: INTRODUCTION :: Time is that which disappears as such in order to make appearance, all appearance and disappearance, that is, events, possible. Its disappearance is twofold: it disappears into events, processes, movements, things as the mode of their becoming. And it disappears in our representations, whether scientific or artistic, historical or contemporary.... -Elizabeth Grosz1 This story is not narrated… but comes to us as silent, tangible, visible, and brute material remains… -Bjørnar Olsen2
 Lossy Recollections investigates frictions produced when the past encounters forms and methods of documentation, and how time-based media—old and new—operate in the complex project of re- presencing the past. Lossy Recollections is comprised of five film and video pieces that engage cultural histories, personal histories, and media materiality. Specifically, this project investigates elusive pasts— pasts that aren’t documented well or have produced inconclusive remnants—and offers ways to navigate these events in the absence of clear traces. The project is motivated by research in critical studies fields such as media archeology, feminist science and technology studies, trauma studies, and subaltern studies. Informed by this research, the works in Lossy Recollections carry careful attention to media materialities and technical mechanisms, addressing theoretical questions through the methods and forms of the pieces. 1 Grosz, Elizabeth. Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. 1-2. 2 Olsen, Material Culture After Text: Re-Membering Things, 1. 1 Lossy Recollections3 was presented at the Granoff Center for the Arts, Studio 1, on Friday October 12, 2018. The presentation took the form of a single-channel screening. To quickly summarize the pieces: CUT conflates apparatuses and materialities of film and textiles to investigate the invisibility of women’s labor in film historical narratives. CUT was shot with digital video and scored with recordings of textile and film technologies. VITARANA is an experimental animation made with heirloom saris. The piece explores the visual connections between materials as well as my own connection to them. VITARANA was shot with Super 8 film and scored with a combination of analog and digital synthesis. VANISHING POINT uses projection slides, the actual—and only—ephemera of a personal loss, to chart the story of this loss. The piece is presented in the form of a slide show, with intervallic images and a narrative voiceover. RECORD uses a vinyl record as a figure for the archive that is judiciously read and reconfigured through experimental turntable performance and projected text. The close links between the sound and displayed text create layered meanings and frictions between the sounds heard and seen. LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS combines decayed and altered 16mm film with digital compression, collapsing the old with the new forms of deterioration. Together, these processes of loss proliferate colorful and textural artifacts, demonstrating the degenerative and regenerative effects time has on media materiality. This body of work is demonstrative of my interest in an array of analog and digital time-based media formats including 16mm film, super 8 film, 35mm slides, digital video, and digital video processing. The sound scores for the pieces were composed with a similar blend of analog and digital techniques, 3 I will use “Lossy Recollections” to refer to the body of work and “LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS” to refer to the piece 2 including field recording, experimental recording made with contact mics and hydrophones, voiceover, manipulations of found sound, and analog and digitally synthesized sound. Given the concern for media materialities and apparatuses, the array of methods and formats knits in closely with the concerns of each piece. I describe these relationships in the chapters of this dissertation. Working audiovisually, specifically with the relationship of moving image to sound, has been a steady thread in my art practice since I began working with electronic media around 2009. My practice initially involved making abstract digital audiovisual work with strong, nonhierarchical relationships between the aural and visual components. Since beginning my doctoral study, my art practice has extended to include performance, instrument building, analog audio and video synthesis, analog film, and most recently, text and narrative. Exposure to media studies and critical studies has influenced these developments in my practice, and how I think about media, technology, culture, and history more generally. Lossy Recollections traces this trajectory, embodying recent developments in my creative and critical practice. I see this body of work situated amongst lineages of materialist film, expanded cinema, and found media practices. In particular, Lossy Recollections shares concerns for the means and materials of production, media materialities and apparatuses, labor and visibility, and working with the archive. I discuss these media practices below. Materialist film refers to an artisanal approach to filmmaking, where artists scratch, bleach, and paint directly on the filmstrip. When projected, the film speaks directly to the process of its production, with the traces of the artist’s handling retained on its surface.4 Materialist film refutes the illusory effects of conventional and commercial cinema, which generally make little reference to the materials or methods of manufacture. Experimental filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice states that part of cinema’s illusionism and 4 Smith, The Animators Body, 2. 3 alienation has to do with the severance of labor from the object of production.5 In both materialist film and expanded cinema, the means of production figure prominently in the cinematic output. For example, contemporary materialist filmmaker Jennifer Reeves sews through film strips in her 2-channel film piece “Light Work Mood Disorder” (2007). The Figure 1: Jennifer Reeves's Light Work Mood Disorder (2006) projection of the film magnifies the perforations from the sewing needle and the details of the thread. In this piece, Reeves explores how notions of the body shifted in the industrial age by collaging found footage of science experiments, educational films on body physiology, and her own materialist film experiments. Sewing through the filmstrip signifies the effects the industrial revolution had on conditioning the human body, an allegory drawn throughout the piece. In true materialist film spirit, the filmmaking process is revealed transparently in the film itself. Expanded cinema is similarly concerned with undoing cinematic illusions, but particularly in the event of cinematic projection. Expanded cinema artists are interested in liveness and closing in on the gap between the film’s production and its presentation.6 Some Figure 2: Lis Rhodes Light Music (1975) 5 Smith, The Animator’s Body, 3. 6 Ibid., 3. 4 artists performed in the cinematic event, placing their bodies between the usually uninhabited space between the projector and the screen, or even using their bodies as a screen. Other artists worked on the film in real-time, as it was being projected, turning filmmaking into a live event. The apparatus of cinema was often either eliminated or multiplied: artists generated “cinema” with lights and bodies, or used multiple projection, allowing bodies and images to intermingle. For instance, in Lis Rhodes’ film installation “Light Music” (1975), Rhodes projects images of the film’s hand-drawn optical soundtrack on two parallel screens facing each other. Projected in a hazy room, the projector’s beam refracts in the air to show its shape. The audience explores the space between the two screens, becoming impromptu performers, disrupting film’s conventional codes of spectatorship. Through the work, Rhodes re-imagines the spatial and performative boundaries of cinema, turning it into a collective event. While Lossy Recollections takes on the format of a conventional cinematic screening, works such as CUT, VANISHING POINT, and RECORD draw from expanded cinema’s ideology by illuminating the conditions of the projected image in the work. The archival impulse of Lossy Recollections aligns with contemporary media practice, given that digital media networks allow users access to seemingly endless content. As a result, the archive has become a site for material and creative intervention, enabling “new possibilities for preserving and representing individual memory within a larger historical consciousness.”7 One such example is Ja’Tovia Gary’s “An Ecstatic Experience.” Gary compellingly combines materialist film practices with found media, recontextualizing current political struggles within a historical frame. A poignant Figure 3: Ja’Tovia Gary’s An Ecstatic Experience (2015) 7 Kashmere, Cache Rules Everything Around Me, 1. 5 moment in the piece features footage of Ruby Dee re-enacting the formerly enslaved mother of Fannie Moore as she realizes her newfound freedom: “I’m free!” she jubilantly cries and repeats. Gary accentuates this footage with hand-scratched animations and digital effects such as split screens. In other parts of the piece, Gary includes music by Alice Coltrane, a monolog from Assata Shakur, and a black chorus singing “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” mixed with recent footage from Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore and Ferguson. Through the work, Gary highlights stark reiterations of oppression in the present moment while also transcending the present moment with the hope of the past.8 Artists working with found media often recognize the archive as a selective repository, rather than a complete record. By working with archival materials, these artists undo its authority and stability, reconstituting the past and present with other meanings.9 Brett Kashmere uses the term “counter-archive” to describe this approach: Taken as an action, the term entails mischief and imagination, challenging the record of official history. Employed as an artistic strategy it pushes our archival impulse into new territories, encouraging critique and material alteration/fabrication, and emboldening anarchivism. To counter-archive is to counter-act, to rewrite, to animate over.10 Carrying the material and critical impulse of materialist media practices, expanded cinema, and archival media work, Lossy Recollections shows how technical and material expressivity can participate in questions surrounding media materiality, history, and the archive. ¨ 8 Gary, Ja’Tovia. https://www.jatovia.com/gallery-3#1 9 Yeo, Cutting Through History, 23-5. 10 Kashmere, Cache Rules Everything Around Me, 1. 6 …These projects are not about offering the stability of history only as a story leading inevitably to the current, but one about seeking potentials— things, ideas, relations that were never actualized. -Jussi Parikka11 Artifacts are astute, but they cannot answer all of our questions… -Lisa Gitelman12 How do we understand and honor pasts that haven’t been cared for, have been suppressed, or present themselves in ways that aren’t intelligible to usual modes of knowing? How do we engage and tell these pasts given their incompleteness? The pieces in Lossy Recollections take an asymptotic approach, drawing near the conditions of the circumstances investigated rather than seeking to produce clear revisionist histories. The pieces in this project tell their stories through the materials, methods, and poetic forms, and are intentionally open at their ends. Critical studies subfields such as feminist science and technology studies, media archeology, trauma studies, and subaltern studies offer methodologies for how to address historical and epistemological partialities. These fields—each in their own way—are invested in undoing hegemonic historical narratives, displacing origin stories/myths, examining the effects of media and technology on knowledge and society, and are comfortable with (and are, in fact, invested in finding) gaps and fissures in our pasts. Moreover, these fields understand that knowledge doesn’t just exist in historical record and textual discourse, but is also held in bodies, memories, material ephemera, and technical apparatuses. These subfields also invite creative praxis and non-academic methods and forms as acceptable modes of inquiry, acknowledging that practice is equally as important in substantiating and exploring complex questions.13 To summarize these critical studies subfields: 11 Parikka, What is Media Archeology?, 141. 12 Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, 8. 13 Parikka, What is Media Archeology?, 138-40. 7 Feminist science and technology studies (feminist STS) seeks to understand how bodies and identities are understood and produced through technoscientific knowledge. Feminist STS overturns the seemingly “neutral” aspects of technology and science, activating forms, epistemologies, and methodologies that present alternatives to Eurocentric and patriarchal tendencies in technological praxis. In Lossy Recollections, CUT and RECORD explicitly foreground relationships between positionality and media technology, illuminating invisible pasts and suggesting other possibilities. Extending from feminist STS into “new materialisms,” work such as Karen Barad’s scholarship on the “intra-action” between apparatuses, observers and objects has been essential in my approach to critical readings of technology and media phenomena.14 Barad’s scholarship suggests that apparatuses are a part of the phenomena they produce—in fact, they are themselves phenomena of the worlds that create them. My interest in the “intra-action” between apparatus, observer, and object finds its way into all of the works in Lossy Recollections through the clear engagement with technical apparatuses and materialities. Media archeology is a self-described heterogeneous field that “excavates the technological conditions of the sayable and thinkable” through a close reading of the past.15 It is ardently uninterested in crafting linearities in historical narratives, embracing forms instead that do not fall prey to the “…usual sublimated way of approaching science and technology through simple linear progress myths…”16 Rather, the field is invested in dismantling codified historical narratives to recuperate lost ideas and overlooked connections between times. The concern for how specific media formats and technologies are imbricated in the knowledges they produce is most apparent in VANISHING POINT, RECORD, and LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS. 14 Barad, Getting Real, 195. 15 Chun, Did Somebody Say New Media?, 4. 16 Parikka, What is Media Archeology, 1. 8 In Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings, Cvetkovich states that the past crosses temporal lines through media ephemera, like photographs, but it also persists in other objects and artifacts. Memory “…is embedded not just in narrative but in material artifacts which can range from photographs to objects whose relation …might seem arbitrary but for the fact that they are invested with emotional and even sentimental value.”17 Ephemera and personal collections of objects stand in opposition to the standard documentation of dominant culture and can provide an alternative mode of knowledge. 18 This is particularly true in cases of trauma. Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. - Elaine Scarry19 Trauma, Cvetkovich writes, is marked by its unspeakability and the way it evades representation. Embodied, it can cause dissociation and lapses in memory. Examining one’s own trauma often brings feelings of discovery as well as invention, imagination and the unknown. 20 Trauma encompasses a complex state of knowing and not knowing, delineating limits of understanding and posing epistemological challenges. 21 Trauma evades common modes of commemoration and documentation, giving rise to new forms of address and expression, such as performance and ritual. These, and other creative engagements, can allow for a return sensation, feeling, and embodied memory of the trauma, which the event often destroys.22 Additionally, these new forms of address can generate their own archives, memories, and material associations as a result.23 VANISHING POINT, RECORD, and to some extent, 17 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 7-8. 18 Ibid., 8. 19 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 4. 20 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 31. 21 Ibid., 18. 22 Ibid., 1. 23 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 7. 9 VITARANA, use creative engagement to make contact with otherwise elusive and traumatic pasts. Cvetkovich specifically addresses trauma in personal memory, but her analysis can also be applied to social and cultural histories whose embodied and material record is complex. