aka Why Do Some People Develop the Lost Camera Films of Total Strangers?
Amelia Tait at the Observer, er, observes this strange subculture of hobbyists who purchase rolls of undeveloped film and then develop them - sometimes getting a bunch of blank grey images, sometimes nondescript snapshots, but occasionally something weird or poignant:
"Those who sell mystery film often don’t set out to trade in the stuff, instead it’s usually picked up by chance at house clearances, inside old cameras or in charity shops. There are many tragic reasons why these rolls could have been forgotten about – divorce, death, dementia – and many mundane ones: film processing is expensive and it’s easy to set aside a half-used roll to be finished later and simply forget about it. Used film can sell from £1 to £100 on eBay, and more and more people are gathering online to celebrate their hobby....
"For Levi Bettwieser, a 33-year-old video producer from Idaho, an interest in forgotten film can be both expensive and risky. Bettwieser estimates he has spent “upwards of $10,000” on rolls of film over the past five years, and says he “can get 10 rolls in a row that come out blank” due to the film being degraded. “A couple of years ago, I was winning and buying every single roll of used film on eBay,” Bettwieser says. “There’s always a feeling of overall excitement that you might get something amazing, something historically viable. Or you might get more cat photos.” Bettwieser now runs a non-profit scheme, the Rescued Film Project, where he encourages people to give him their old rolls which he then develops. “Part of the reason I’m doing it is because I like the idea of being the first person to ever see these images; even the photographer has never seen them.”
It's a bit intrusive.... a bit peeping-tom-ish, if you think about it.
It's also archive fever finding a new zone to flex itself in - again the idea that everything deserves to be preserved....
“I love so many images for so many reasons,” says Bettwieser, when asked about his favourite photo he’s recovered. “I try and look at every image I rescue as if I’m looking at it in 50 years – everything I rescue is history. People hold on to rolls of film for years and years in the back of a drawer, because we all know that pictures are history, whether it’s just a birthday party or not. Pictures are our only defence against time, our only evidence, sometimes, that we ever even existed.”
Postscript August 1st -
interesting thoughts on this subject from Xenogothic, who is a collector of such images and is drawn to them for their "alterity"-
"The main thrill comes from seeing something radically out of context. The anxiety of the unanswerable question that haunted Roland Barthes instead becomes a perverse thrill — indeed, as it was for Barthes though he seemed reluctant to admit it.
Like an object found on the beach in a ghost story, the energy trapped in a photograph like a fly in amber is a special thing that is highly susceptible to romantic flights of the nostalgic subject and, as such, to find such things in the world of the vernacular image is far past the pale of cliche...."
Xenogothic also says that another place to find such images is record covers
Showing posts with label ARCHIVE FEVER. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ARCHIVE FEVER. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Friday, May 3, 2019
ArchivFieber, slight return - "The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History"
via Atlas Obscura
"About 71,000 VHS and BETAMAX cassettes are sitting in boxes, stacked 50-to-a-pallet in the Internet Archive’s physical storage facility in Richmond, California, waiting to be digitized. The tapes are not in chronological order, or really any order at all. They got a little jumbled as they were transferred. First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.
"In 1975, Stokes got a Betamax magnetic videotape recorder and began recording bits of sitcoms, science documentaries, and political news coverage. From the outset of the Iran Hostage Crisis on November 4, 1979, “she hit record and she never stopped,” said her son Michael Metelits in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a newly released documentary about his mother and the archival project that became her life’s work."
"Stokes was no stranger to television and its role in molding public opinion. An activist archivist, she had been a librarian with the Free Library of Philadelphia for nearly 20 years before being fired in the early 1960s, likely for her work as a Communist party organizer...."
"Roger Macdonald, director of the television archives at the Internet Archive.... recalls asking [Michael] Metelits, “How could you physically manage taping all this stuff? And he said, ‘Well, we’d be out at dinner and we’d have to rush home to swap tapes’ … that was one of the cycles of their lives, tape swapping.”
"In addition to her son Michael and her husband, Stokes’s nurse, secretary, driver, and step-children were enlisted to assist in her around-the-clock task of capturing every moment on television....
"Now, Stokes’s work will be made publicly available on the Internet Archives, bit by bit, offering everyone the opportunity to examine history..."
Calling Borges, or do I mean Benjamin....
"About 71,000 VHS and BETAMAX cassettes are sitting in boxes, stacked 50-to-a-pallet in the Internet Archive’s physical storage facility in Richmond, California, waiting to be digitized. The tapes are not in chronological order, or really any order at all. They got a little jumbled as they were transferred. First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.
"In 1975, Stokes got a Betamax magnetic videotape recorder and began recording bits of sitcoms, science documentaries, and political news coverage. From the outset of the Iran Hostage Crisis on November 4, 1979, “she hit record and she never stopped,” said her son Michael Metelits in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a newly released documentary about his mother and the archival project that became her life’s work."
"Stokes was no stranger to television and its role in molding public opinion. An activist archivist, she had been a librarian with the Free Library of Philadelphia for nearly 20 years before being fired in the early 1960s, likely for her work as a Communist party organizer...."
"Roger Macdonald, director of the television archives at the Internet Archive.... recalls asking [Michael] Metelits, “How could you physically manage taping all this stuff? And he said, ‘Well, we’d be out at dinner and we’d have to rush home to swap tapes’ … that was one of the cycles of their lives, tape swapping.”
"In addition to her son Michael and her husband, Stokes’s nurse, secretary, driver, and step-children were enlisted to assist in her around-the-clock task of capturing every moment on television....
"Now, Stokes’s work will be made publicly available on the Internet Archives, bit by bit, offering everyone the opportunity to examine history..."
Calling Borges, or do I mean Benjamin....
Monday, April 8, 2019
ArchivFieber (extended mix)
Archive Fever
uncut version of column published in Der Tagesspiegel, March 2019
by Simon Reynolds
Almost a quarter-century ago, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida published a slim, dense book titled Mal d’Archive. I would be lying if I said I understood every bit of his typically abstruse argument, but what struck me immediately and has stayed with me is the brilliance and beauty of Derrida’s title phrase as rendered in English: archive fever. It sounds and looks even better in German, I should imagine, because of the way you guys smush words together: Archivfieber.
Whether two words or a single word, Derrida’s coinage impacts me like a miniature poem: it’s a cogent and potent distillation of how so many of us live our lives these days. Since the launch of broadband internet and the invention of social media, a mania for cataloging, collecting, list-making, documentation and commemoration has enveloped our culture. The total recall and instant recall enabled by search engines and wi-fi means that we live in a proximity with the cultural past that our ancestors would have found inconceivable. If things like Spotify and Netflix weren’t sprawling enough, open-access archives like YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, and Discogs tend towards entropy: an infinitely recessive profusion and confusion. Somewhere between a library and a maze, you could get lost in any one of these for a lifetime.
“Retromania” and Archivfieber are almost interchangeable as concepts. One of the symptoms of the retro-virus is coming down with archivfieber. Personally, the malady has made me a sickly, wilted being, whose memory is shot, whose arms and fingers ache from daily races back and forth across the internet’s spatialization of history. I get temporal whiplash as I oscillate between different pockets of the past. In any given day, I visit many eras and sample many treasures, but like a practitioner of “check list tourism” I barely retain any after-images from the musical museums and sonic monuments I’ve seen. I’ve tried to cram too much in. I don’t want to miss out anything, so I end up just barely experiencing everything.
Archivfieber is a transitional affliction, to some extent: it’s particularly chronic among those who grew up in analogue-era of cultural scarcity and have only partially adapted to the digital abundance. Embedded deep in the bones and the nerves of our listening selves is a matrix of consumer desire shaped by growing up with never being able to get hold of enough music. So we have poorly adjusted to an inside-out world where where’s too much. People – such as my children – who are digital natives don’t have the same compulsion to keep and collect: they might bookmark favorite things or otherwise sensibly organise their listening, but they feel no need to own the MP3s. They live in the certainty (and the confidence is not necessarily well-placed - things do disappear from the internet, get taken down) that these songs, mixes, and video-clips will always be out there should they want them.