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s scholarship on “subaltern pasts” has been constructive in mapping out relationships between marginal histories and mainstream historical narratives. Chakrabarty questions whether the fragmented and obtuse nature of marginal histories can impact mainstream historical discourse. He expresses concern for how the contact between the marginal and the dominant might alter the former as it comes under the weight of the latter. For minority histories to become a part of dominant historical discourse, they can be combed through for parts that make sense to the perspective of the historian. The incongruent or “irrational” parts risk being transformed, absorbed, or occluded in this process.24 A tension exists, then, between undoing dominant historical narratives while also preserving minority histories. Chakrabarty concludes that illuminating minority histories and subaltern pasts offers a contrast to history’s usual construction, describing subaltern pasts as “knots” in the otherwise smooth fabric of history, interrupting its continuous weave. Lossy Recollections similarly sees its interventions as nodes that illuminate such historical conditions. Media are central to historical epistemology: they encompass the stories of how people know what they know. Recorded media bifurcate otherwise fluid temporalities and locations, separating the “then and there” and the “here and now.” However, this rift allows the past to fold into the present, creating complex configurations of time and place. Wolfgang Ernst describes this spatiotemporal folding as “short circuit[ing]…historically separated times,” creating a “sedimented and layered” temporality and materiality.25,26 Vivian Sobchak describes this process of animating the past into the present—what she 24 Chakrabarty, Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts, 16. 25 Ernst, Media Archeography, 57. 26 Parikka, What is Media Archeology, 3. 10 calls “re-presencing”—as “ahistorical,” meaning that, while allowing access to another time, re-presencing doesn’t necessarily yield the kind of coherence expected of historical narratives. In fact, the act of re- presencing can have the opposite effect: the palpable re-appearance of the past can challenge accepted orders, destabilizing what we thought we knew.27 In “Media as Historical Subjects,” author Lisa Gitelman states, “There’s no getting all of the way ‘outside’ [our media] to perform the work of historical description or analysis. Our sense of history—of facticity in relation to the past—is inextricable from our own experience of the inscription…”28 In other words, there is really no way to analyze the content of media without the influence of the media material itself. As an artist, I interpret this condition not as a call towards attaining an objective distance in studying media, but as an invitation to use media to think about media, while carrying sensitivity for this reflexivity. The pieces in Lossy Recollections listen for the articulation of their respective media, poetically—and sometimes explicitly—referencing the media that is used within the work itself. ¨ Art critic Hal Foster says, “There are artists who want to push for futuristic freedoms of new media, and others who want to look at what this apparent leap forward opens up in the past, the obsolete.”29 Lossy Recollections leans towards the latter, intervening in multimedia art’s focus on newness, teleological histories, inventors, and objective explanations. Lossy Recollections seeks out frameworks that give greater consideration of the amalgam of historical, social, and political factors tied to media technologies and practices. Through its varied interventions and combinations of media, Lossy Recollections participates in discourses and debates surrounding the archive, obsolescence, and the “new” and “old.” 27 Sobchak, Afterward, 324. 28 Gitelman, Media as Historical Subjects, 21. 29 Alexander, SlideShow, 32. 11 Furthermore, while experimental film and new media practice have developed the conversation regarding the demographics of its practitioners, the field of electronic media art—especially within sound and multimedia performance—is still catching up. Thus, it is crucial for the field of electronic media art to address and understand concerns that extend beyond the objective, teleological, and technical, and make concerted efforts to embrace the political. This project proposes technical interventions that address theoretical questions, elucidating ways to interweave technical, social, cultural, and historical concerns. The politically oriented artist engaged in technoscientific discourses faces significant challenges. She has to be versatile within the theoretical framework developed in disciplinary areas such as science and cultural studies, acquire the technical and or scientific skill base needed in her chosen area of investigation, and develop an artistic language appealing to peers in her field while remaining accessible… - Beatriz da Costa30 ¨ What follows are five sections, one dedicated to each piece in this project. Each section charts relevant histories and theories that have informed each work. In the essay for CUT titled “Editing Into the Fabric of History,” I describe history and filmmaking as a process of tailoring that obfuscates women’s labor. I describe how, in CUT, I use the metaphor of “projection” to intervene in the illusion of historical constructions of the past. In the essay for VITARANA, I chart how “animation” figures into technical and personal engagement with heirloom saris. In the essay for VANISHING POINT, titled “Projecting the Past,” I describe how the vernacular of the slide show is mobilized in my use of the slide. In this piece, the slide is itself the remnant of a loss, and is engaged to chart the loss. In RECORD, I describe how notions of writing and reading figured into the history of the vinyl record, contextualizing my sound and text- based intervention. In “Glitch/Bleach: Bridging Digital and Analog Materialisms,” the essay for LOSSY 30 Da Costa, Reaching the Limit, 366. 12 RECOLLECTIONS, I draw connections between digital and analog materialist film practices, describing how these approaches explore the material effects of time. Each essay is followed with a discussion of the process of making the piece. ¨ 13 :: CITATIONS :: Alexander, Darsie, Charles Harrison, and Robert Storr. 2005. Slideshow: Projected Images in Contemporary Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Barad, Karen. 1998. "Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality." Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 87-128. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1998. "Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts." Postcolonial Studies 15-29. Chun, Wendy. 2006. "Did Somebody Say New Media?" In New Media / Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, by Wendy Chun and Thomas Keenan (Eds), 1-10. New York: Routledge. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. Da Costa, Beatriz. 2008. “Reaching the Limit: When Art Becomes Science.” In Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, Technoscience, 366-385. Cambridge: MIT Press. Done, Mary Anne. 2002. "The Instant and the Archive." In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 206- 232. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2011. "Media Archeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media." In Media Archeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, by Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo, 239-255. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Gitelman, Lisa. 1999. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gitelman, Lisa. 2006. "Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects." In Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, by Lisa Gitelman, 1-24. Cambridge: MIT Press. 14 Kashmere, Brett. 2010. “Introduction: Cache Rules Everything Around Me.” In Incite! Journal of Experimental and Radical Aesthetics, Pittsburgh: Independent. Olsen, Bjørnar. 2003. "Material Culture After Text: Re-Membering Things." Norwegian Archaeological Review 87-104. Parikka, Jussi. 2012. What is Media Archeology? Cambridge: Polity Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Vicky. 2015. "The Animators Body in Expanded Cinema." Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1-16. Yeo, Rob. 2004. "Cutting Through History: Found Footage in Avant-garde Filmmaking." In CUT: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video, by Stefano Basilico, 13-28. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum. 15 :: CUT :: Length: 10’45” Image: digital video Sound: field recordings, digital processing https://vimeo.com/298238951 In early cinema, the majority of film editors were women. Film editing was seen as clerical & crafty—not creative or technical—akin to sewing and textiles manufacturing. Referred to as “cutters,” literal hands for hire to manufacture moving image, these editors crafted together narratives, creating illusions of seamless continuity. Despite their involvement in early film production, cutters were left out of mainstream historical narratives & rarely credited—in essence, cut from the past. CUT is motivated by the shared, and often obfuscated, histories of film and textiles and the subsequent devaluation of labor. Spinning wheels and film reels are conflated; yarn is laboriously spun; the yarn is woven into a screen, the material and surface through which the moving image is made possible, with the work of the invisible laborer embedded. 16 Figure 4: Stills from CUT 17 :: CUT: EDITING INTO THE FABRIC OF HISTORY :: Film itself can be said to be a form of tailoring. It is stitched together in strands of celluloid, woven into patterns, designed and assembled…. – Giuliana Bruno 31 In film, the “cut,” or splice, is the site where two shots meet one another, a seam joining two distinct points in time and space. A cut is sharp and quick, nearly imperceptible and easily forgettable. Cutting, or editing as it is now known, is the process of discerning a film’s essential content, locating and discarding the excess. Cutting hides the work of film: never does the viewer see the actor fall out of character, the changes in set, or the film crew. Somewhat paradoxically, the cut is what allows for continuity in film.32 Cuts hide in the fold of film, allowing scenes to come together without calling attention to the process of fusion. A “good” cut is one that is not noticed, a gash sutured by the logic of the film narrative. A cut should feel normal, even expected, dynamically propelling the story along without question. 33 It is little-known that women played a key role as editors in the production of early cinema. In addition to working as editors, women also worked as film developers, printers, costume designers, set designers and script copy editors.34,35 These forms of work were burdened with associations to sewing, patching, fabric dying, mending, and tidying. Accordingly, they carried values and practices tied to gendered labor in textiles manufacturing, copy-editing, and domestic labor. 36 Film editing was categorized as clerical, repetitive, tedious, and menial—not creative, skilled, or technical. Primed by exploitative labor practices in textiles mills that emerged in the industrial revolution, film production companies drew on young, 31 Bruno, Surface, 36. 32 Reynolds, Cutting Room Floor, 74. 33 Basilico, The Editor, 30. 34 Reynolds, Cutting Room Floor, 67. 35 Stamp, Women and the Silent Screen, 15. 36 Reynolds, Cutting Room Floor, 78. 18 often unmarried, working-class women to perform the toilsome task of cutting. These women editors were referred to as “cutters.” Cutters were often brought into the field informally as daughters and friends of editors. Resembling the precarity of employment at textiles mills, cutters were denied employment contracts, the promise of reasonable workday, and the guarantee of sustained employment. Cutters worked in crammed rooms, flanked by their material. They were expected to be obsessive about their work, working through nights and being on call to work at all hours of the day. 37 Figure 5: Cutters in film editing houses [images from archive.org] 37 Reynolds, Cutting Room Floor, 73. 19 Florence Osborn, editor of Motion Picture Magazine in the 1920s, writes: Among the greatest ‘cutters’ and film editors are women. They are quick and resourceful. They are also ingenious in their work and usually have a strong sense of what the public wants to see. They can sit in a stuffy cutting-room and see themselves looking at the picture before an audience.38 At best, cutters were regarded as the filmmaker’s secretarial assistant, but were still denied credit in the creative partnership. Husband and wife directing and editing teams were common, just as they were in writing, and similarly the wife’s work was rarely acknowledged. 39 Even when not legally wed, the relationships between assistants and directors were often described as “marriages”—underscoring the gendered power dynamic and loyalty expected to the director. Normative reproductive metaphors were sometimes ascribed to the working relationship, where editors brought the vision of the film director to life.40 Cutting was likened to pre-industrial and domestic work despite how obviously it demanded specialized technical skill, creativity, and extended knowledge of filmmaking. By and large, this is common with so- called “women’s work.” Feminized labor has historically been undersold as soft and unskilled no matter how technical or inventive. For instance, typing, sewing, telephone operating, and computing were all considered forms of menial labor despite the necessary expertise of advanced machinery and knowledge about communications systems.41 Cutters did more than just repetitively splice film, of course. Film editing requires in-depth knowledge of all aspects of the filmmaking process and of the material of film. Cutters attended test screenings at various stages of a film’s development, advising directors on when more footage was needed and how it 38 Hatch, Cutting Women. 39 Reynolds, Cutting Room Floor, 76. 40 Ibid., 78. 41 Ibid., 79. 20 should be shot. Despite their contributions—establishing the craft of film editing and creatively and technically influencing filmic language, cutters were excluded from film credit and film historical narratives. Ironically, cutters themselves were themselves subject to their own technique, and cut from the past. The goal of film and history alike is to convincingly tell a story. As Shelley Stamp succintly states in the title of the conclusion in Women and the Silent Screen, “history has not been kind.” The editing of women’s contributions in filmmaking is consistent with the dominant narrative of men as the sole subjects of ingenuity in technoscience and technical media. Just as film editing is a purposeful purging of events meant to direct the viewer to accept certain conclusions, the redacting of the contributions of cutters fits the continuities of dominant historical narratives.42 Film cuts enmesh with a film’s logic and narrative. So, too, do the seams that hem the fringes of history. ¨ CUT is motivated by the paradox of cutters being cut from film history and the affordances of conflating textiles and film materialities to think about labor, visibility, and the illusions of history. CUT suggests an interpretation of history that carries sensitivity for what might be lurking beyond its fashioning. CUT demonstrates that the fabric of history and film is as much a product of what isn’t shown as it is of what is. 42 Basilico, The Editor, 30. 21 Figure 6: Still of film reel in CUT CUT establishes the connection of film and textiles in the first section of the piece by quickly shuttling between shots of a spinning wheel and film reel in motion. The footage is accompanied by a loud, visceral soundscape made of recordings of both spinning wheels and film projectors. Both the reels and spinning wheel are shot closely to draw out their formal similarities. The shared soundscape between the two machines remains constant throughout the abrupt visual cuts, suggesting that they are operating within the same space—the same factory or workshop, perhaps. This first section ends with the slowing down of the reels and spinning wheel and a quieting of the soundscape. Figure 7: Still of spinning wheel in CUT 22 In the second section of the piece, an off-screen—and never seen—subject slowly spins wool into yarn. The subject performing the labor is never shown, but their work is: for several minutes, the viewer sees the yarn passing through frame, unedited. The yarn is shot closely, exposing the detail of the thread. The camera perspective sits where the viewer might if they were spinning the wool themselves. This allows the viewer to intimately experience and appreciate the material and identify with the labor being performed. The quietude of the second section, with the gentle churning and clacking of the spinning wheel and the continuous movement of the thread, is juxtaposed with the machinic density of the first section. Figure 8: Still of yarn being spun in CUT In the third section of the film, the off-screen subject begins weaving the previously spun yarn. A weaving weft (the vertical thread of a weave) abruptly appears on screen. The yarn is woven through the weft manually. There weaver’s body never intersects with the frame, though at times the viewer sees the subject’s shadow cast on the material. The manual weaving occurs over the percussive sounds of a mechanical weaving loom. Slowly, line by line, the weaving encompasses the frame, eventually usurping it. 23 Figure 9: Still of woven yarn in CUT In the final section of the piece, the woven plane is used as a screen for a projected moving image. In conventional cinema, the projection screen is an opaque surface that is dissolved by the illusions of the projection.43 In CUT, the screen does not completely disappear. The screen, and the labor of its assembly, act as a filter through which we see the moving image. The score shifts from the diegetic sounds of the textiles work to a non-diegetic, low, gently throbbing, continuous drone, offering the viewer to meditate on how the piece arrived here. 43 While not cited, Erkki Huhtamo’s work on the “Archeology of the Screen” also motivated this pursuit. 24 Figure 10: Still of projection on woven screen in CUT The metaphor of textiles in CUT offers set of poetics to expressively perform investigation of film and historical constructions. If the term “film” is taken literally, it would be understood as a veneer, or a facade. Perhaps, too, we can understand history as a projection of the past. ¨ 25 Many media artists and scholars have highlighted the relationship between textiles and technical media to perform interventions in their respective discourses.44 Two such artists that have done so through film and multimedia performance are Annabel Nicolson and Mary Stark. Annabel Nicolson compellingly takes on the subjects of gendered labor in textiles and film in her expanded cinema performance “Reel Time” (1973). In this piece, Nicolson is seated at a table with a sewing machine between the projector and the projection screen. A long film loop hangs from the ceiling and is threaded through the film projector and through the path of Nicolson’s sewing machine. Figure 11: Annabel Nicolson performing Reel Time (1973) The projector casts the shadow of Nicolson and the [image from https://theartstack.com/artist/annabel- sewing machine onto the screen. The motors of nicolson/documentation-of-reel-time ] both machines interweave as the piece begins. No actual thread is sewn into the film, but the film strip is perforated by the sewing machine’s needle and then immediately projected. As the piece proceeds, the film strip slowly breaks down from the perforation until it eventually snaps. When Nicolson pauses to splice the broken film together, two people seated in the audience read two different how-to manuals simultaneously: “How to Thread a Sewing Machine,” and “How to Thread a Film Projector.”45 Nicolson’s intervention brings the sewing machine, a domestic, feminized practice, into the masculine public space of film, which denied her expertise. Additionally, women generally use the sewing machine to fix things; here Nicolson used it to break the film, her intervention disrupting the continuity of the film strip. 44 In terms of scholarship, Sadie Plant’s Zeros and Ones and Birgit Schneider’s research are formative examples. 45 Sparrow, Lux Online. 26 Contemporary performance and installation artist Mary Stark fuses textiles and film in her work as a means of summoning “absent voices in obsolete industries.”46 Her performances and installations bring film and textiles materials into unexpected dialogues through spoken word, recorded sound, live shadow play, textiles materials and methods, and film projections. In works such as “From Fiber to Frock” (2013) Stark spools film loops on thread spools. In her series, “Film as Fabric, Lace and Thread,” she uses text to imagine unrecorded histories accompanied by similarly evocative soundscapes. In an ongoing installation series, Stark weaves film strips of feature-length films into large-scale tapestries. ¨ Figure 13: Mary Stark performance Figure 12: Mary Stark film strip weaving [image from marystark.uk] [image from marystark.uk] Through careful and critical use of material, Nicholson and Stark undermine usual categorizations of practice and historical trajectories in textiles and media work. With a similar material and historical impulse, CUT highlights obscured histories through the use of material. ¨ 46 https://www.marystark.co.uk/about 27 :: PROCESS :: The video footage and audio recordings for CUT were recorded separately in sections over the course of about five months. All of the video was recorded in my home studio and the audio was recorded both at my studio as well as at WARP, a local textiles workspace in Rhode Island. Editing and shooting took place simultaneously; after editing and composing sections I would stage and record more material as I felt necessary. I used two types of DSLRs to shoot video: the Panasonic Lumix DMC GH4 (“GH4”), and the Canon 70D (“70D”).47 I primarily used the GH4. GH4s have fast lenses, making them effective instruments for low-light shooting conditions. This was important for the piece, given the emphasis on light and shadow.48 The sound score was composed with recordings of textile and film machines. I recorded the sounds using a pair of Studio Project C4 microphones, which are small diaphragm condenser microphones.49 Their small size made it easy to set them up within the depths of machines when necessary. The machines recorded include: a walking spinning wheel, a spinning wheel with a foot treadle, an 8-shaft weaving loom, an electric sewing machine, 8mm film projectors, and 16mm film projectors. 47 A special thank you to Cole Moore, who had several instructive conversations with me about DSLRs. 48 Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to access the GH4 for all of my shooting, so portions—most notably the shots of the weaving—were recorded with the 70D. I tried to match the light temperature and contrast of these shots in the process of shooting as well as in post-production, but I still felt there were still noticeable differences in the quality of the images. Ideally, I would have used the same camera throughout the production of the piece. 49 An additional thank you to Jim Moses and Luke Moldof for their advice on recording techniques. 28 The loom and sewing machine were recorded at WARP Textile Collective’s facility, located in Atlantic Mills, which, coincidentally, is an old wool manufacturing building in the Olneyville neighborhood in Providence. The machines at WARP were operated with the generous Figure 16: Atlantic Mills in Providence RI assistance of Priscilla Carrion, a textiles artist and member of the collective. I spent an extensive amount of time [image from golocalprov.com/business/Olneyvilles- Mansion-Atlantic-Mills] EQing the recordings to reduce incidental noise and increase their physical impact. Figure 15: Walking wheel prop in CUT Figure 14: 16mm projector, like the one used in CUT 29 In the first section of CUT, I used a Quaker-style walking wheel, sometimes referred to as a “great wheel,” (pictured at left) as a video prop. I located this spinning wheel second-hand.50 I used a 16mm projector’s reel (like the one pictured at right) as a second video prop to contrast its form and movement with that of the spinning wheel. To light these two props, I used the light sourced from 8mm and 16mm film projectors rather than typical film or photography lights. This may seem like an odd choice; however, I own a small collection of projectors and had them at my disposal whenever I needed to shoot. I also found that the quality of light was well-suited for the effect I was seeking. Projector lights are extremely bright, narrow, and focused, which allowed me to selectively light the objects while keeping the shooting area in my home studio dark.51 I used similar approaches to shoot both the spinning wheel and the film reels. I paid careful attention to how the light interacted with these objects, their movements, and the shadows casted in the space. Most of the shots I selected were close shots on the wheel and reel; rarely is the full mechanism of the machine shown in the piece. The closeness draws out the formal similarities of the two objects, making their scale and movement appear analogous. For some shots, I set up the wheel and reel to intermingle in the frame, for instance, allowing the spinning wheel to cast its shadow onto the film reel, and used camera focus to navigate the layers by shifting between the object in the foreground and background. 50 In retrospect, a smaller treadle-driven wheel may have been more appropriate: the size of the wheel would have been closer to a film reel and the treadle would have allowed hands-free operation while shooting. However, the smaller-treadle wheels were costly, and the great wheel, which was quite cheap in comparison, fulfilled the role it needed to play in the piece. 51 Photography and film lighting are quite diffuse and are generally suited for distributing light evenly throughout a large space. At one point, I tried using small lighting cans but found it difficult to narrow the light into a tight beam, even with using “barn doors” and masks. The film projector light was much more effective for my purposes. Additionally, I appreciated the reflexivity of using the tools whose history and materiality I was exploring in the piece. 30 The audio for this section was a mechanical soundscape made by mixing sounds of both spinning wheels and running film projectors. The recording of the spinning wheel was played back at half speed, deepening the pitch of the material such that it was more visceral. At half speed, the spinning wheel recording intersected with the rhythm and pitch of the projector allowing them to form an ambiguous amalgam of mechanical sound. The dense and steady nature of the sound connected the quick visual cuts, allowing the devices to feel as if they were in the same space. In the second section, the yarn appears prominently as a stark white line contrasting and bifurcating the dark space of the empty frame. I used a prime lens on the GH4 to shoot this section of the piece. I adjusted the aperture such that there was a very narrow Figure 17 Yarn in narrow plane of focus plane of focus. As the yarn passes through the frame, its clarity ebbs and flows dynamically depending on its distance from the camera. This induces a heightened drama in the otherwise highly minimal shot. The yarn in this section was lit with the light source of an 8mm projector. However, instead of using the light coming out of the projector lens, I used the softer light emitted directly from the vent on the bulb. This incidental light ended up being a nice small source of light that fit the scale of the props in the shot. 31 Figure 18: Craft weaving loom Figure 19: Eight-shaft weaving loom For the weaving section, the third section of the piece, I wove the yarn on a table-top craft loom. The craft loom (left), as opposed to mechanical looms (right), was better suited for the small amount of yarn I had spun, and additionally could handle thickness and unevenness of the yarn.52 I propped the loom up vertically such that I could shoot and project film onto it as if it were a screen. The footage of this section is paired with audio recordings of an 8-shaft mechanical loom (like the one pictured at right) at WARP Textiles collective. In the final section of the film, I projected 16mm film of scratched found footage onto the woven screen. The projected image is distorted by the unevenness of the bumps and frayed edges of the hand-woven yarn and the gaps in the tightness of the weave. Additionally, I altered the focus on the projector so that the projected image was, at certain times, sharp, and in other instances, softer and blurry. The sound from this section departs from the mechanical sounds used in the rest of the piece and instead 52 Mechanical looms are suited for use with copious amounts of thinner thread. 32 features a long and low drone. This sound was generated by performing spectral freezes on a recording of a film projector. The perceivably contemplative sound takes the film out of mechanical time into a more interpretive place, giving the viewer a chance to reflect on the possible meanings generated by the meeting of the materials. Figure 21: Weaving with projector setup Figure 20: Woven screen with projection I made a strong decision in post-production to desaturate all of the footage to black and white. I found this choice compelling for a few reasons. One is that it highlights the careful use of light and shadow in the filming of the content. The desaturation allows the conflation of the various apparatuses and materials to feel more plausible. Their forms and movements are highlighted without the distraction of color. The desaturated image also gives the piece the aesthetics of a black and white film, evoking the quality of image of the silent film era that it investigates. 33 :: CITATIONS :: Basilico, Stefan. 2004. "The Editor." In CUT: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video , by Stefan Basilico, 29-46. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum. Bruno, Giuliana. 2014. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hatch, Kristen. 2013. Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood's Pioneering Female Film Editors. September 27. Accessed September 2018. https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/essay/cutting- women/. Reynolds, Sian. 1998. "The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor: Women Editors in the French Cinema of the 1930s." Labour History Review (Maney Publishing) 66-82. Sparrow, Felicity. 2005. Lux Online. Accessed June 2018. http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/annabel_nicolson/essay(2).html. 34 35 :: VITARANA :: Length: 6’48” Image: Super 8 film to digital Sound: analog and digital synthesis https://vimeo.com/298265253 VITARANA in Sanskrit means transference, though somewhat ambiguously: its expansive interpretation can mean gift, remnant, passage, to cross over, or to overcome. This film animates an assemblage of matrilineal garments as they approach the brink of inheritance. The present as “gift” or “granted object” blurs with the temporal present, a past given presence. The materials become a conduit, a passage to a past only partially known. Animation is used as a method of both finding connections both between and to the materials. 36 Figure 22: Stills from VITARANA 37 :: VITARANA :: In the summer of 2018, my mother, older sister, and I went through many of my mother’s and late maternal grandmother’s old jewelry and saris. As is culturally customary, these items had traveled through matrilineal lines and it was time to discuss how they might be divided amongst my siblings and myself. As we sorted through the items, stories about my family’s past surfaced—stories I had never heard before. I learned about places my grandmother and mother traveled to, their weddings, gifts that they were given, family tensions, hopes, and disappointments. I unfolded the fabrics, feeling their textures, admiring their colors, and observing the various collisions of patterns. My mother Figure 23: Still from VITARANA explained details about the construction and design of the saris—the material of the fabrics, dyeing techniques, their weaving and embroidery style, and in what regions those styles originated. I learned about the meaning associated with the various styles and types of saris, their value, and the occasions that they were meant to be worn. I was struck by how much was spoken through these garments. Many of the saris had been dormant for years, stowed away in closets and trunks. It was unclear whether the folds in the fabrics were the result of the wearing and pleating or years spent in storage. I was surprised to find that some still carried the smell of the perfume that my grandmother wore. I could remember the sound of her singing while she shuffled through the hallways of my parents’ house, the hem of her sari dragging on the carpet. While I had never seen some of the saris before, some were very familiar. I became acutely aware that, along with inheriting 38 the garments, I was inheriting their pasts as well. I was mesmerized by the saris and their stories but felt uncertain about what my personal relationship was to them. In all likelihood, I would never wear most of them. I couldn’t really imagine carrying them into the future the way my mother and grandmother may have imagined. I intend to preserve them, but I still don’t know exactly why. In the meantime, I decided to make a film. ¨ In its most general translation, the Sanskrit word “vitarana” (िवतरण) means “transference.” However, its full definition is expansive. A common use of “vitarana” is to denote a gift or object of bestowal. It can also mean a “remnant,” an unplanned gift or relic from the past. “Vitarana” can also refer to the passing between two states, places or times, or the act of overcoming an obstacle. A more practical translation is “delivery,” as in a delivery of parcels or goods. “Delivery” can also be interpreted as the manner with which something is delivered, as in the tenor with which one “delivers” a speech. Saris are often inherited through generations, sometimes even purchased with future generations in mind. Saris are usually passed Figure 24: Still from VITARANA down during special occasions, such as birthdays, marriage, after an accomplishment, before significant life change, or after someone’s passing. Thus, the bestowal of the sari marks moments of passage from one stage of life to another, from one body to another. They are transitive matter, connecting different bodies in different moments of time—and connecting different moments in time to different bodies. 