People from my generation are still wired for a world of non-availability and inaccessibility. We grew up inside that gnawing need for more music than you could afford to buy or to copy (given that blank cassettes cost money too). We remember the sensation of boredom as emptiness and lack of choice, as opposed to the new forms of boredom that have emerged with distracted overload and surfeit of choices. So we cannot completely exit the psychology of accumulation and ownership. That’s how come an individual with my particular mix of curiosity, wide taste and sheer simple greed ends up with thousands and thousands of hours of music stockpiled in an external hard drive, vastly more than I could hope to listen to even once during the remainder of my time on earth, let alone do justice to any of it through dedicated repeat immersion.
It’s not just music, of course: they are so many forms of cultural data and digitized entertainment out there to forage and hoard. A recent obsession of mine that got a little out of hand is experimental animation of the pre-digital era, particularly from Eastern Europe: within a matter of weeks, I harvested 1200 short films from YouTube, Vimeo and other online resources, out of which I have to date watched perhaps forty. The drive to seek and gather displaces the desire to experience. The buzz is the momentary thrill of acquisition as the file downloads into your computer, even as you are already searching for the next obscure discovery.
People predisposed to obsessive-compulsive disorders could get just as out of hand in the analogue era, of course – trawling into their homes unmanageable quantities of vinyl recordings or books. But the digitization of culture – through its removal of the limitations of storage space and the disincentives of cost – causes the mania to balloon to grotesque degrees. The fact that it is out of sight, compressed into the minuscule cubic space of a computer, laptop, or even phone, conceals the disgrace from other’s eyes, but it does not alleviate the squalor of the soul. But even if you keep it all in the cloud, or don’t “keep” it in any form beyond bookmarks in your browser, the internet’s sprawl has a way of invading your inner world. It clutters your mind and eats your time. Many are the days in which, as the end approaches, I look back on the hours of journeying across the internet and can barely remember where I “went”, what I read or watched or heard, nor indeed what I saved for later – a “later” that will never come.
There is nothing necessarily unwholesome about an overdeveloped musical libido: rather than a debilitating disease, we might think of the “fieber” in Archivfieber as a fan’s enthusiasm or shared excitement (Saturday Night Fever) or even the erotic fire of Peggy Lee’s “you give me fever.” Music-desire is a form of sensualism, it can involve a hungry curiosity about new sensations and stimulations, and in that sense belongs to the kingdom of Eros. Still, as mediated through the internet, music consumption habits can take on an automatized quality that Freud would classify under the sign of “the repetition-complex”, a regressive drive he linked to the death instinct. Archivfieber, in this dark light, would be a literally morbid impulse. In yet another sense, the archival drive is a denial of mortality. “We buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them,” said Warren Zevon, adapting a maxim of Schopenhauer’s. The same applies to records and MP3s.
So far, I have only discussed the anal-retentive aspects of music consumption in the age of overabundance: the residual impulse to collect, a refusal to let go. What about, to coin a quasi-Freudian phrase, the “anal-expulsive” – the people who are compelled to share and upload, to build and maintain discographic websites or unofficial archives like UbuWeb? Is there not something slightly deranged about their manic sprees of generosity (an artists’s entire discography laid out on a blog for the feasting - a gift to complete strangers, from a complete stranger). Is there perhaps something suspect and even disturbing about the sheer amount of time and unstinting care that goes into these contributions to a commons of creativity (other people’s creativity - expropriated, unrecompensed). Although I’m vastly more a taker than a giver, I too have felt this archivist-sharer impulse to digitize rare things in my unique possession – cassette recordings of pirate radio broadcasts from early Nineties London that may be, I fondly imagine, the only document of this one particular show – or to add the public listening library things that no one has yet bothered to put on YouTube, like the 12-inch B-side instrumental by a postpunk or Eighties ‘new pop’ group. There is a vague feeling of virtue attached to these acts. But there is also the neurosis of completism at work: you are rectifying sins of omission, filling in gaps in the historical record, for the benefit of the public or posterity.
How does the monstrous growth of music archiving affect music itself? There’s two areas: the listening experience of fans, and the mentality of musicians. Giving that time is finite and we all have other things to busy ourselves with, fans confronted with a surfeit of choice - unlimited listening both in the present and in terms of all prior recorded music– must listen faster, or listen while doing other things. In effect, they now consume music much more like critics and deejays (back when they were the only people, apart from the very wealthy, who listened to such absurdly largely amounts of music, and to such a wide range of music - simply because they were sent it for free). So, like critics and deejays, ordinary people make snap judgments, listening once and never returning (something you would almost certainly never do if you’d paid hard-earned money for the record). They listen while doing other things: the sort of multitasking that computers and phones not so much make possible as enforce. They listen thinly - skimming and skating across the surface of sound at top speed.
Jacques Attali in his famous book of 1977, Noise: A Political Economy of Music, wrote about the era of recordings and collecting as a terminal stage for music as meaningful activity: the solipsistic stockpiling of sound in the home combined with a privatisation of the listening experience, separating it from the aspects of social ritual or spiritual function that used to surround music But Attali couldn’t have imagined a stage beyond this, where the collection became infinite, at once freed of the exchange-economy's commodification and ownership, yet devalued even further to the point where patterned sounds literally stream into our lives like electricity or water: a mere utility.
Listeners respond to the overload by various tactics. I have seen bloggers set themselves tasks (or ordeals?) where they listen to just one album for a whole week and nothing else, or attempt to digest an entire artist’s oeuvre in a one giant bloc of listening. While many allow Spotify’s algorithms to guide them on drifting meanders through sameness, others like myself use it in more purposeful ways that vainly strive to master the flux: building enormous playlists of genres or clustered artists that would take a day or two to listen through. These playlists are almost always - in my experience, anyway – promptly forgotten about and never returned to. Like the downloading, they are residual spasms of the collector impulse, failed adaptions to a medium where music is free (well, apart from the annoying adverts). They are last-ditch stands against streaming's numbing logic of instilling in listeners a mind-state of barely-attentive disengagement, in which all music becomes ambient (or even Ambien).
You can turn the internet into a sort of sedentary, stay-at-home substitute for the record shop, “browsing” its virtual racks (album-sharing blogs, YouTube) and discovering things you never knew existed. Or you can recreate the thrills of scarcity by fetishizing the impossibly obscure, pursuing either the absolutely (and deservedly) forgotten, or the exotically parochial. There are blogs dedicated to the state record company releases of folk music from various Soviet republics, to African dance pop of the 1970s and 1980s that was only ever released on cassette and never reached the West, or – in an exoticism of time rather than space – you can push back through history to pre-WW2 gospel and blues, British music hall, and so forth. Retromania and xenomania merge as we hungry souls explore the heritage of other countries and continents. For me a whole new frontier of sickness – a way of recreating the thrills of digging through the crates in record stores – was when I realized you could strip the audio off YouTube and Vimeo clips. In animations and obscure experimental films, I found electronic and avant-garde sounds – sometimes synth scores made by unknown composers as a favour to the film-maker, sometimes electronic sound-effects and noises – that had never been released on vinyl in the first place. A new frontier for my Archivfieber to rampage across!
And how about the musicians, stuffing their sonic stomachs with an overly rich and riskily varied audio diet? Inevitably they excrete a maximalist sort of music whose aesthetic I call “glutted and clotted”. It reminds me of the Gang of Four song “At Home He Feels Like A Tourist” and in particular the lines “he fills himself with culture / he gives himself an ulcer.” In these conditions, it takes tremendous spiritual strength and aesthetic rigor to fend off the inundation of influences and create any kind of distinctive sound-identity.
This kind of stubborn mettle is also essential for critics and historians, not just of music but in any field. The archival overload makes it irresistible to over-research. I am not exaggerating when I say that there have been times when I’ve embarked on a 500 word record review, having gathered together 50 pages of interviews and earlier reviews of the artist’s work. This is vastly different from when I started out in the late Eighties, when I might respond to a record critically knowing nothing about a band – perhaps a few scraps of data that lodged in my head from reading earlier pieces in music papers, but often not even that (since I barely looked at press releases then). Oblivious to the group’s actual intent or influences, I could project my own critical fancies upon the blank screen of the music, or recruit them to my own critical agenda. Reviewing became a creative act in its own wonderfully irresponsible right, as opposed to a dutiful sorting-through of factual circumstances and avowed rationales. You didn’t necessarily judge the music on its own terms; you invented the terms.
To be historian or a writer of a non-fiction book in this day and age involves a sort of inverted version of Hercules and the Augean stables: the gathering in of shit that then has to be cleared almost entirely away. Having amassed steaming mounds of data, the researcher must summon the will and the ruthlessness to cut through it, to consign details and incidents and characters to historical oblivion, to winnow down nearly everything that’s been laboriously accumulated and forcibly impose a shape on the material. This self-created challenge is not a uniquely digital-era phenomenon: academics and journalists have often got “carried away” and then had to face the day of reckoning. But the limitless of the online archive incites over-research.
We see this need for narrativization in current affairs: the rise of meta-journalists like Seth Abramson, whose role is not to do original reporting on Trump, Russia, Mueller et al, but to process and organize what is already out there in the public domain, constructing timelines and connective threads that rescue events and disclosures that have already slipped out of the public’s short-term memory.
The ultra-forensic detail and rapid-fire turnover of real-time of news coverage means that important information and discoveries get evacuated from popular consciousness within weeks or even days. This archive of the no-longer-news but still highly germane and crucial languishes in a state of chaos – anyone who can construct a through-line is doing a valuable service. Future historians will rely on this kind of pattern-recognition to help them navigate the monstrous excess of documentation and commentary. They used to describe journalism as “the first draft of history”, but figures like Abramson are annotating and abridging what would otherwise likely be illegible and indecipherable to future eyes and brains. The dark side version of this will-to-order is the rise of conspiracy theories and secular demonologies, which piece together delusory links and connective lines through the data overload. Indeed paranoid schizophrenia can often express itself through a mania for the archives and grandiose system-building
Anxieties about data overload and a creeping cultural senescence related to the build-up of archives is not a new phenomenon. Nietzsche’s 1874 polemic “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” rails against the antiquarian mentality, warning of that “blind mania for collecting, a restless compiling together of everything that ever existed. The man envelops himself in a moldy smell…”. In Jorge Luis Borges's 1949 fable “The Aleph” one character imagines the connected man of the future: “I picture him in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins.” With his obsessions with libraries and labyrinths, Borges is often seen as a prophet of the internet - but even he might have felt disoriented at the god-like powers granted by things like search engines and the Cloud.
If we’re adapting badly, it’s because for millennia the human sensorium was oriented around immediate surroundings and the present tense. There were orally transmitted myths and legends, but practically speaking, the here-and-now was all there was. Then came a much shorter period, when rulers and the very wealthy and powerful institutions like the Church or the first universities had archives or private museums, but the vast majority of the population owned no books or images (least of all images of themselves) while music could only be heard in the presence of living musicians. It’s really only been a couple of centuries in which personal libraries have become commonplace and a little more a century in which recordings (phonographic, photographic, film / video) have existed. In what feels like a vertiginous acceleration, communicational distance has been abolished, individual access to archives has become freakily enlarged even as the archives themselves have expanded astronomically, and the scope for personal self-documentation and self-broadcast has likewise grown to be almost limitless. Yet we still have the eyes and ears, the haptic and present-tense orientation bequeathed us by millions of years of evolution. Is it any wonder that our nerves are shredded, our sense of ego boundaries grows every more tenuous, that anxiety and depression and narcissistic disorders proliferate?
As we say in English, you can have too much of a good thing.
uncut version of column published in Der Tagesspiegel, March 2019
by Simon Reynolds
Almost a quarter-century ago, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida published a slim, dense book titled Mal d’Archive. I would be lying if I said I understood every bit of his typically abstruse argument, but what struck me immediately and has stayed with me is the brilliance and beauty of Derrida’s title phrase as rendered in English: archive fever. It sounds and looks even better in German, I should imagine, because of the way you guys smush words together: Archivfieber.
Whether two words or a single word, Derrida’s coinage impacts me like a miniature poem: it’s a cogent and potent distillation of how so many of us live our lives these days. Since the launch of broadband internet and the invention of social media, a mania for cataloging, collecting, list-making, documentation and commemoration has enveloped our culture. The total recall and instant recall enabled by search engines and wi-fi means that we live in a proximity with the cultural past that our ancestors would have found inconceivable. If things like Spotify and Netflix weren’t sprawling enough, open-access archives like YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, and Discogs tend towards entropy: an infinitely recessive profusion and confusion. Somewhere between a library and a maze, you could get lost in any one of these for a lifetime.
“Retromania” and Archivfieber are almost interchangeable as concepts. One of the symptoms of the retro-virus is coming down with archivfieber. Personally, the malady has made me a sickly, wilted being, whose memory is shot, whose arms and fingers ache from daily races back and forth across the internet’s spatialization of history. I get temporal whiplash as I oscillate between different pockets of the past. In any given day, I visit many eras and sample many treasures, but like a practitioner of “check list tourism” I barely retain any after-images from the musical museums and sonic monuments I’ve seen. I’ve tried to cram too much in. I don’t want to miss out anything, so I end up just barely experiencing everything.
Archivfieber is a transitional affliction, to some extent: it’s particularly chronic among those who grew up in analogue-era of cultural scarcity and have only partially adapted to the digital abundance. Embedded deep in the bones and the nerves of our listening selves is a matrix of consumer desire shaped by growing up with never being able to get hold of enough music. So we have poorly adjusted to an inside-out world where where’s too much. People – such as my children – who are digital natives don’t have the same compulsion to keep and collect: they might bookmark favorite things or otherwise sensibly organise their listening, but they feel no need to own the MP3s. They live in the certainty (and the confidence is not necessarily well-placed - things do disappear from the internet, get taken down) that these songs, mixes, and video-clips will always be out there should they want them.
People from my generation are still wired for a world of non-availability and inaccessibility. We grew up inside that gnawing need for more music than you could afford to buy or to copy (given that blank cassettes cost money too). We remember the sensation of boredom as emptiness and lack of choice, as opposed to the new forms of boredom that have emerged with distracted overload and surfeit of choices. So we cannot completely exit the psychology of accumulation and ownership. That’s how come an individual with my particular mix of curiosity, wide taste and sheer simple greed ends up with thousands and thousands of hours of music stockpiled in an external hard drive, vastly more than I could hope to listen to even once during the remainder of my time on earth, let alone do justice to any of it through dedicated repeat immersion.
It’s not just music, of course: they are so many forms of cultural data and digitized entertainment out there to forage and hoard. A recent obsession of mine that got a little out of hand is experimental animation of the pre-digital era, particularly from Eastern Europe: within a matter of weeks, I harvested 1200 short films from YouTube, Vimeo and other online resources, out of which I have to date watched perhaps forty. The drive to seek and gather displaces the desire to experience. The buzz is the momentary thrill of acquisition as the file downloads into your computer, even as you are already searching for the next obscure discovery.
People predisposed to obsessive-compulsive disorders could get just as out of hand in the analogue era, of course – trawling into their homes unmanageable quantities of vinyl recordings or books. But the digitization of culture – through its removal of the limitations of storage space and the disincentives of cost – causes the mania to balloon to grotesque degrees. The fact that it is out of sight, compressed into the minuscule cubic space of a computer, laptop, or even phone, conceals the disgrace from other’s eyes, but it does not alleviate the squalor of the soul. But even if you keep it all in the cloud, or don’t “keep” it in any form beyond bookmarks in your browser, the internet’s sprawl has a way of invading your inner world. It clutters your mind and eats your time. Many are the days in which, as the end approaches, I look back on the hours of journeying across the internet and can barely remember where I “went”, what I read or watched or heard, nor indeed what I saved for later – a “later” that will never come.
There is nothing necessarily unwholesome about an overdeveloped musical libido: rather than a debilitating disease, we might think of the “fieber” in Archivfieber as a fan’s enthusiasm or shared excitement (Saturday Night Fever) or even the erotic fire of Peggy Lee’s “you give me fever.” Music-desire is a form of sensualism, it can involve a hungry curiosity about new sensations and stimulations, and in that sense belongs to the kingdom of Eros. Still, as mediated through the internet, music consumption habits can take on an automatized quality that Freud would classify under the sign of “the repetition-complex”, a regressive drive he linked to the death instinct. Archivfieber, in this dark light, would be a literally morbid impulse. In yet another sense, the archival drive is a denial of mortality. “We buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them,” said Warren Zevon, adapting a maxim of Schopenhauer’s. The same applies to records and MP3s.