39 Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers. 53 -Karen Barad ¨ VITARANA was shot on Super 8 film. Given that Super 8 film is an established format for home movies, its use is congruent with the personal nature of this piece. VITARANA uses animation techniques to generate rhythmic visual imagery. In filmmaking, Figure 25: Still from VITARANA “animation” refers to methods of bringing motion to an inert object, imbuing it with a sense of life. To generate animations, still images are arranged and projected in rapid succession such that the object appears to move of its own volition, often in entertaining ways. Nonhuman objects and figures are given a sense Figure 26: Film animation of fleshy vitality and are also exempt from abiding by the rules of the physical world. 54 Of course, all cinematic forms produce motion from discontinuous, discrete images— this is not unique to animation. 55 In live-action films, image sequencing enmeshes with human perceptions of time and motion such that the perceptibility of the frame is lost. However, in animation, the unit of the discrete frame can become evident due to the slight discontinuities between frames. 53 Barad, Interview, 59. 54 Beckman, Animating Film Theory, 4. 55 Gunning, Animating the Instant, 38. 40 VITARANA might be best described as “experimental animation,” given that the imagery doesn’t seek continuity between the succession of images. In the broad subcategory of experimental animation, notions of movement and visual transformation are elastic, embracing nonrepresentational, nonlinear, and disjointed imagery. 56 The emphasis shifts towards formal qualities like color, contrast, light, tempo, and rhythm. Whereas conventional animation is organized around dissolving the perceptibility of the frame, experimental animation is agnostic. Images in succession may ignore the frame registration altogether as is often the case in Figure 28: Handpainted film that ignores frame cameraless filmmaking (such as in Figure 27) or registration. [Image from Mono No Aware website] disparate images may be brought together in succession http://mononoawarefilm.com/direct-film-animation- april-2018/ to see the effects of their proximity once they are 57 projected. This is a technique employed by many structural filmmakers who sought to make the Figure 27: Animator Jodie Mack's film strips of stroboscopic patterns in “Posthaste Perennial unit of the frame Pattern” (2010) prominent, playing with the perceptual effects of its result. A more recent example is animator Jodie Mack’s stroboscopic films, which combine patterns in everyday objects. 56 Beckman, Animating Film Theory, 3. 57 Filmmaker and experimental animator Jodie Mack calls this “anti-animation” 41 VITARANA uses the unit of the frame to generate pulsating visual motion. By shooting frames in patterns—for instance, shooting two frames of one fabric, four frames of another, two frames of the first fabric, etc.—the material takes on a palpating quality. In some segments of the piece, two different fabrics appear to be superimposed. This effect is the result of alternating frames—i.e. shooting one frame of one fabric and one frame of another repeatedly. With frame alternation, there is enough continuity between the two different shots for the viewer to perceive both patterns at once. I also used the camera’s intervalometer to animate. Intervalometers automate shots at set intervals and are often used for time- lapse footage, where ongoing processes are “sampled” at intervals, compressing long durational processes into shorter durations, effectively speeding them up. I used the intervalometer to cause “stutters” in the visual imagery, allowing the camera to shoot at intervals while I slowly scanned over the fabrics. The score for VITARANA similarly emphasizes patterns and iterations through and repetitions of rhythmic pitched material from an analog synthesizer. The synthesized, Figure 29: Still from VITARANA pitched material is made using sequencers, which program patterns of sonic events in time. The sonic patterns cyclically repeat, slowly evolving over time. The composition of the score allows these patterns to overlap, creating syncopations. The score and imagery act in support of each other, with occasional moments of subtle contrast. The sound offers a soft but active field for sensing and interpreting the pulsating imagery. Shooting VITARANA was highly improvisational in comparison to the scripting and storyboarding involved in conventional animation. After setting up the fabrics, I allowed my eye to guide the 42 progression of the images without predetermining it. As a result, the piece doesn’t conjure dramatic suspense or feelings of anticipation. It is more processual, emblematic of my exploratory engagement with the fabrics. ¨ Scholar Vivian Sobchak uses the term “re-presencing” to describe the complexity of animating the past in the present moment. Sobchak says that re-presencing is not just a simple representation or metonymic invocation of another time. Artifacts from “then and there” don’t just appear “here and now.” Rather their presence performs a “puncture” in quotidian temporality: “Although the metonymic fragments and traces of the past do not transport the past directly to the present, in their presence they do numinously reverberate with its absence.”58 Sobchak continues, stating that the trace of the past “provokes intense awareness not only of an irrecoverable larger absence (conceived as “the past”) but also of an existentially present “otherness.”59 Figure 30: Still from VITARANA The fabrics in VITARANA are, for me, are both material and symbolic conveyors of the past. They are tangible unknowns: numinous reverberations, as Sobchak describes, of a past animated in the present. Animation is, after all, the substitution of one image with the next—the generation of lineage, an act of seeing what is as a result of what has come before it. In its use and treatment of material, VITARANA nods towards this dual meaning of animation as both a form and action of lineage and temporality. 58 Sobchak, Afterward, 326. 59 Ibid. 43 :: PROCESS :: VITARANA was shot on Super 8 film, using a Sankyo EM-40XL camera. This camera features an extensive intervalometer60 that can automate shots at ½, 1, 2, 15, 60 second intervals. Thus, it is well suited for animation, pixilation, and time-oriented effects.61 I used Kodak Vision 3 Color Negative Super 8 film, purchased from eBay. My choice to use Super 8 film for this piece was the result of a negotiation between my interest in working with analog film and its cost. 16mm film, while having the benefit of increased resolution and image quality, simply proved to be too costly. Additionally, the use of Super 8 film felt consistent with the film’s familial subject matter, since Super 8 was a common format used for home movies. Figure 31: Sankyo EM-40XL Super 8 camera Figure 32: Sankyo EM-40XL intervalometer 60 An intervalometer is a variable-speed motor that regulates the intervals at which each frame is exposed. 61 I first stumbled across this camera at a Super 8 workshop, organized by AgX Film Collective, a film co-op style analog film lab located in Waltham, MA. 44 I draped the saris over a banister in my parents’ home to stage them for shooting.62 I hung the saris in various sequences, organizing them by color, pattern, and chronology, thinking about their organization in relation to the composition of the film. I also took into consideration how I would choregraph my movement to shoot the footage. There is usually a lot of natural sunlight in the area I was shooting, however, it was extremely overcast during the time I was at their home working on this project. I then had to improvise lighting. I collected as many table lamps as I could find and used the same light bulbs to try and match the lighting sources. I set them up in a long row to create some continuity of brightness along the material. 63 For some shots, I clustered the lights together and brought them close to the material to bring out details such as the reflectivity in the metallic thread of some of the embroidery. At times, I actually held a lamp in one hand and shot with the camera in the other to make sure the material was brightly lit. Figure 33: Lighting materials for shooting VITARANA 62 Given that all the material exists in my parents’ home, I had to shoot this project there. While I initially wished for a more “proper” shooting space, the domestic space of my parents’ home proved to be the most appropriate for the subject matter. 63 The lighting proved to be very uneven and inconsistent across the fabric, making it difficult to set F-stop settings and aperture. Working with a lighting kit would have allowed for more evenness across the footage, but this condition also lent a more “handmade” and hand-touched aesthetic to the final piece. 45 Almost all of the animating and composing seen in the final video was done “in camera” rather than digitally. Some animation techniques I used include: § Shooting each frame individually to sequence a very specific sequence of images. § Setting the intervalometer to various speeds and allowing the camera to catch discrete moments of my motion by chance. § Something in between these two previous techniques: using the intervalometer but pacing my motion to get specific shots. § Conventional shooting, i.e. allowing the camera to run continuously while I navigated specific parts of the material. Figure 34: Setup for VITARANA 46 I shot three rolls of film for this project. I considered hand-developing the film myself,64 but eventually decided on sending it to a professional lab for developing and scanning.65 Hand developing can have an interesting effect on the film, but for this piece, I was more interested in even and clear developing. Sending it to a professional developer also meant I could request digitization on a professional scanning bed.66 Once I had the digital file of the Super 8 scan, I aimed to keep the integrity of the animating I had done in-camera, only editing out parts that were extremely out of focus or contained unintended, incidental content. After editing the rolls of film together, I started working on the score. Given the rhythm, pattern, and cyclical repetition of the imagery, as well as my interest in working with sequenced sound, I aimed to highlight the rhythm, texture, and the cyclical, iterative structure of the film.67 To compose, I used a combination of analog synthesizers and digital processing, starting with the Korg Minilogue. The Minilogue is a recently released consumer polyphonic analog synthesizer that has a nice built-in sequencer. I generated a few motifs, and then used a program I designed in MaxMSP to reorganize the material. The MaxMSP patch combines sampling and sequencing and a set of simple audio effects to create sequences and patterns of remixed sampled sound: 64 I hand developed a couple of test rolls prior to shooting this piece to see how the images turned out. I really enjoy the process of hand-developing, but it also can create inconsistent results. I didn’t want to gamble with this footage. 65 The film was sent to CineLab, located in New Bedford, Massachusetts: http://www.cinelab.com/ 66 My other options for Super 8 digitization include: filming the projection off of a white wall with a DSLR, or using an optical printer with a DSLR and taking a digital photograph of each frame. This is an extremely time-consuming process (3 minutes of film has taken me upwards of 5 hours). 67 I trace this interest to my history of studying tabla, which involves a lot of complex time and rhythmic operations. 47 Figure 35: MaxMSP Patch used in VITARANA A sound file is loaded into the patch, and a visualization of the waveform of the file appears at the top of the software. A clock runs at a speed designated by the user by turning the dial in the top-left corner. The vertical yellow bars in the middle of the patch correspond to different locations within the audio file for a sample to play back at each sequence step. The pink dot denotes which sequence step is currently being clocked. The pink bar on the top-left of the patch indicates the sample length for each step of the sequence. The horizontal yellow bar indicates the length of the sequence. The resulting audio is sent through a filter as well as an envelope that can both be assigned specific parameters for each sequence step. The delay and reverb give the audio a sense of space. I can also change the playback speed of the audio sample such that the pitch changes. 48 I used this patch to compose the layers of the audio score, watching the film while I worked on the audio. I additionally used sounds sourced from the Korg VolcaKeys, a small analog synthesizer, as well as the ARP250068 to generate supportive material. 68 The ARP2500 has been a big part of my time here at Brown. Specifically, it spurred my initial research interests in histories of technologies and cultural implications for interface design. 49 :: CITATIONS :: Barad, Karen. 1998. "Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality." Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 87-128. Beckman, Karen. 2014. "Animating Film Theory: An Introduction." In Animating Film Theory, by Karen (Ed.) Beckman, 1-24. Durham: Duke University Press. Gunning, Tom. 2014. "Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry between Animation and Photography." In Animating Film Theory, by Karen (Ed.) Beckman, 37-53. Durham: Duke University Press. Sobchak, Vivian. 2011. "Afterward: Media Archeology and Re-Presencing the Past ." In Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, by E., Parikka, J. (Eds.) Huhtamo, 323-333. Berkeley 50 :: VANISHING POINT :: Length: 7’19” Image: 35mm slides to digital video Sound: field recordings, recorded voice https://vimeo.com/298248005 In VANISHING POINT, a collection of projector slides, the actual ephemera of a personal loss, are engaged to show the dynamic and elusive processes of a sometimes vivid and sometimes dissolving memory. The piece retains the structural elements of a slide projector show, including sequential imagery and voiceover, as a posthumous story is explicated with the posthumous use of the slide. 51 A person sits on a bedroom floor with their legs crossed in the early morning light. Feet outline an in-progress art project on the ground. Two people stand in a kitchen with their shirts zipped over their heads. They’ve obviously been laughing. A person holds up a fig and smiles. People are gathered, out of focus, in the background. A person walks a few feet ahead of the photographer on an outdoor trail. They’re looking back at the photographer and pointing ahead. I’ve been told that what happened is complicated, but sometimes it seems simple: the road had changed. Your friend said you were on an uninterruptable path. I still believe them. The first thing I did when I found these slides was to try to reassemble it. 52 No, these photos aren’t yours or mine. There are no photos of us after all. The second time you left, the air was much like it is now, still warm, but change imminent. You had a way of holding time with your words and images… holding time like a puddle holds a leaf. After the first time we met, as we waved goodbye, I said be careful. The roads were icy, and you had a long walk home. 53 I came to your house soon after. It was suspiciously clean, almost barren. You had just given away many of your belongings… …books...clothes...furniture... And bins full of projector slides, you told me. The next day there was a blizzard. You walked me to the bus stop and on the way we took photos of the snow and of each other. None of my photos turned out well. We spent a lot of time outside that winter and spring. I remember taking the bus to the park. I took pictures of a large fallen tree. 54 When we went to the water, you skipped rocks. I think about the boat, how easy it was to dream in that boat. That spring you went one the first journey that ended in the sky but started on the ground. When you came back, I helped you plant your garden. We had just had a little misunderstanding, and it felt good to work on something together. I didn’t take many photos of you. I think it’s because I wasn’t worried. One morning, I left you a message. You sent it back to me. In it, we both tell each other goodbye. 55 How many times can an instant die? I think about how the heat of the lamp could melt a jammed slide. Scroll and click and scroll and click, the images palpate, a sea floods between them, killing time, spilling time. The next year, winter happened twice, maybe three times. Of course I think about if it had been spring again. 56 In my last message to you I said, be careful. In the desert I think about that boat, how easy it was to dream in that boat. ¨ 57 :: PROJECTING THE PAST :: In 2014, I received an email about a large collection of projection slides that were going to be discarded. The email stated that if anyone had any interest in retrieving them, they could respond and take as many slides as they wished. I had always been curious about slide projectors and had often thought about using them in an audiovisual or performance project. I responded, but by then, they had all been claimed. The person who retrieved them, who I will refer to as “Em,” heard that someone else was interested. Em contacted me over email, generously offering to share the collection if I was still interested. I was; but the email got lost in the shuffle and I never responded. I ended up meeting Em two years later under completely unrelated circumstances, not knowing that this was the person that had contacted me about the slides. We soon began a relationship, not realizing our previous correspondence until a few months later. One day, Em told me about spending their weekend cleaning out their house. Em described many of the belongings they decided to get rid of, including several heavy boxes full of projector slides. We realized our previous connection and had a laugh about it. We wondered what would have happened if I had indeed responded to that message two years prior. Em kept a near-constant social media presence, uploading images, poems, thoughts, political musings, comedy, and live streams. Many people, myself included, were captivated by the way Em captured life. In fact, I had heard of Em’s social media presence before we met. During our relationship, social media figured in poignantly. We would keep up with each other and keep each other entertained during the day through various social media platforms. Several months into the relationship, things quickly and unexpectedly soured. I was heartbroken. The online archive of the time we spent together, the messages we exchanged, and other related content 58 became extremely painful to have access to and re-experience in the context of our split. I deleted everything I could. I asked Em to remove everything online that they had posted about, or with, me in it. At my request, we didn’t speak for several months following our breakup. Six months later, a mutual friend of ours died in a tragic accident, one mourned widely at both national and local levels. Many of our friends were devastated by the loss. I knew Em would be too. I contacted Em to send my condolences. I wished Em well. Six weeks later, Em died in a tragic accident. It was, and still is, impossible to believe. It was intolerable to process these two tragedies, both horrific accidents, on their own terms, let alone with such proximity to one another. I was bewildered that we had just been in touch after so long—something I took as a sign that, maybe, someday we could find a way to reconnect and move on. Em’s passing was also publicized and mourned heavily through major news media channels and talked about widely within my network on social media. The internet was dense with memories, anecdotes, and reflections. It was at this point that I realized that there was no evidence of our relationship; I had no photographs or ephemera of the time we spent together. There was barely a trace that our relationship had even happened. Lightly stated, I was in a haze amidst the grief. I would often take long, meandering walks to pass difficult stretches of time. One day, while wandering around town, something caught my eye in the window of a local consignment store. I walked in. In the corner, I spotted the bins of projector slides— the ones that belonged to Em—that we had previously corresponded about. I began sifting through them. As I sorted through the slides, I began choosing images. Some images brought back memories of the time we spent together. I tried to find images to match some of my vivid memories. I arranged the images into 59 sequences that mimicked events and trajectories in our relationship. The slides, of course, weren’t indexical to the time we spent together, but they provided something to think with. I left the store with several handfuls of slides, not sure what exactly I would do with them. I finally set them in motion one year later in VANISHING POINT. ¨ The fly that dissolves in the carnivorous pitcher of the bog plant; the bog, which breaks down Tigers' bones but tans and supples their hides; the lump of ore wasted to sand by acid rain; And the old man smoking at his corner desk who has burned himself alive with poetry. - T.R. Hummer “Corrosive Lyric69 ¨ Slide projectors were anticipated by Magic Lanterns, pre-cinematic devices from the 1800s that projected light (first, oil and kerosene lamps, then arc lamps and limelight before the advent of the lightbulb) through transparent images painted on glass slides. Magic Lanterns became a popular form of entertainment. Troupes traveled and performed illustrated lectures and stories. 70 The slide show was eclipsed by the advent of film, which quickly became the preferred mode of public entertainment. In the 1930s, slides returned with the release of the 35mm slide format and projector. By the 1950s, after some technical refinement, they became extremely popular devices for domestic entertainment and in educational settings. 35mm slides had good color quality, great resolution, were less costly than photo prints, and were easier store and handle compared to photo prints and film. The projector’s simplicity and easy operativity allowed non-experts a mode of creative multimedia expression as they navigated the sequencing of images and narration. While reliant on the still image, 69 Hummer, Skandalon 70 Sarlin, The Last Slide Projector, https://paigesarlin.info/the-last-slide-projector-2006/ 60 slide projection shows were live, communal events that incorporated a degree of improvisation. Even if the show was repeated, the narrator could shift the order of images around and rework the narration.71 There was an art to the delivery, even in the most banal domestic context. The slides and projector also asserted their own humor and liveness: the slides might appear in the wrong order or upside down, or the slide might get stuck and interrupt the flow of the sequence. While unintentional, these malfunctions served as an amusing counterpoint. Slideshows drew provocative tensions between still image photography and film. The slide photos were documents of the past, but the slide projector show reworked that past as an event happening in the present. Slideshows were both documentary and theater, simultaneously preserving and projecting the past. The intervallic timing of the slide straddled cinema and film as well: each slide image was experienced as a discrete entity, but the sequencing carried the forward drive of cinema.72 The intervallic, automated nature of the slideshow could expand or compress time, allowing events of greater or lesser scale to be mapped into a narrative durational scale. These features made time and temporality an elastic feature in the slideshow. 73 Its tensions between the past and present, and photo and film, set the slideshow apart from other media. Elastic temporalities are one of many reasons that artists have been drawn to projector slides in the late 20th and early 21st century. The uncomplicated, affordable, and everyday quality of the slide, in addition to its comparative technological innocence, made it an attractive medium and format for anti-establishment- minded conceptual and performance artists in the 1960s and 70s.74 Many conceptual and performance artists in the 1960s and 70s used the slide to document endurance performance or site-specificity. In 71 Alexander, SlideShow, xx. 72 Ibid., 5. 73 Ibid., 24. 74 Ibid., 10. 61 addition to allowing audiences to view them beyond their inaccessible site and scale, it also elucidated the artist’s process, often a prominent feature in conceptual works. Ana Mendieta is one such example. Mendieta’s transient, ephemeral, and site-specific performances were often only witnessed by the site and a photographer. Mendieta used slides as a way to elucidate the stages of her performances such that they could be understood and witnessed by wider audiences. At left are three of the nine slides for Figure 36: Ana Mendieta's Body Tracks (1974) “Body Tracks,” a 1974 piece where Mendieta smeared animal blood on a white sheet to think about the traces left by an ephemeral body.75 Other artists use the slide to reflect on it as a vernacular medium of the past.76 In James Coleman’s “Slide Piece” (1972), the same image is subjected to various interpretations delivered through a number of different voice-overs. Throughout the piece, Coleman explores the plausibility of a number of different realities existing within the same moment, and how Figure 37: James Coleman's Slide Piece (1972) the viewer buys into the authority of the image’s description. In Jonathan Monk’s “One Moment in Time (Kitchen)” (2002), the images of 80 photographs are replaced by phrases of description. Rather than project the images, Monk projects the text, reflecting on the nature of how a slide represents an event. Ceal Floyer’s “Auto Focus” (2002) features an unloaded slide projector continuously moving in an out of 75 Alexander, SlideShow, 22. 76 Ibid., xx. 62 focus. Because of the focusing action, viewers assume there is something to be seen but are left to realize that there is, in fact, nothing there. ¨ The visual imagery in VANISHING POINT is reminiscent of a travelogue. I imagine many of the images were taken during camping trips, road trips, and visits to national parks. Long journeys were a theme in Em’s life—Em went on one cross-country journey before we met, one while we were together, and one after we parted. Em was killed while on this final cross-country trip. I organized the slides to mimic the shifting landscape of an east coast to west coast journey. I also followed the movement of the seasons, beginning in late summer. This is when Em left on their final journey. Em died in the winter, and we met in the winter, so when the slideshow moves through the fall and hits winter, I cycle back into the past to the beginning of our relationship. This is one example of how the piece moves nonlinearly through time. I chose to narrate the text with the direct use of “you.” This use of “you” can be interpreted in two ways: 1) it suggests that the audience is witnessing my dialogue to Em, and 2) it addresses the audience as if they are Em, or the person I am speaking to. This brings the audience more directly into my experience of the past, rather than simply listening to my description of the past. After Em passed, I struggled a lot with the fact that Em’s life was so thoroughly documented but there was no vestige of our relationship. I had no material to confirm my memories with, no traces to conjure a feeling of connection. The use of the slides allowed me to develop some sense of an archive of our past even if they didn’t bear a direct connection to it.77 While the choice of the slide was one made by circumstance, the format and its connotations felt very fitting to the action of piecing together memory 77 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 26. 63 with disjointed parts, allowing for absences between the images. The slides gave me the means to write in a memory where there has been no trace left to follow, a way to encounter the loss, despite the absentia of any ephemera. ¨ 64 :: PROCESS :: I began by sorting through the many slides I had collected, sequencing them based on imagery in text I had written about Em. I categorized them into groups based on which ones I thought could be engaged with in the work. I continued this process until I had distilled the collection of slides into a reasonable amount of content to work with. I had originally imagined this piece as a live slide projector show with a live actor reading the text. However, as the rest of the pieces in my dissertation began falling into fixed-media formats, I began thinking about how to work with this piece as a video piece, rather than a performance. When Figure 38 Organizing slides for VANISHING POINT working with analog formats in a digital environment, the digitization process is always a question given how much of an impact that process can have on the quality of the content. I decided to simply project the slides onto a white screen and record the images with a DSLR.78 78 I could have located a digital 35mm slide scanner to get very good quality image of each slide, however, I would have had to compromise or fabricate the “live” elements, such as the shutter closing on the image and the manual focusing of the slide. For this reason, I stuck with the DSLR. In retrospect, fabricating these live elements would have been fine and I do wonder how good the quality of the images could have been with a digital scan. I may try scanning in the future. 65 Figure 39: My first attempt at recording the slides with a DSLR (projector screen not shown, TV used simply as a stand to elevate the slide projector). In this attempt, I tried to record the video and audio simultaneously. I wrote a generous amount of text in preparation for this piece; some abstract and poetic, some prose- poetic, some traditionally narrative. The final version pulled from various parts of these writings.79 In my first draft of this piece, I included the text in captions below the slides. I found that the captions detracted from the attempt at portraying a live, personal, projector show, leading it to feel more like an educational lecture or silent film. In my second draft of the piece, I recorded my own voice speaking the text. I preferred the voiceover but found that it was profoundly uncomfortable working with my own voice.80 For the next draft, I asked my friend, Kate Bergstom, an actor and theater director, if she would be willing to The final version turned out more narrative and straightforward than I had originally imagined. First versions of the text were 79 much more abstract, poetic, and descriptive of the conditions of the slide rather than of the story itself. 80 This can be attributed to the personal nature of the subject matter as well as the fact that I am not a trained speaker. 66 voice act.81 Kate knew about what had happened and I felt very comfortable working with her. It was much easier to think about the composition of the piece more objectively with Kate’s voice, and Kate’s delivery was congruent with the tone I hoped to achieve.82 I recorded Kate’s voiceover using one Studio Projects C4 small condenser microphone with a windscreen. In direction, I asked Kate to try delivering the text with a steady, hollow tone, one that mimicked the numbness and disbelief that often accompanies grief. I asked Kate to stay quite close to the microphone. I set the volume high in Kate’s headphones such that she could hear a lot of detail in her voice. This discouraged dynamic intonations, and fostered a flatter, even delivery. The result felt very intimate, as if someone were sitting by your side telling you about what had happened, or perhaps that the spoken word was actually the voice of your own thoughts, rather than one enunciated out loud. I recorded the sound effect of the slide projector advancing separately from the video recording.83 I used a large condenser microphone and EQed the recording such that the fan noise of the projector was minimized. After sculpting a clean sound effect, and after I had finishing composing the sequence of images with the voiceover, I then edited in the projector recording to synchronize with the changing imagery. I took a very minimal approach to the rest of the sound score, leaving a generous amount of space and attention for the voiceover and the projector sound. I wanted those sounds to feel foregrounded, using the additional elements of the score to support the voice and give the images a sense of space and location. I 81 www.katebergstrom.com/about 82 This quality was inspired in part by Janet Cardiff’s “Alter Banhoff Video Walk (2012). This piece can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOkQE7m31Pw 83 I ended up using a recording of a slide projector that was different than the one used for the visual slides. The one I used for the projection had an extremely noisy fan. I found a quieter projector to make the sound effects for the piece. 