So far, I have only discussed the anal-retentive aspects of music consumption in the age of overabundance: the residual impulse to collect, a refusal to let go. What about, to coin a quasi-Freudian phrase, the “anal-expulsive” – the people who are compelled to share and upload, to build and maintain discographic websites or unofficial archives like UbuWeb? Is there not something slightly deranged about their manic sprees of generosity (an artists’s entire discography laid out on a blog for the feasting - a gift to complete strangers, from a complete stranger). Is there perhaps something suspect and even disturbing about the sheer amount of time and unstinting care that goes into these contributions to a commons of creativity (other people’s creativity - expropriated, unrecompensed). Although I’m vastly more a taker than a giver, I too have felt this archivist-sharer impulse to digitize rare things in my unique possession – cassette recordings of pirate radio broadcasts from early Nineties London that may be, I fondly imagine, the only document of this one particular show – or to add the public listening library things that no one has yet bothered to put on YouTube, like the 12-inch B-side instrumental by a postpunk or Eighties ‘new pop’ group. There is a vague feeling of virtue attached to these acts. But there is also the neurosis of completism at work: you are rectifying sins of omission, filling in gaps in the historical record, for the benefit of the public or posterity.
How does the monstrous growth of music archiving affect music itself? There’s two areas: the listening experience of fans, and the mentality of musicians. Giving that time is finite and we all have other things to busy ourselves with, fans confronted with a surfeit of choice - unlimited listening both in the present and in terms of all prior recorded music– must listen faster, or listen while doing other things. In effect, they now consume music much more like critics and deejays (back when they were the only people, apart from the very wealthy, who listened to such absurdly largely amounts of music, and to such a wide range of music - simply because they were sent it for free). So, like critics and deejays, ordinary people make snap judgments, listening once and never returning (something you would almost certainly never do if you’d paid hard-earned money for the record). They listen while doing other things: the sort of multitasking that computers and phones not so much make possible as enforce. They listen thinly - skimming and skating across the surface of sound at top speed.
Jacques Attali in his famous book of 1977, Noise: A Political Economy of Music, wrote about the era of recordings and collecting as a terminal stage for music as meaningful activity: the solipsistic stockpiling of sound in the home combined with a privatisation of the listening experience, separating it from the aspects of social ritual or spiritual function that used to surround music But Attali couldn’t have imagined a stage beyond this, where the collection became infinite, at once freed of the exchange-economy's commodification and ownership, yet devalued even further to the point where patterned sounds literally stream into our lives like electricity or water: a mere utility.
Listeners respond to the overload by various tactics. I have seen bloggers set themselves tasks (or ordeals?) where they listen to just one album for a whole week and nothing else, or attempt to digest an entire artist’s oeuvre in a one giant bloc of listening. While many allow Spotify’s algorithms to guide them on drifting meanders through sameness, others like myself use it in more purposeful ways that vainly strive to master the flux: building enormous playlists of genres or clustered artists that would take a day or two to listen through. These playlists are almost always - in my experience, anyway – promptly forgotten about and never returned to. Like the downloading, they are residual spasms of the collector impulse, failed adaptions to a medium where music is free (well, apart from the annoying adverts). They are last-ditch stands against streaming's numbing logic of instilling in listeners a mind-state of barely-attentive disengagement, in which all music becomes ambient (or even Ambien).
You can turn the internet into a sort of sedentary, stay-at-home substitute for the record shop, “browsing” its virtual racks (album-sharing blogs, YouTube) and discovering things you never knew existed. Or you can recreate the thrills of scarcity by fetishizing the impossibly obscure, pursuing either the absolutely (and deservedly) forgotten, or the exotically parochial. There are blogs dedicated to the state record company releases of folk music from various Soviet republics, to African dance pop of the 1970s and 1980s that was only ever released on cassette and never reached the West, or – in an exoticism of time rather than space – you can push back through history to pre-WW2 gospel and blues, British music hall, and so forth. Retromania and xenomania merge as we hungry souls explore the heritage of other countries and continents. For me a whole new frontier of sickness – a way of recreating the thrills of digging through the crates in record stores – was when I realized you could strip the audio off YouTube and Vimeo clips. In animations and obscure experimental films, I found electronic and avant-garde sounds – sometimes synth scores made by unknown composers as a favour to the film-maker, sometimes electronic sound-effects and noises – that had never been released on vinyl in the first place. A new frontier for my Archivfieber to rampage across!
And how about the musicians, stuffing their sonic stomachs with an overly rich and riskily varied audio diet? Inevitably they excrete a maximalist sort of music whose aesthetic I call “glutted and clotted”. It reminds me of the Gang of Four song “At Home He Feels Like A Tourist” and in particular the lines “he fills himself with culture / he gives himself an ulcer.” In these conditions, it takes tremendous spiritual strength and aesthetic rigor to fend off the inundation of influences and create any kind of distinctive sound-identity.
This kind of stubborn mettle is also essential for critics and historians, not just of music but in any field. The archival overload makes it irresistible to over-research. I am not exaggerating when I say that there have been times when I’ve embarked on a 500 word record review, having gathered together 50 pages of interviews and earlier reviews of the artist’s work. This is vastly different from when I started out in the late Eighties, when I might respond to a record critically knowing nothing about a band – perhaps a few scraps of data that lodged in my head from reading earlier pieces in music papers, but often not even that (since I barely looked at press releases then). Oblivious to the group’s actual intent or influences, I could project my own critical fancies upon the blank screen of the music, or recruit them to my own critical agenda. Reviewing became a creative act in its own wonderfully irresponsible right, as opposed to a dutiful sorting-through of factual circumstances and avowed rationales. You didn’t necessarily judge the music on its own terms; you invented the terms.
To be historian or a writer of a non-fiction book in this day and age involves a sort of inverted version of Hercules and the Augean stables: the gathering in of shit that then has to be cleared almost entirely away. Having amassed steaming mounds of data, the researcher must summon the will and the ruthlessness to cut through it, to consign details and incidents and characters to historical oblivion, to winnow down nearly everything that’s been laboriously accumulated and forcibly impose a shape on the material. This self-created challenge is not a uniquely digital-era phenomenon: academics and journalists have often got “carried away” and then had to face the day of reckoning. But the limitless of the online archive incites over-research.
We see this need for narrativization in current affairs: the rise of meta-journalists like Seth Abramson, whose role is not to do original reporting on Trump, Russia, Mueller et al, but to process and organize what is already out there in the public domain, constructing timelines and connective threads that rescue events and disclosures that have already slipped out of the public’s short-term memory.
The ultra-forensic detail and rapid-fire turnover of real-time of news coverage means that important information and discoveries get evacuated from popular consciousness within weeks or even days. This archive of the no-longer-news but still highly germane and crucial languishes in a state of chaos – anyone who can construct a through-line is doing a valuable service. Future historians will rely on this kind of pattern-recognition to help them navigate the monstrous excess of documentation and commentary. They used to describe journalism as “the first draft of history”, but figures like Abramson are annotating and abridging what would otherwise likely be illegible and indecipherable to future eyes and brains. The dark side version of this will-to-order is the rise of conspiracy theories and secular demonologies, which piece together delusory links and connective lines through the data overload. Indeed paranoid schizophrenia can often express itself through a mania for the archives and grandiose system-building
Anxieties about data overload and a creeping cultural senescence related to the build-up of archives is not a new phenomenon. Nietzsche’s 1874 polemic “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” rails against the antiquarian mentality, warning of that “blind mania for collecting, a restless compiling together of everything that ever existed. The man envelops himself in a moldy smell…”. In Jorge Luis Borges's 1949 fable “The Aleph” one character imagines the connected man of the future: “I picture him in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins.” With his obsessions with libraries and labyrinths, Borges is often seen as a prophet of the internet - but even he might have felt disoriented at the god-like powers granted by things like search engines and the Cloud.
If we’re adapting badly, it’s because for millennia the human sensorium was oriented around immediate surroundings and the present tense. There were orally transmitted myths and legends, but practically speaking, the here-and-now was all there was. Then came a much shorter period, when rulers and the very wealthy and powerful institutions like the Church or the first universities had archives or private museums, but the vast majority of the population owned no books or images (least of all images of themselves) while music could only be heard in the presence of living musicians. It’s really only been a couple of centuries in which personal libraries have become commonplace and a little more a century in which recordings (phonographic, photographic, film / video) have existed. In what feels like a vertiginous acceleration, communicational distance has been abolished, individual access to archives has become freakily enlarged even as the archives themselves have expanded astronomically, and the scope for personal self-documentation and self-broadcast has likewise grown to be almost limitless. Yet we still have the eyes and ears, the haptic and present-tense orientation bequeathed us by millions of years of evolution. Is it any wonder that our nerves are shredded, our sense of ego boundaries grows every more tenuous, that anxiety and depression and narcissistic disorders proliferate?