67 used mostly field recordings and EQed them, keeping the volume level modest such that they didn’t overwhelm the other elements of the piece. Given that the piece moves through seasons and contains mostly outdoor imagery, the sounds in the score are mostly environmental. I used field recordings of birds, wind, leaves, as well as one hydrophone recording. These field recordings were sourced both locally in Rhode Island, as well as Alaska.84 For all of these recordings, I used a TASCAM DR-40 field recorder, using both the built-in microphones as well as external mics. About two-thirds of the way into the piece, there is a section that interjects into the ongoing narrative, a bit like a “bridge” in a song.85 In this section, I animate still images of the slides being held and examined closely. At some moments, the hand of the examiner is shown, a nod towards the process of finding and sorting through these images. This section of the piece is scored using a swell of pink noise, signifying the wash of memory as it ebbs and flows, and also signaling the departure from the rest of the piece in terms of its form and intent. There are many references embedded in the text that the viewer would not be aware of without intimate knowledge of my experience of this event. I’ll describe some of these allusions here. In the first section of the piece, the voiceover describes—over visual blackness—photographs of Em and I that were deleted. The “puddle” and “leaf” reference the imagery Em used to describe the ending of our relationship in a piece of published writing. The line, “That spring you went on the first journey that ended in the sky but started on the ground,” references the two cross-country journeys Em went on while I knew them: one which ended with Em unexpectedly taking an airplane to finish the journey, and the second which ended in Em’s death. The “message” is an audio recording we made together one day, where we—together in In 2015, I went on a trip to Alaska and amassed a lot of environmental field recording that I often pull from in my creative 84 work. 85 A “bridge” in western popular and folk music song form is a moment that departs and contrasts from the verse/chorus structure. The bridge allows for a moment of reflection. It also prepares the listener for the conclusion of the song. 68 the same room—acted as if we are talking to each other over the telephone. In the recording, we greet each other and say goodbye at the end. Em sent it back to me one day over email. I forgot about this recording and found it on my hard drive a few months after Em died. It was haunting to hear both of our voices together. In the bridge of the piece, I use the phrase “killing time, spilling time.” This wordplay was inspired by an excerpt of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcade Project. Benjamin’s quote is: Rather than pass the time, one must invite it in. To pass the time (to kill time, expel it): the gambler. Time spills from his every pore.86 The “boat” in the piece is a reference to a piece of Em’s writing that describes two people falling in love on a boat. The boat crashes, but both people survive. After the crash, they have a hard time cultivating their love for each other. They long for the time they spent together on the boat, despite knowing it will crash. I read this writing over and over again after Em died. 86 Benjamin, The Arcade Project. 69 :: CITATIONS :: Alexander, Darsie, Charles Harrison, and Robert Storr. 2005. Slideshow: Projected Images in Contemporary Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. Hummer, T.R. 2014. Skandalon: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Sarlin, Paige. 2006. The Last Slide Projector. Directed by Paige Sarlin. https://paigesarlin.info/the-last- slide-projector-2006/. 70 :: RECORD :: Length: 5’55” Image: digital video animation Sound: vinyl record, digital processing https://vimeo.com/298261224 RECORD uses a vinyl record as a figure for “the record”—as in, an authorized account—that is judiciously read and reconfigured through sound and text-based composition. Sounds from a manually manipulated vinyl record generate projected text, culling from words of testimony and frustration—of all that remains or is kept “off record.” If a record spins in its engineered orbit, what meanings are generated in its disruption? 71 FIGURE X: STILLS FROM RECORD 72 :: READING AND REFIGURING THE RECORD :: RECORD uses a vinyl record as a figure for “the record”—as in, an authorized account—that is judiciously read and reconfigured through sound and text-based composition. RECORD suggests that our recording and reading apparatuses are engineered to capture, protect and avail certain knowledges while withholding others. RECORD proposes that evidence is not only subject to its apparatus but also to the practices surrounding it that can occlude pertinent information it contains. The methodology of RECORD extends and contends with the way information on a record is read by inhabiting the space between observer, object, and apparatus.87 Figure 40: Still from RECORD Through the coupling of sound sourced from a vinyl record with projected text, RECORD calls forth the relationships between reading, writing, and sonic inscriptions that inform the history of the vinyl record. When Edison designed the phonograph—the vinyl record’s precursor—in the late 1800s, he envisioned it as a tool for dictation. 88 To Edison, the phonograph was an improvement on stenography. The phonograph would record speech, etching the vibrations of a sounding body directly into a material body. These etchings, while not discernible or legible to the human eye, were still understood as a form of writing, one that only the phonograph could read.89 87 Barad, Getting Real, 96. 88 Gitelman, Scripts Grooves, 2. 89 Ibid., 65. 73 By inscribing the “physically real” trace of sound, the phonograph collapsed lived experience and evidence into the same document. 90 , 91 The notion that the phonograph accurately approximated reality was confirmed by the US Patent Office, who initially classified the phonograph under “measuring tools.92 The phonograph was pitched as an unbiased witness, one that recorded and repeated its sounding body without the burden of symbolic representation or human mediation.93 The phonograph was associated with veracity, indexicality, and fidelity.94 Figure 41: Edison’s phonograph patent at the Edison Museum 90 Ernst, Sonic Articulations, 173. 91 Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, 63. 92 Ibid., 98. 93 Some artists and thinkers pondered the semiotic possibilities of sonic inscription beyond the “real.” For instance, in Production- Reproduction, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy speculates on a “groove-script alphabet” that could arise from close study of sound grooves, finding correspondences between sounds and their etched shapes. Moholy-Nagy’s groove-script suggested the possibility of fabricating sounds, and maybe even voices. This was worrisome, for the success of this would challenge the ontological stability of recorded sound as the recording of “real” life. 94 Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, 102. 74 Wolfgang Ernst agrees that audio recordings are novel in comparison to their visual and readable archival counterparts, but not for their evasion of symbols or their supposed objectivity. Rather, Ernst proposes that audio recordings are distinctive because they relay incidental information that would otherwise transcend and resist symbolization, such as environmental sound, the grain of the voice, and noise induced by the medium itself. 95 The incidental noise produced by the recording medium reveals that, in recording, two regimes clash: human performativity and technical operativity. Ernst’s analysis proposes that both are audible in the output. 96 Edison’s phonograph is consistent with the strict determinism of scientific method, where measurements correspond with their premeasurement properties, and language and other representations of reality are assumed to transparently transmit the observed. 97 Ernst proposes an understanding of recording that underlines the apparatus as co-extensive with the phenomena it produces. RECORD suggests that, if we read the record as a phenomenon, we can hear these negotiations. Donna Haraway offers a figure, the modest witness, through which we can reconsider reading (emphasis is mine): Figurations are performative images that can be inhabited. Verbal or visual, figurations can be condensed maps of contestable worlds…. For example, think of a small set of objects into which lives and worlds are built: chip, gene, seed, fetus, database, bomb, race, brain, ecosystem. This...list is made up of…dense nodes that explode into entire worlds of practice… We inhabit and are inhabited by such figures that map universes of knowledge, practice and power. To read such maps with mixed and differential literacies and without the totality…is the task of the mutated modest witness.98 95 Ernst, Sonic Articulations, 173-4. 96 Ernst, Archeography, 59. 97 Barad, Getting Real, 195. 98 Haraway, Modest Witness, 11. 75 Haraway appropriates the figure of the “modest witness” from scientific literature where it denotes the presence of an unbiased, neutral, all-seeing witness whose accounts are assumed to mirror reality. As Haraway notes, this “modest witness” is a stand-in for the modern, European man. Haraway explains that this older figure of the “modest witness:” …is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts. He bears witness: he is objective; he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects. His subjectivity is his objectivity. His narratives have a magical power — they lose all trace of their history as stories, as products of partisan projects, as contestable representations, or as constructed documents in their potent capacity to define the facts.99 In contrast, Haraway’s modest witness reads figures not as static givens but as inhabitable spaces. The modest witness reads both itself as well as other figures as constructions of Western technoscience. It understands that those marked by gender, class, and race are identified as incompetent witnesses to objective knowledge. However, this can be leveraged. The skepticism with which Haraway’s modest witness is met encourages a different type of reading, one that can see how figures are assembled and imagine beyond them: I would like to queer the elaborately constructed and defended confidence of this civic man of reason in order to enable a more corporeal, inflected, and optically dense, if less elegant, kind of modest witness to matters of fact to emerge in the worlds of technoscience.100 Haraway’s modest witness has insider and outsider knowledge: they are both implicated in and at odds with technoscience.101 Thus, they are adept at reading figures and refiguring them. Haraway’s modest witness probes the relations amongst object, apparatus, observer, and phenomena, for nothing is a given, and the given is to be questioned:102 99 Haraway, Modest Witness, 24. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 3. 102 Ibid., 23. 76 My technique is resolute overreading. I know no better strategy to deal with the vermin-infested normality of rational discourse.103 RECORD is motivated by the modest witness’s commitment to differential literacy—to “inflected and optically dense…resolute overreading.” In RECORD, the turntable and vinyl record become inhabitable spaces where usual orientations of object, apparatus and observer are reconfigured. I interrupt the reading apparatus’s orbit, averting the turntable’s needle from its usual, continuous spiral. I use the turntable as an instrument, manually lifting and dropping the needle to repeat, suspend, and stutter moments of audio playback. At times, I drag the needle perpendicular to the grooves of the record. In addition to reading the record and its apparatus differently, I also write over the inscriptions as the needle scratches and dulls the record’s grooves. These actions carry a sense of revision, as I choose which sounds are activated, how they are activated, and overwrite the record’s trace Figure 42: Still from RECORD with my own. RECORD sources its audio material from a compilation of bloopers made on air during radio and television broadcast in the 1960s. This compilation mostly features authoritative, masculine broadcast voices, with occasional clips of docile, nervous, and hysterical feminine voices. The re-composition of these archetypically gendered voices calls attention to the differences in their portrayal and allows them to speak differently. 103 Haraway, Modest Witness, 253. 77 I connect the manipulations of the vinyl record to projected text. This intermedial relationship amplifies the associations of sonic inscriptions with processes of reading and writing. The audio gestures performed on the turntable prompt the appearance of visual text. Sometimes the text mimics the spoken voice on the record and other times it supplies conflicting or superfluous information. The text is culled from a self-authored manuscript about gender-based harassment. This manuscript includes excerpts of testimony as well as text about the relationship between testimony and what is understood as truth. It recognizes the importance of personal disclosure as a form of Figure 43: Still from RECORD evidence in the absence of any other record.104 In embedding personal testimony within the record, I invest it with evidence of another lived experience, one that the record previously denied. The inundation of information mirrors the complex interior experience of trauma, the amalgam of memories, experiences, sensations, fact, feeling, doubt and frustration that can be very difficult to convey in forms of documentation. ¨ 104 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 28. 78 As Lisa Gitelman clarifies, the widespread use of an apparatus is not a pure measurement of its functionality but of its ability to function well within the conditions with which it arises. The success of a technology does not constitute an explanation—conversely, it demands one.105 What are the apparatuses for evidence? Which sounding bodies are recorded by these apparatuses? Which can be read? RECORD bears witness to the clashing of these regimes, proposing a method that contests with the rationality it produces. 105 Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, 8. 