As we say in English, you can have too much of a good thing.
Monday, April 1, 2019
ArchivFieber (death by data)
Here's a piece I wrote - for the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel - tagged to the Find the File symposium that I participated in last week in Berlin.
I boldly, even rashly, tried (using internet translation machines in the absence of any knowledge of the language) to come up with a bunch of German-wordplay headlines myself. Among them were "Delirium von Dateien" and "Dasein und Dateien" (yes I'm afraid that is an attempt at a Heidegger joke). The newspaper came up with their own headline and I'm sure that was the correct decision.
There is a longer version - about three times as long - of this piece which I may well post here at some point.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
In 1975, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida published a slim, dense book titled Mal d’Archive. It would be lying to say I understand all of his typically abstruse argument, but what struck me immediately and stayed with me is the brilliance of the title phrase as rendered in English: archive fever. I imagine it looks and sounds even better in German: ArchivFieber.
I boldly, even rashly, tried (using internet translation machines in the absence of any knowledge of the language) to come up with a bunch of German-wordplay headlines myself. Among them were "Delirium von Dateien" and "Dasein und Dateien" (yes I'm afraid that is an attempt at a Heidegger joke). The newspaper came up with their own headline and I'm sure that was the correct decision.
There is a longer version - about three times as long - of this piece which I may well post here at some point.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
In 1975, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida published a slim, dense book titled Mal d’Archive. It would be lying to say I understand all of his typically abstruse argument, but what struck me immediately and stayed with me is the brilliance of the title phrase as rendered in English: archive fever. I imagine it looks and sounds even better in German: ArchivFieber.
The word impacts me like a miniature
poem, distilling the essence of how many of us live our lives nowadays. Since
the launch of broadband internet, a mania for cataloging, list-making,
documentation and commemoration has
enveloped our culture – particularly affecting music fandom and consumption,
but not limited to that region by any means. The total recall and instant
recall enabled by search engines means that we live in a proximity with the cultural
past that our ancestors would have found inconceivable. Open-access archives
like YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, and Discogs are somewhere between a library
and a labyrinth: you could get lost in any one of these for a lifetime.
ArchivFieber and “retromania” are
interchangeable concepts really: you might say that one of the main symptoms
of catching the retro-virus is coming down with ArchivFieber. And the malady has made me a sickly being,
whose memory is tattered, whose arms and fingers ache from daily races back and
forth across the internet. I get temporal whiplash oscillating between
different pockets of the past. Like a
practitioner of “check list tourism” I can barely retain any after-images from
the musical museums and sonic monuments I’ve visited. I’ve tried to cram too much in. I don’t want to miss out on anything, so I end up
just barely experiencing everything.
Archivfieber is a transitional
affliction: it’s particularly chronic among those who grew up in analogue-era conditions
of cultural scarcity and have only partially adapted to the digital abundance.
People – such as my children – who are digital natives don’t have the same
compulsion to keep and collect: they might bookmark favorite things but they feel
no need to own the MP3s. People from my generation grew up inside that gnawing
need for more music than you could then afford to buy or to copy (given that
blank cassettes also cost money). That’s how come an individual with my
particular mix of curiosity, wide taste and sheer greed ends up with thousands
and thousands of hours of music stockpiled in an external hard drive, vastly
more than I could hope to listen to even once during the remainder of my time
on earth.
People predisposed to
obsessive-compulsive disorder could get just as out of hand in the analogue
era, of course – trawling into their homes unmanageable quantities of vinyl
recordings, books, etc. But the digitization of culture – through its removal
of the limitations of storage space and the disincentives of cost – causes the
mania to balloon to grotesque degrees. The fact that it is out of sight,
compressed into the miniscule cubic space of a computer, laptop, or phone,
conceals the disgrace from other’s eyes, but it does not alleviate the squalor
of the cluttered soul.
For sure, rampant music-libido is a
form of curiosity and pleasure-seeking, and in that sense belongs to the
category of life-affirming Eros. But something about the internet’s effects on
music consumption habits pushes into the morbid zone of repetitious and
near-automatic behavior. There is a
neurotic aspect to archival drive: a denial of mortality. “We buy books because
we believe we're buying the time to read them,” said Warren Zevon, adapting a
maxim of Schopenhauer’s. The same applies to records and MP3s.
So far, I have only discussed the
anal-retentive aspects of music consumption in the age of overabundance: the
residual impulse to collect. What about the
“anal-expulsive” – the people who are compelled to share and upload? In some
ways, this is more mystifying, the motivation for these manic sprees of generosity
(an artists’s entire discography laid out on a blog for the feasting - a gift
to complete strangers). Although I’m vastly more a taker than a giver, I too
have felt this archivist-sharer impulse to digitize rare things– cassette
recordings of pirate radio broadcasts from early Nineties London, B-side 12
inch instrumentals that no one else has yet thought to upload to YouTube. There is a vague feeling of virtue attached to
these acts of unofficial archiving. But also a neurotic completism: you are correcting
sins of omission, filling in gaps in the historical record
How does the metastasis of online amateur
archiving affect music itself? In two areas: the listening experience of fans, the
mentality of musicians. Giving that time is finite and we all have other things
to do, fans confronted with a surfeit of choice - unlimited listening both in terms of current
music and the history of recorded sound– must listen faster, or listen while
doing other things. Nowadays, anybody with access to wi-fi is in the same position
as only music critics and deejays - who were sent things for free – used to be.
So they listen like critics and deejays: playing something once and never
returning, making snap judgments after partial listens. They give things partial attention: listening
while doing the kind of multitasking that computers and phones not so much make
possible as enforce.
As music streams into our lives like a
mere utility such as electricity or water, people come up with tactics to
“re-enchant the commodity” (which of course is no longer a commodity, but
price-less and therefore increasingly value-less). Bloggers set themselves
tasks where they listen to just one album for a whole week, or attempt to
digest an entire artist’s oeuvre in a one giant bloc of listening. You can turn
the internet into a sort of sedentary, stay-at-home substitute for the record
shop, “browsing” its virtual racks and discovering things you never knew
existed. You can recreate the thrills of scarcity by fetishizing the impossibly
obscure, pursuing either the absolutely (and deservedly) forgotten, or the
exotically remote. There are blogs dedicated to the state record company
releases of folk music from various Soviet republics, to African dance pop of the 1970s and 1980s that
was only ever released on cassette and never reached the West…
As for the musicians, stuffing their
sonic guts with an overly rich and various audio diet, well, inevitably they excrete
a maximalist music whose aesthetic I term “glutted and clotted”. In these overloaded circumstances, it takes
tremendous spiritual strength and aesthetic rigor to fend off the inundation of
influences and create any kind of distinctive sound-identity.
This stubborn mettle is also essential for critics and historians, not just of music but in any field. The archival overload makes over-research irresistible. To be a historian or a writer of a non-fiction book today involves an inverted version of Hercules versus the Augean stables: a gathering in of masses of shit which must then be cleared away almost entirely. Researchers have to summon the ruthless will to consign details, incidents and characters to historical oblivion, forcibly imposing a shape on the material. We see a version of this steely will to narrativize in current affairs: the rise of meta-journalists like Seth Abramson, whose role is not to do original reporting on Trump, Russia, Mueller et al, but to process and organize what is already out there in the public domain, constructing timelines and connective threads that rescue events and disclosures that have already slipped out of the public’s short-term memory. They used to describe journalism as “the first draft of history”, but figures like Abramson are annotating and abridging what would otherwise likely be illegible and indecipherable to future historians. The dark side version of this drive to create narratives amid chaos is conspiracy theory, those secular demonologies of causation. Indeed paranoid schizophrenia has often expressed itself through a mania for archives, esoteric knowledge, and grandiose system-building.