79 :: PROCESS :: The audio in RECORD is sourced from “Pardon My Bloopers, Vol. 4,” a compilation of mistakes made during radio and television broadcasts assembled and released by Kermit Schafer in the 1960s. Given that television and radio hosts were mostly men at the time, the resulting audio mostly features authoritative, masculine banal broadcast voices. I chose to use this recording because of the implications it would have given the subject matter of the piece. My approach to the turntable as an instrument is informed by experimental turntablism, most notably, the work of Maria Chavez. Chavez has, over the course of several years of performance, developed many techniques for using the turntable gesturally and percussively. Many of these techniques are documented in a how-to Figure 45 Maria Chavez performing book she published titled Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable. I studied and taught a set of these techniques to the students in my course, Tactile Media Workshop, in the spring of 2017 at Brown University. I carried these techniques over into RECORD. Figure 44 Figure from Essay #9 of Chavez's book 80 I used my personal, home-entertainment record player as the instrument for this piece. I then brought the audio signal into the software MaxMSP to process the audio and designed a program where the audio input could generate text. In Max, I made an amplitude threshold detector. I calibrated the threshold such that I could find the moments when the needle made contact with the record and when there were large dynamic shifts in the record’s content. When the threshold was passed, an impulse was generated that could then be mapped onto other Figure 46 Turntable setup for RECORD parameters in the software. The audio from the turntable was processed through a filter. When the amplitude threshold detector was passed, random values (within specified ranges) were chosen for the cutoff frequency, resonance, gain, and filter type. This effect heightened the gestures of my manual manipulations with the record, making them more dynamic. I used a separate filter module for the left and right channels to generate spatiality within the stereo field. At times, the combination of random values chosen were quite severe, causing momentary distortions of the audio content. The impulse outputted by the amplitude detector also directed parameters in the text generator. When the threshold was surpassed, a word was randomly selected from the manuscript of text, and random 81 values (within specified ranges) were assigned to the size and placement of the text within the frame.106 The chosen text would only linger while the audio stayed above the threshold. If the audio went below the threshold, the text would disappear, and a new word would be selected the next time the threshold was surpassed. I experimented with various colors for the displayed text, but ultimately decided on a simple scheme: white text on a black background. I felt that this configuration mimicked the idea of text and meaning emerging out of the invisible trace of the record’s opaque surface. I improvised a few versions of record manipulations with the text generation, recording the sound and video output together in Max. I initially imagined that the final piece would simply be the rendering of one of these improvisations. However, I found sections in various versions of the improvisation effective and decided to edit these sections together. I then began composing more sculpturally with the improvised material, carving audiovisual activity, removing portions that were too dense, and overlaying sections to generate layered audiovisual events and meanings. While editing and composing, I added text to the video that “micky-moused” the audio track—in other words, I transcribed elements of the audio improvisation in the text projection—to demonstrate greater coherence between the words heard and seen. One possible addition to this program would be to assign specific values for text size and location depending on the word 106 chosen such that there are stronger correlations in the content and its visibility. 82 I additionally added two types of graphical footage to the final video expand the visual variance of the imagery. Figure 47: Stills of ASCII animation from RECORD For one of these methods, I used ASCII characters in repetition to create patterns, and then animated them. This method can be found in the title image, where forward-slashes created a texture of lines through which the title of the piece appears. These forward-slashes appear once more in the middle of the piece. In another section, I animate horizontal lines of the letter “a.” The animation in this section offsets the parallel lines in various ways. The generated text appears behind these lines, as if they were hidden messages within the lines of inscription. 83 The second type of graphical animation that appears are the result of printing Letraset on clear 16mm film leader. Letraset is a dry rub-on printing method where sheets of manufactured typeset and patterns can be applied to paper. I transferred various border patterns onto clear film leader. The Letraset didn’t adhere very well to the film leader in the transfer, and when projected you can see the unevenness magnified, which I found compelling. These graphics resemble optical soundtracks or some sort of Figure 48: Clear leader with LetraSet graphical representation of sound, allowing the audience to experience other visual dimensions of the heard sound. Figure 49: Examples of LetraSet on film digitized 84 :: CITATIONS :: Barad, Karen. 1998. "Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality." Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. 87-128. Chavez, Maria. 2012. Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable. New York: Printed Matter. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. Gitelman, Lisa. 1999. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2013. "Toward a Media Archeology of Sonic Articulations." In Digital Memory and the Archive, by Wolfgang Ernst, 172-183. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseª: Feminism and Technoscience. New York and London: Routledge. 85 86 :: LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS :: Length: 6’45” Image: Analog film, digital processing Sound: analog and digital synthesis The digital has become synonymous with improvement and permanence. However, encoding and decoding digital information modifies its object, causing data loss. Dwelling in a celebratory and confounding place of imperfect transmission, LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS embraces digital and analog degradation alike, using obtuse compression techniques to generate colorful artifacts on already decayed and hand-altered 16mm film. 87 Figure 50: Stills from LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS 88 GLITCH/BLEACH: BRIDGING DIGITAL AND ANALOG MATERIALISMS Dear PAL…. I was asked to reflect on your fragmented histories, your inherent characteristics and finally, your silent, yet somehow violent termination…. What your history teaches me is that your discontinuation is continued in my experience of new technologies; your history teaches me about my future…. I think I can only begin to understand the flow of this progress, by studying the history of breaks, like yours – in the art of artifacts. 107 – Rosa Menkman, from The Collapse of PAL In The Collapse of PAL, media theorist and artist Rosa Menkman performs as the “angel of history” speaking to the now obsolete PAL (phase alternating line) signal, a color encoding system for analog broadcast television. This piece, which is presented as an audiovisual performance, is a eulogy and homage to FIGURE X: Still from The Collapse of PAL analog visual and sonic artifacts of yesterday. Menkman’s footage is distorted by processes of visual feedback, circuit-bent video gear, and digital compression. A similarly crackling, distorted audio score accompanies the footage. In the piece, the “angel of history” reflects on the silent, uncelebrated death of PAL. The piece laments this loss but concludes that Figure 51: Stills from Rosa Menkman's The Collapse of PAL the obsolete signal lives on as a trace in newer technologies, inherited—flaws and all—into the digital. 107 Transcript taken from Video Vortex Reader II, 338. 89 The Collapse of PAL, like other works and essays by Menkman, embraces the expressive and analytical potentials of the “glitch.” Jenny Sundén explains, Glitch is that moment when a CD player in a bar begins to skip, stutter, stumble, and the heightened tension in the room as the vulnerability of the playback technology becomes noticeable. Glitch is the spinning wheel on the computer screen, the delay between a command given and its execution, the kind of technological anticipation that makes us not only hold our breath, or pull out our hair, but forces us to pay attention to the materiality and fragility of new media.108 Glitches are sudden interruptions in technological processes appearing when formerly functional structures undermine themselves. Menkman describes them as the “abnormal mode of operandi:” the same operations that are responsible for a system’s functionality are what cause its operations to short circuit.109 A glitch is unexpected, and its unforeseen appearance calls attention away from the information the system is meant to transmit and directs it towards the system itself.110 Glitches, as a form of noise, are negatively defined phenomena. They are distortions of intended signals, or absences of anticipated information. These instances of non-information, Menkman and others propose, are a way to approach the substructures of informatic and technological systems, which are generally invisible to their users. Glitches are the machine speaking on its own terms, revealing an agency embedded within its materiality that is beyond the user’s command. “Glitch art” refers to the use of analog and digital artifacts to create expressive material. Glitches are intentionally generated by causing interference with analog signals or corrupting and misreading digital files. For instance, one way to intentionally generate glitches in image files is to open a JPEG in a hex editor and delete lines of text, thereby altering the original raw binary information of the file. When saved 108 Sundén, On Trans-, Glitch, and Gender Machinery of Failure, 5. 109 Menkman, Glitch Studies Manifesto, 5. 110 Klee, The Long, Twisted History of Glitch Art. 90 and opened as a new file, the image may be perceptibly distorted due to the erasure of information and how digital processes decode the misinformation.111 The same process can be repeated with audio or video files. Many media artists and scholars situate glitch art within a lineage of materialist media practices. Glitch enthusiast Evan Meany specifically ties glitch video art to materialist film.112 Materialist filmmakers and expanded cinema artists of the 1960s and 1970s sought to dispel the illusion of invisibility of the medium by deliberately calling “…attention to the film material itself as the basis of image.”113 These artists treated the surface of the film strip as a space worthy of investigation. Artists scratched, painted, bleached, stitched, and collaged onto the surface, calling attention to the otherwise imperceptible surface of film. Some materialist filmmakers used found footage, disrupting the sense of sanctity of the image and the archive. These artists worked over the original content of the film to overwrite history and generate new meanings.114 Other artists highlighted the spatial and temporal unit of the frame by making flicker films115 and projecting onto various architectures and surfaces. In the expanded cinema movement, artists interjected themselves in the usually uninhabited space between the projector and the screen to generate a sense of liveness and activity within the usual passive space of the cinema. Rather than hide the apparatuses of cinema to allow for the illusion of narrative to take place, the media machines and 111 Phillip Stearns describes this technique in greater detail here: https://phillipstearns.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/stgo_glitch_workshop_day1.pdf 112 Evan Meaney, On Glitching. 113 Le Grice, Material, Materiality, Materialism, 117. A compelling contemporary example that blends historical and contemporary found footage is Ja’Tovia Gary’s An Ecstatic 114 Experience. Excerpt here: https://vimeo.com/188073363 115 Examples include Paul Sharits, Ken Jacobs, and Tony Conrad. 91 materials were themselves the primary focus of the work.116 Like materialist film, glitch art is similarly concerned with dispelling illusions of the medium and allowing the apparatus to “speak for itself.”117 Glitch art and materialist film analogously make apparent what was always there but obfuscated by conventional practices surrounding their media. Through their work, artists working in these practices reflexively demonstrate how their respective mediums achieve a sense of invisibility and illusion. Additionally, through the exploration of the effects of forced malfunction, both practices embraced the aesthetics of the unfamiliar, abstract, and unpredictable. The effects of glitching and bleaching film don’t just produce mesmerizing anomalies for the sake of strangeness. These processes also reveal, in an acute fashion, how time and the environment operate on their respective mediums. 118 With film, the passing of time causes decomposition of its materials, instigating the natural separation of the emulsion from its support and the image’s attachment to the substrate. This process may either be slow or fast, depending on storage Figure 54: Acetate film makeup Figure 52: (left) Water damage on acetate film Figure 53: (right) Nitrate base decay 116 Peter Gidal’s Materialist Film and Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema are not specifically referenced but both sources have certainly informed my understanding of these two artist movements. 117 Meaney, On Glitching. 118 Ibid. 92 conditions and how the film has been handled and exposed to elements. With time, the film strip is scratched, fades, and accrues other visual artifacts on its surface.119 Digital data degradation, or “data rot” as it is sometimes known, occurs as a result of stress on storage mediums such as discs and drives. Imperfect insulation, exposure to intense temperature, humidity, and light, or small changes in magnetic orientation can all cause transformations of digital data. Furthermore, data loss is induced via compression. Compression eases digital file transmission and maximizes storage space by minimizing file sizes. Digital compression can either be “lossless” or “lossy.” “Lossless” compression redacts redundancies in file structures, but the redacted data is recovered when the file is uncompressed. “Lossy” compression permanently removes redundancies and other “unnecessary” information in the file, with the hopes that these losses are either imperceptible or inconsequential. Digital files in “lossy” formats additionally endure “generation loss,” meaning that every time the file is uploaded, transmitted, or altered and saved, it will lose increasing amounts of information. Patrick Liddell illustrates this process in his series “I Am Sitting in a Video Room”120 where he successively reuploaded the same video to YouTube 1,000 times between 2009-2010. Figure 55: Lidell before and after 1,000 YouTube compressions 119 https://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org, https://www.filmpreservation.org 120 The title is a nod to experimental composer and performer Alvin Lucier’s influential work, “I am Sitting in a Room.” 93 Both materialist film and glitch art amplify inherent properties of their mediums. Usually, these already- occurring processes are only perceptible over large scales of time and transmission. The acute nature with which these artists engage these processes makes their media materialisms and conditions palpable. New technologies might solve old problems, but will always bring new problems…. new ways of breaking down. -Jenny Sundén121 Despite the degenerative potential of the digital, archival practices surrounding analog media are curiously drawn to digitization. This trend confirms a widespread belief that the digital is a stable and time-tested format—permanent even—denying and deferring its own archival complications. While it is true that digitization has many affordances in terms of archival access and in terms of content analysis and enhancement, digital media has by no means brought relief to the archival concerns of its analog predecessors. In “Did Somebody Say New Media?” Wendy Chun interrogates how the use of “new” in “new media” contributes to the myth of the digital as stable. The categorization of digital and computation media as “new media” differentiate them from their analog predecessors. The use of “new” insinuates that what has come before it is over and dead.122 This characterization effaces any relation that digital media might bear with the past.123 Chun traces the conflation of the digital as stable in the misconception of memory as storage. Memory is an active and volatile act of retrieval, whereas “storage” signifies preservation for the future. Digital media, 121 Sundén, On Trans-, Glitch. 122 Chun, Did Somebody Say New Media?, 1. 123 Ibid., 3. 94 from hardware to software, are reliant on memory at every stage. Digital media are constantly undergoing processes of degeneration and regeneration as they are compressed, encoded, transmitted, and decoded— all processes that unremittingly chip away their data. Digital media are imbued with the quality of “always being there,” but paradoxically, they are always disappearing and reappearing.124 Digital media are the opposite of stable. As Chun argues, what should surprise us is not that “digital media fades, but that it stays at all.”125 As Menkman insists, the faultlessness of the digital is a myth, and is perhaps not what we should be seeking anyway: “…our search for a noise-less system is an ill-fated dogma.”126 ¨ LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS bridges materialist film and glitch art processes, bringing together visual artifacts of degradation in both film and digital materials. The footage sourced for the piece includes segments of 16mm film that have been naturally decayed and altered by hand, such as film leader that was colored with inks, leader and found footage that was bleached away and painted, and found footage that was left in compost so the image emulsion would slowly rot away. The film fragments were digitized at high quality using a DSLR set up with an optical printer. The digitized footage was then processed in a myriad of ways, including acute digital compression, color correction, color keying and overlaying. The digital processes generate a secondary layer of visual artifacts, intertwining with the analog film artifacts. 