If we’re adapting poorly to the vast and immaterial info-world we’ve built, it’s because for millennia the human sensorium was oriented around immediate surroundings and the present tense. It’s really only been a little more a century in which recordings (phonographic, photographic, cine-video, etc) have existed. In just a couple of decades, individual access to archives has become freakily enlarged even as the archives themselves have expanded astronomically, while the scope for personal self-documentation and self-broadcast has likewise swelled to be almost limitless. Yet we still have the haptic and present-tense orientation bequeathed us by evolution. Is it any wonder that our nerves are shredded, our sense of ego boundaries and memory grow blurry and tenuous, that personality disorders proliferate?
As we say in England, you can have too much of a good thing.
This stubborn mettle is also essential for critics and historians, not just of music but in any field. The archival overload makes over-research irresistible. To be a historian or a writer of a non-fiction book today involves an inverted version of Hercules versus the Augean stables: a gathering in of masses of shit which must then be cleared away almost entirely. Researchers have to summon the ruthless will to consign details, incidents and characters to historical oblivion, forcibly imposing a shape on the material. We see a version of this steely will to narrativize in current affairs: the rise of meta-journalists like Seth Abramson, whose role is not to do original reporting on Trump, Russia, Mueller et al, but to process and organize what is already out there in the public domain, constructing timelines and connective threads that rescue events and disclosures that have already slipped out of the public’s short-term memory. They used to describe journalism as “the first draft of history”, but figures like Abramson are annotating and abridging what would otherwise likely be illegible and indecipherable to future historians. The dark side version of this drive to create narratives amid chaos is conspiracy theory, those secular demonologies of causation. Indeed paranoid schizophrenia has often expressed itself through a mania for archives, esoteric knowledge, and grandiose system-building.
If we’re adapting poorly to the vast and immaterial info-world we’ve built, it’s because for millennia the human sensorium was oriented around immediate surroundings and the present tense. It’s really only been a little more a century in which recordings (phonographic, photographic, cine-video, etc) have existed. In just a couple of decades, individual access to archives has become freakily enlarged even as the archives themselves have expanded astronomically, while the scope for personal self-documentation and self-broadcast has likewise swelled to be almost limitless. Yet we still have the haptic and present-tense orientation bequeathed us by evolution. Is it any wonder that our nerves are shredded, our sense of ego boundaries and memory grow blurry and tenuous, that personality disorders proliferate?
As we say in England, you can have too much of a good thing.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
archive fever diva
From the GQ interview last month, Beyoncé on the "crazy archive" that documents "practically her every waking moment" going back to 2005
Anytime she wants to remind herself of all that work—or almost anything else that's ever happened in her life—all she has to do is walk down the hall. There, across from the narrow conference room in which you are interviewing her, is another long, narrow room that contains the official Beyoncé archive, a temperature-controlled digital-storage facility that contains virtually every existing photograph of her, starting with the very first frames taken of Destiny's Child, the '90s girl group she once fronted; every interview she's ever done; every video of every show she's ever performed; every diary entry she's ever recorded while looking into the unblinking eye of her laptop.
"Stop pretending that I have it all together," she tells herself in a particularly revealing video clip, looking straight into the camera. "If I'm scared, be scared, allow it, release it, move on. I think I need to go listen to 'Make Love to Me' and make love to my husband."
Beyoncé's inner sanctum also contains thousands of hours of private footage, compiled by a "visual director" Beyoncé employs who has shot practically her every waking moment, up to sixteen hours a day, since 2005. In this footage, Beyoncé wears her hair up, down, with bangs, and without. In full makeup and makeup-free, she can be found shaking her famous ass onstage, lounging in her dressing room, singing Coldplay's "Yellow" to Jay-Z over an intimate dinner, and rolling over sleepy-eyed in bed. This digital database, modeled loosely on NBC's library, is a work in progress—the labeling, date-stamping, and cross-referencing has been under way for two years, and it'll be several months before that process is complete. But already, blinking lights signal that the product that is Beyoncé is safe and sound and ready to be summoned— and monetized—at the push of a button.
And this room—she calls it her "crazy archive"—is a key part of that, she will explain, so, "you know, I can always say, 'I want that interview I did for GQ,' and we can find it." And indeed, she will be able to find it, because the room in which you are sitting is rigged with a camera and microphone that is capturing not just her every utterance but yours as well. These are the ground rules: Before you get to see Beyoncé, you must first agree to live forever in her archive, too.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
"[Patrick] Feaster gathers from throughout history depictions of sound waves and alternative sound recording methods, some from before Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877, others simply different means of capturing sounds, and presents them along with illustrations and the stories of their creation. Even better, these images, figured Feaster, "could be 'played' just as though they were modern sound recordings," and set to do just that. He was right, and the result is a fascinating, haunting and indeed defining, new work.... The CD is a surreal listen with 28 tracks sequenced to be heard while reading the book. Lost voices rise up, theoretical tones designed by conjecture and imagination jump out of history.
"On track six, Feaster conjures sound from a photo in an 1898 advertisement for a "Zon-a-Phon." He took a high-resolution scan of the record in the ad, then, he writes, "converted it into a series of parallel lines" that he was able to transform and "unbend" using Photoshop. The result is a man's voice from 114 years ago. His name is Chauncey Depew; he was a politician who stumped for Abraham Lincoln and ended up a senator. He was also a noted after-dinner speaker, and this is one of his talks. He sounds like he can barely break through the past, the portal is so tiny"
-- LA Times' Randall Roberts on Dust-To-Digital's Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio: 980-1980
When I first read about this (Mark Pilkington had a piece in the Scott Walker issue of The Wire) I did think it sounded like the ultimate hauntological come-on: pandering to our archeological fever for the oldest, the earliest, the most ancestral and precursor-y and ahead-of-its-time-y... to our dead media/steampunk lust for the olden days curiosity, for technological paths never taken and alternative history scenarios... My suspicions were aroused because (as with the Depew example, which reminds me of Blow-up) many of these aren't recordings in any real sense, but imaginative constructions based on the barest of traces.
Still, consider me successfully (s)educed: I am mighty curious to hear it.
Blurb from the Dust To Digital Site:
Using modern technology, Patrick Feaster is on a mission to resurrect long-vanished voices and sounds—many of which were never intended to be revived.
Over the past thousand years, countless images have been created to depict sound in forms that theoretically could be “played” just as though they were modern sound recordings. Now, for the first time in history, this compilation uses innovative digital techniques to convert historic “pictures of sound” dating back as far as the Middle Ages directly into meaningful audio. It contains the world’s oldest known “sound recordings” in the sense of sound vibrations automatically recorded out of the air—the groundbreaking phonautograms recorded in Paris by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the 1850s and 1860s—as well as the oldest gramophone records available anywhere for listening today, including inventor Emile Berliner’s recitation of “Der Handschuh,” played back from an illustration in a magazine, which international news media recently proclaimed to be the oldest audible “record” in the tradition of 78s and vintage vinyl. Other highlights include the oldest known recording of identifiable words spoken in the English language (1878) and the world’s oldest surviving “trick recording” (1889). But Pictures of Sound pursues the thread even further into the past than that by “playing” everything from medieval music manuscripts to historic telegrams, and from seventeenth-century barrel organ programs to eighteenth-century “notations” of Shakespearean recitation.
In short, this isn’t just another collection of historical audio—it redefines what “historical audio” is.
Friday, December 21, 2012
curioser and curioser
"By building curiosity cabinets, early modern elites made their mental
lives manifest: the curiosity cabinet displayed its owner's interests,
tastes, travels, and "wit," yet it was also an assemblage of found objects, and thus a display of the external world in all its infinite variety....
"In the realm of art (following a circuitous path that leads us through Joseph Cornell's enchanting boxes and Robert Rauschenberg's combines), the cluttered, fragmented, eclectic aesthetic of the curiosity cabinet carried into the twentieth century...
"I began to notice Wunderkammer-like displays in contemporary web presentation. Perhaps the internet loves curiosity cabinets because it is, itself, a curiosity cabinet -- in a manner of speaking, of course....
"In the ecosystem of Pinterest we find the same organic arrangement of contrasting items, grouped poetically (rather than rationally) around a nebulous theme. The eclectic and exotic are prized; color and visual interest win the day. And the context for each item? Virtually nonexistant. The objects that made up a curiosity cabinet followed circuitous pathways... in the course of which they lost their original contexts, names, meanings. Objects that had once embodied human culture, like sculptures and coins, became mere ephemerata."
from "Cabinets of Curiosity: the Web as Wunderkammer" by Benjamin Breen, at the Appendix, a "journal of narrative & experimental history"
Breen points to further reading on this subject:
the internet as wunderkammer paper by Jessica Ezell
as well as his own earlier essay on 17th Century cabinets of curiosity at the blog Res Obscura
see also the collation of responses to the piece that point to other pieces and further vidence
^^^^^^^^^^
I argued a similar point -- collection as a decontext/recontext machine in the Toop piece in the Wire earlier this year:
"What emerges as a subtext of Exotica is the idea of the collection--a public or private archive of recordings, texts, images—as a decontextualisation machine. When a collection achieves a certain density and duration, the proximity of things of far-flung provenance allows for the remapping of cultural fields: strange connections cutting across time and space and genre become almost unavoidable. Ownership and location of cultural forms gets displaced from its proper setting. The Internet -- a vast collective collection, a non-space of absolute proximity between everything-- is just the nth-degree fruition of tendencies inherent to the archive."
"In the realm of art (following a circuitous path that leads us through Joseph Cornell's enchanting boxes and Robert Rauschenberg's combines), the cluttered, fragmented, eclectic aesthetic of the curiosity cabinet carried into the twentieth century...
"I began to notice Wunderkammer-like displays in contemporary web presentation. Perhaps the internet loves curiosity cabinets because it is, itself, a curiosity cabinet -- in a manner of speaking, of course....
"In the ecosystem of Pinterest we find the same organic arrangement of contrasting items, grouped poetically (rather than rationally) around a nebulous theme. The eclectic and exotic are prized; color and visual interest win the day. And the context for each item? Virtually nonexistant. The objects that made up a curiosity cabinet followed circuitous pathways... in the course of which they lost their original contexts, names, meanings. Objects that had once embodied human culture, like sculptures and coins, became mere ephemerata."
from "Cabinets of Curiosity: the Web as Wunderkammer" by Benjamin Breen, at the Appendix, a "journal of narrative & experimental history"
Breen points to further reading on this subject:
the internet as wunderkammer paper by Jessica Ezell
as well as his own earlier essay on 17th Century cabinets of curiosity at the blog Res Obscura
see also the collation of responses to the piece that point to other pieces and further vidence
^^^^^^^^^^
I argued a similar point -- collection as a decontext/recontext machine in the Toop piece in the Wire earlier this year:
"What emerges as a subtext of Exotica is the idea of the collection--a public or private archive of recordings, texts, images—as a decontextualisation machine. When a collection achieves a certain density and duration, the proximity of things of far-flung provenance allows for the remapping of cultural fields: strange connections cutting across time and space and genre become almost unavoidable. Ownership and location of cultural forms gets displaced from its proper setting. The Internet -- a vast collective collection, a non-space of absolute proximity between everything-- is just the nth-degree fruition of tendencies inherent to the archive."
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Wow, what a great piece on the afterlife of the Grateful Dead at the New Yorker... by Nick Paumgarten... and particularly interesting from a retromaniacal point of view because of its focus "on the Dead’s transformation, over time, from living thing to library", all the paradoxes entailed in "something intended to be spontaneous and ephemeral" becoming "a curated body of work"
In one of the best passages in this long, long feature, Paumgarten gets escorted by the Dead's official archivist Dave Lemieux to visit the Dead's tape vault, now in the custody of Rhino and just one zone within the vast cenotaph of sound maintained by Warner Bros up in Burbank:
“Are you ready to enter the holy portal?” [the Warner Bros archivist/guide] asked. We passed through a door into a vast climate-controlled hangar of shelves loaded with boxes containing the reel-to-reel multitrack recordings of studio sessions and concerts of hundreds of artists. There was a smell of vinegar—the disintegration of old magnetic audiotape. We wandered the aisles, tunnelling through music. Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Gene Autry, Yes, Coolio, Jean-Luc Ponty, Teddy Pendergrass, Winger. “Three-quarters of this place is unissued,” he said. He pointed to a rack of reel-to-reels: Otis Redding, live, 1967, never circulated. Another set of shelves contained hours and hours of Aretha Franklin songs that have never been released.
“Drool,” Lemieux said.
The Dead’s section was toward the back, surrounded by a chain-link fence. It was a vault within a vault—a Holy of Holies. The funny thing was that the Dead’s stash, sealed off from the rest, had long been by far the most porous of all. Every year, new old music gushes forth. “That’s what makes the Grateful Dead unique within this building,” the archivist said. “David is using it all.”
He opened a padlock. We stepped inside. There were two long aisles, with a line of bays on either side. There were fifty-four bays. Each bay was about four feet wide and nine shelves high, with as many as a hundred tapes per shelf. There were big reels and small ones, cassettes and digital audiotapes. The arrangement wasn’t strictly chronological. The system was arcane."
^^^^^^^^^^^^
C.f. the previous post on Lee Gamble's 'ardkore 'auntology using his old pirate radio tapes (or that Tape Crackers doc). c.f. also Ariel P's Worn Copy... howzabout this then on the oh-so-particular flava of Deadhead taper's recordings that then get copied and re-copied as they circulate among the community of fans...
"Even the compromised sound quality became a perverse part of the appeal. Each tape seemed to have its own particular note of decay, like the taste of the barnyard in a wine or a cheese. You came to love each one, as you might a three-legged dog....
"Each had a character and odor of its own, a terroir. Some combination of the era, the lineup, the set list, the sound system, the recording apparatus, its positioning in the hall, the recorder’s sonic bias, the chain of custody, and, yes, the actual performance would render up a sonic aura that could be unique. Jerry Garcia claimed to be a synesthete—he said that he perceived sound as color. Somehow, I and others came to perceive various recordings, if not as colors, as having distinct odors or auras."
Despite being very much not-a-Deadhead, that certainly resonated with me as a pirate tape nut... There's shows i've had for years recorded with dodgy signals onto poor quality album-advance tape, then heard again as a better quality recording that's someone's uploaded onto the internet.... and all the flavour, the aura, that I'd become attached to, it's gone...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
In the Retromania section on the Deadheads and the inherent paradoxes of fetishising, decades after the fact, dodgy recordings of something meant to be experienced purely in-the-now, I speculate that the tapers are in some way missing the very thing they're so obsessed with capturing... they are not really fully present, because preoccupied with recording levels, microphone placement.... that sense is strengthened by the bit in Paumgarten's piece where he meets the taper responsible for a particular concert recording [nicknamed the Fox after the Georgia venue in question] that he and his boarding school buddies were obsessed with in the Eighties...
"He sat throughout the set, holding a microphone in his hand. “I remember it being quite a pain. I can see the band and the house in my mind’s eye, from that spot,” he said. “The sound was so unique and wonderful. There was such wide stereo range on the P.A. It translated to the tape. You don’t usually get that on audience tapes. It’s Dan Healy who deserves the credit. Healy just went for it.” He was referring to the Dead’s soundman, and it occurred to me that his admiration for the Fox had more to do with the quality of sound than with the performance. Tapers listen differently."
Certainly the surviving members of the Dead do not understand the phenomenon at all, think the tapers and the tape-collectors (it's all on the Internet now, of course) have missed the point...
Phil Lesh, for instance, says, "recordings have always seemed to me, personally, to be kind of a fly in amber, which was contrary to the spirit of the Grateful Dead". Of the recent limited edition/sold out instantly box set of every single date on the Europe 72 tour (22 concerts, 73 discs, over 70 hours of music), Lesh says, "I have to admit, I have not listened to it"
Sensible fellow! He lived it, why would he want to relive it?
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Also Retromania-resonant is the section on all the tribute bands that the Dead have spawned. One of them, the Dark Star Orchestra, "perform specific concerts from the Grateful Dead's vast library of past gigs. They reproduce the set list, with the particular song arrangements and sonic configurations that the Dead employed that night... They have thousands of units of existing material to choose from, and they have yet to repeat one. D.S.O. does not, as some mistakenly assume, replicate the concerts note for note; instead, in the spirit of their progenitors, and in the interest of their own enjoyment, and of performative plausibility, they improvise, within the context of the era they are drawing from. It is a peculiar form of repertory."