124 Chun, Enduring Ephemeral, 167. 125 Ibid., 171. 126 Menkman, Glitch Manifesto. 95 This hybrid of digital and analog artifacts calls attention to the similar qualities of fallibility of what we might otherwise categorize as “old” and “new.” In LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS, the notion of stability and permanence associated with the “new” media is made to feel Figure 56: Still from LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS fragile, contextualized within the terms of film’s unmistakable degenerative nature. In combining these processes, the piece speaks back to the fantasy of the digital as immaterial, invisible, and friction-free. The digital artifacts in LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS are generated by using codecs meant to compress video to ease transmission and file size. The piece stylizes technical errors but finds pleasure in them rather than fetishizing noise and malfunction in what Menkman describes as the “masculine Avant-garde art of mishaps” often found amongst glitch enthusiasts.127 The piece brings pleasure to the eye, but also subverts its confidence as usually disparate media-technical processes and aesthetics intermingle. The synthesis of erased information in the analog and digital media doesn’t lead the viewer to a null absence; the piece is brimming with activity. The “absences” of information caused by the information loss cause the proliferation of tangible artifacts, allowing the viewer to feel, imagine, and invent through their sensual animation. Perhaps, then, rather than lamenting all that is lost, the viewer is led to wonder about the beauty and wonder of what once was. 127 Menkman, Glitch Studies Manifesto, 341. 96 The score of the piece foregrounds this sense of wonder and clarity rather than ominous or menacing qualities that could have otherwise been underlined. The sound is warm and inviting, functioning as a way to enter the visual space, to guide the eye through the otherwise frenetic visual activity, and to support and hold the viewer there. The density of visual and sonic activity is at times overwhelming but retracts and settles just as it reaches this brink. The conflation of degradation between both mediums turns back the wheel on linear progress of its “new” media component. While artifacts of loss and malfunction are explored in this piece, perhaps the thing “glitched” in LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS is the divide between the analog and digital. It reminds us that the digital is seeded and saturated with vestiges of our media pasts.128,129 As Menkman offers, the purpose of exploring glitch and malfunction is not necessarily to seek out truths or stable knowledge; nevertheless, they can generate new ways of thinking.130 Glitch is anti-conservation, a black hole that becomes a portal, the error as a catalyst that propagates and proliferates other futures.131,132 Maybe rather than the future meaning progress, we can conceive of another future, even with—or perhaps, because of—all that is lost. 128 Zinman, Getting Messy, 111. 129 Miller, Kiri. Dissertation draft feedback. 130 Sundén, On Trans-, Glitch, 2. 131 Menkman, Glitch Studies Manifesto, 341. 132 Russell, Digital Dualism. 97 :: PROCESS :: I began working with experimental and materialist film techniques in early 2016, focusing on direct animation and working with found footage. During the course of a few months, I experimented with a variety of techniques. On both clear and opaque film leader, I painted animations, experimented with various inks and household products, and scratched away at the emulsion. I bleached found footage and immersed it in acidic foods and household liquids. I buried film underground and loaded coffee cans full of film and compost to see how these processes would impact the celluloid over time.133 Figure 57: Examples of hand-altered film 133 I sought out a lot of resources in researching materialist film techniques including: Kathryn Ramey’s Break The Machine, Steven Woloshen’s Scratch, Crackle, & Pop!, and the collaborative film zine Recipes for Disaster. Bryan Papciak at RISD and AgX Film Collective in Boston have also been very helpful. 98 I digitized most of this work, since I anticipated that the film might become hard to store at some point, and that it might deteriorate. To digitize the clips, I used an optical printer set up with a DSLR located in RISD’s analog film studio. Optical printers allow filmmakers to re-photograph film from one filmstrip onto another. Filmmakers often use optical printers to generate time effects such as photographing multiple frames of the original onto another roll of film, thereby “slowing down” the speed of action on the original or using color filters to alter the look of the material. It is also a way to make copies, a technique that is especially useful with hand-painted film for making a more stable copy that can be projected without ruining machines. This particular setup with the DSLR allowed me to take a high-quality digital Figure 58: Digitizing 16mm film with optical printer image of each individual film frame, and then and DSLR assemble the photographs into moving image with software. When I’ve worked with 16mm film in the past, I’ve been fairly strict about not digitally altering the film. I’ve previously wanted the work to convey the discoveries and processes of the material of the film. I’ve since warmed up to the idea of allowing the digital and analog parts of my art practice come into dialogue with each other. 99 I ran some of the film clips through an old MaxMSP/Jitter patch from 2010.134 Figure 59: MaxMSP patch for video compression This Max patch is very simple. It is predicated on playing with compression artifacts. The patch lets the user change the codec and the quality of the render. If an obtuse codec is chosen and if the video is rendered at low-quality, the results can be quite surprising. The compression artifacts look akin to “datamoshing” but do not go into file structure quite as specifically as many common datamoshing tactics. In my version, the visual effects are generated through set compression algorithms. Interestingly, this patch only works in Max 6, an earlier version of MaxMSP, because many of the codecs that produce interesting visual results are not supported in current versions of MaxMSP, including Max 7 and 8. After amassing a set of clips that had been processed through the Max patch, I began overlaying the compressed versions with uncompressed version, exploring simple digital video processes such as color This patch was developed in conversation with Adam Rokhsar, who I encountered at Harvestworks Media Center in New York 134 City in 2010. 100 keying and overlaying. This allowed one layer of imagery to appear through the superimposed imagery, either as another color or through a specific color channel of the top layer of imagery. I used both MaxMSP/Jitter and Adobe Premiere for color masking. The color quality of the original film clips varied quite a bit. For a few of the clips, ones that I found to be dull color-wise, I edited the colors quite radically such that they appeared more vibrant. I found in many cases that color-correcting brought out the texture of the film celluloid, making the hand-made aspects more palpable. Color correcting the film also returned some of the vibrancy in color and texture that was flattened in the process of digitization. At times, the digital processing and color-swapping caused an effect that looked akin to solarization in analog film developing. This occurs when an analog film strip is exposed to light while only partially developed. The colors can appear in reverse tone, sometimes with a silvery, halo-like effect. After creating a sequence of imagery with the digitized and processed film, I began composing the sound score. My approach to sound similarly blended analog and digital audio techniques and materials. The score, like the film, also expanded upon a small amount of analog content through digital manipulations. The primary source material for the sound score was an excerpt of audio recorded with the ARP2500 synthesizer. I used a MaxMSP patch to navigate manipulations of this sound clip. At low playback speed and a slower sequencing speed, I was able to create something akin to a bass-line. At higher playback and sequencing speeds, the sound generated was more shimmery and textural. I edited the sound and the video together, giving close consideration to the rhythmic and textural relationship of the aural and visual. 101 :: CITATIONS :: Chun, Wendy. 2006. "Did Somebody Say New Media?" In New Media / Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, by Wendy Chun and Thomas (Eds) Keenan, 1-10. New York: Routledge. Chun, Wendy. 2008. "The Enduring Ephemeral or the Future is a Memory." Critical Inquiry 148-171. Menkman, Rosa. 2009/2010. Glitch Studies Manifesto. Amsterdam/Cologne. Menkman, Rosa. 2011. "Glitch Studies Manifesto." In Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube, by Geert Lovink and Rachel (Eds.) Somers Miles, 336-347. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Klee, Miles. 2015. “The Long Twisted History of Glitch Art.” March 22. Accessed December 2018. https://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/12265/glitch-art-history/. Le Grice, Malcolm. 2001. "Material, Materiality, Materialism." In Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, 164-171. London: BFI Publishing. Meaney, Evan. 2010. "On Glitching." In Incite! Journal of Experimental and Radical Aesthetics, by Brett (Ed.) Kashmere. Pittsburgh: Independent. Russell, Legacy. 2012. Digital Dualism and the Glitch Feminism Manifesto. December 10. Accessed 2018- 19. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/12/10/digital-dualism-and-the-glitch- feminism-manifesto/. Sundén, Jenny. 2015. "On Trans-, Glitch, and Gender as Machinery of Failure." First Monday. 102 :: CONCLUSION :: The five pieces in LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS expand the ways we think of history, the archive, and how the past remains in the present. Together, they demonstrate the importance of challenging what counts as historical thinking and doing, connecting to larger discursive conversations surrounding the counter- historical. These pieces show the role of art and expressive work in examining time as a constructed, shared, and contested site whose effects are imbricated in the sensual and social dimensions of lived experience. In addition to historical, personal, and cultural anecdotes, LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS centers technological operativity and media materiality—from thinking about the apparatus of projection, the unit of a frame, the functioning of a slide projector and turntable, to the deterioration of data. By combining these allegories with technical operativity, LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS elucidates how technologies operate on memory and material, ultimately leading to what we know and how we know it. The pieces in this project open up a dialogue with these processes, rather than obscure them as our social and cultural operations often do. On a personal artistic level, the project demonstrates the meeting of creative practice and critical research. LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS explores the yields of bringing these modalities together. My hope is that by combining expressive material engagement and rigorous theoretical and historical context, there are a number of ways for audiences and publics to engage these works. I suspect that this dialogue between creative expression and critical research will continue to inform my future work. 103 :: COMPLETE BIBLIOGRAPHY :: Alexander, Darsie, Charles Harrison, and Robert Storr. 2005. Slideshow: Projected Images in Contemporary Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Barad, Karen. 1998. "Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality." Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 87-128. 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New York: Printed Matter. Chun, Wendy. 2006. "Did Somebody Say New Media?" In New Media / Old Media: A History and Theory Reader , by Wendy Chun and Thomas (Eds) Keenan, 1-10. New York: Routledge. Chun, Wendy. 2008. "The Enduring Ephemeral or the Future is a Memory." Critical Inquiry 148-171. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press . 104 da Costa, Beatriz. 2008. "Reaching the Limit: When Art Becomes Science." In Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience , by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Phillip, 366-385. Cambridge: MIT Press. Done, Mary Anne. 2002. "The Instant and the Archive." In The Emergence of Cinematic Time , 206-232. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2011. "Media Archeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media." In Media Archeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, by Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo, 239-255. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2013. "Toward a Media Archeology of Sonic Articulations." In Digital Memory and the Archive , by Wolfgang Ernst, 172-183. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. GItelman, Lisa. 2006. "Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects." In Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, by Lisa GItelman, 1-24. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gitelman, Lisa. 1999. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gunning, Tom. 2014. "Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry between Animation and Photography." In Animating Film Theory, by Karen (Ed.) Beckman, 37-53. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseª: Feminism and Technoscience. New York and London: Routledge. Hatch, Kristen. 2013. Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood's Pioneering Female Film Editors. September 27. Accessed September 2018. https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/essay/cutting-women/. Heumann, Michael. 2013. "Metal Machine Music: The Phonograph's Voie and the Transformation of Writing." eContact! Online Journal for Electroacoustic Practice (web). Holmes, Thom. 2008. Early Turntablism. September 20. Accessed January 2019. http://www.thomholmes.com/Noise_and_Notations/Noise_and_Notations_Blog/Entries/2008/9 /20_Early_Turntablism.html. 105 Hummer, T.R. 2014. Skandalon: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Kane, Carolyn. 2014. "Compression Aesthetics: Glitch from Avant-Garde to Kanye West." InVisible Culture 1-17. Kane, Daniel. 2009. We Saw the Light: Conversations Between New American Cinema and Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Kashmere, Brett. 2010. "Introduction: Cache Rules Everything Around Me." In Incite! Journal of Experimental and Radical Aesthetics 1-3. Klee, Miles. 2015. The Long Twisted History of Glitch Art . March 22. 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"Cutting Through History: Found Footage in Avant-garde Filmmaking." In CUT: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video, by Stefano Basilico, 13-28. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum . Zinman, Gregory. 2015. "Getting Messy: Chance and Glitch in Contemporary Video Art." In Abstract Video, 98-115. Berkeley: University of California Press. 108 APPENDIX :: PUBLIC PRESENTATION :: The public presentation of Lossy Recollections took place on Friday, October 12, 2018 in Granoff Center for the Arts, Studio 1 at 8:00pm. The program lasted between 50-60 minutes. Approximately 70 people were in attendance. The presentation was set up as a traditional proscenium-style screening, with audience seating on risers. I used a large, standalone fast-fold projection screen, set at eye-level for the audience. The sound design for all of the pieces was composed in stereo. I used two QSC speakers, each with a subwoofer, placed at either side of the projection screen. Figure 60: Setup for public presentation The pieces in the screening were played one after another with a 25 second silent pause in between each piece, giving the audience a chance to reflect on connections between the works. 109 Figure 61: Program from public presentation 110