In a delicious, vicious twist of irony, the D.S.O. finds itself effectively in competition with a post-Dead band formed by Lesh and Bob Weir, a battle that gets pretty nasty. Paumgarten drily, mordantly notes that the D.S.O.'s rhythm guitarist Rob Eaton "treats the band (or its remnants) that has given him a living, a body of work, a style, and some measure of transcendence as a kind of adversary. “If you want to get off, you come see us,” [Eaton] said. “We have a bigger repertoire than the Dead ever had, at any one time.” They have the whole career in rotation. “We’re showing the kids what it was like."
In one of the best passages in this long, long feature, Paumgarten gets escorted by the Dead's official archivist Dave Lemieux to visit the Dead's tape vault, now in the custody of Rhino and just one zone within the vast cenotaph of sound maintained by Warner Bros up in Burbank:
“Are you ready to enter the holy portal?” [the Warner Bros archivist/guide] asked. We passed through a door into a vast climate-controlled hangar of shelves loaded with boxes containing the reel-to-reel multitrack recordings of studio sessions and concerts of hundreds of artists. There was a smell of vinegar—the disintegration of old magnetic audiotape. We wandered the aisles, tunnelling through music. Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Gene Autry, Yes, Coolio, Jean-Luc Ponty, Teddy Pendergrass, Winger. “Three-quarters of this place is unissued,” he said. He pointed to a rack of reel-to-reels: Otis Redding, live, 1967, never circulated. Another set of shelves contained hours and hours of Aretha Franklin songs that have never been released.
“Drool,” Lemieux said.
The Dead’s section was toward the back, surrounded by a chain-link fence. It was a vault within a vault—a Holy of Holies. The funny thing was that the Dead’s stash, sealed off from the rest, had long been by far the most porous of all. Every year, new old music gushes forth. “That’s what makes the Grateful Dead unique within this building,” the archivist said. “David is using it all.”
He opened a padlock. We stepped inside. There were two long aisles, with a line of bays on either side. There were fifty-four bays. Each bay was about four feet wide and nine shelves high, with as many as a hundred tapes per shelf. There were big reels and small ones, cassettes and digital audiotapes. The arrangement wasn’t strictly chronological. The system was arcane."
^^^^^^^^^^^^
C.f. the previous post on Lee Gamble's 'ardkore 'auntology using his old pirate radio tapes (or that Tape Crackers doc). c.f. also Ariel P's Worn Copy... howzabout this then on the oh-so-particular flava of Deadhead taper's recordings that then get copied and re-copied as they circulate among the community of fans...
"Even the compromised sound quality became a perverse part of the appeal. Each tape seemed to have its own particular note of decay, like the taste of the barnyard in a wine or a cheese. You came to love each one, as you might a three-legged dog....
"Each had a character and odor of its own, a terroir. Some combination of the era, the lineup, the set list, the sound system, the recording apparatus, its positioning in the hall, the recorder’s sonic bias, the chain of custody, and, yes, the actual performance would render up a sonic aura that could be unique. Jerry Garcia claimed to be a synesthete—he said that he perceived sound as color. Somehow, I and others came to perceive various recordings, if not as colors, as having distinct odors or auras."
Despite being very much not-a-Deadhead, that certainly resonated with me as a pirate tape nut... There's shows i've had for years recorded with dodgy signals onto poor quality album-advance tape, then heard again as a better quality recording that's someone's uploaded onto the internet.... and all the flavour, the aura, that I'd become attached to, it's gone...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
In the Retromania section on the Deadheads and the inherent paradoxes of fetishising, decades after the fact, dodgy recordings of something meant to be experienced purely in-the-now, I speculate that the tapers are in some way missing the very thing they're so obsessed with capturing... they are not really fully present, because preoccupied with recording levels, microphone placement.... that sense is strengthened by the bit in Paumgarten's piece where he meets the taper responsible for a particular concert recording [nicknamed the Fox after the Georgia venue in question] that he and his boarding school buddies were obsessed with in the Eighties...
"He sat throughout the set, holding a microphone in his hand. “I remember it being quite a pain. I can see the band and the house in my mind’s eye, from that spot,” he said. “The sound was so unique and wonderful. There was such wide stereo range on the P.A. It translated to the tape. You don’t usually get that on audience tapes. It’s Dan Healy who deserves the credit. Healy just went for it.” He was referring to the Dead’s soundman, and it occurred to me that his admiration for the Fox had more to do with the quality of sound than with the performance. Tapers listen differently."
Certainly the surviving members of the Dead do not understand the phenomenon at all, think the tapers and the tape-collectors (it's all on the Internet now, of course) have missed the point...
Phil Lesh, for instance, says, "recordings have always seemed to me, personally, to be kind of a fly in amber, which was contrary to the spirit of the Grateful Dead". Of the recent limited edition/sold out instantly box set of every single date on the Europe 72 tour (22 concerts, 73 discs, over 70 hours of music), Lesh says, "I have to admit, I have not listened to it"
Sensible fellow! He lived it, why would he want to relive it?
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Also Retromania-resonant is the section on all the tribute bands that the Dead have spawned. One of them, the Dark Star Orchestra, "perform specific concerts from the Grateful Dead's vast library of past gigs. They reproduce the set list, with the particular song arrangements and sonic configurations that the Dead employed that night... They have thousands of units of existing material to choose from, and they have yet to repeat one. D.S.O. does not, as some mistakenly assume, replicate the concerts note for note; instead, in the spirit of their progenitors, and in the interest of their own enjoyment, and of performative plausibility, they improvise, within the context of the era they are drawing from. It is a peculiar form of repertory."
In a delicious, vicious twist of irony, the D.S.O. finds itself effectively in competition with a post-Dead band formed by Lesh and Bob Weir, a battle that gets pretty nasty. Paumgarten drily, mordantly notes that the D.S.O.'s rhythm guitarist Rob Eaton "treats the band (or its remnants) that has given him a living, a body of work, a style, and some measure of transcendence as a kind of adversary. “If you want to get off, you come see us,” [Eaton] said. “We have a bigger repertoire than the Dead ever had, at any one time.” They have the whole career in rotation. “We’re showing the kids what it was like."
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
archive fever, part 1798
(via Wired)
"The origins of the online music revolution are back, thanks to internet archivist extraordinaire Jason Scott. Scott, who works for the internet preservation group Archive.org, has resurrected the Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA as the kids called it back in 1992, when they were uploading songs via Gopher....
"the IUMA’s goal was to create an online music archive for unsigned musicians and bands. The idea was simple: Bands uploaded files and sent them out to fans over Usenet or e-mail. ...
"The IUMA site eventually came to host thousands of bands and hundreds of thousands of songs, many in MP2 and other long-since-abandoned audio formats. Like so many other sites of that era, IUMA was eventually sold off during the dot-com boom years to a series of clueless owners who let the site die a slow death of neglect until it was shut down completely in 2006.... Fortunately John Gilmore — perhaps best known for helping to start the Electronic Frontier Foundation — had the foresight to grab a copy of the site....
"Now Scott has used Gilmore’s tape archives to resurrect the IUMA site.... ” The rescued archive doesn’t have everything that ever appeared on IUMA, but it does resurrect some 25,000 bands and artists and over 680,000 tracks of music. That’s 243 days worth of music for those of you more accustomed to iTunes than IUMA"
who on earth has the time to trawl through this tranche?
as with private press stuff, can't help thinking that anyone who couldn't get signed in the 90s, to one or other of the myriad small-scale, niche-market oriented labels in existence.... perhaps they were deservedly unknown...
but i suppose it's Good that It Was All Documented, for the sake of future anthropologists / sociologists / historians of amateur music production...
intro to the reclamation project from that Jason Scott dude
(via Wired)
"The origins of the online music revolution are back, thanks to internet archivist extraordinaire Jason Scott. Scott, who works for the internet preservation group Archive.org, has resurrected the Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA as the kids called it back in 1992, when they were uploading songs via Gopher....
"the IUMA’s goal was to create an online music archive for unsigned musicians and bands. The idea was simple: Bands uploaded files and sent them out to fans over Usenet or e-mail. ...
"The IUMA site eventually came to host thousands of bands and hundreds of thousands of songs, many in MP2 and other long-since-abandoned audio formats. Like so many other sites of that era, IUMA was eventually sold off during the dot-com boom years to a series of clueless owners who let the site die a slow death of neglect until it was shut down completely in 2006.... Fortunately John Gilmore — perhaps best known for helping to start the Electronic Frontier Foundation — had the foresight to grab a copy of the site....
"Now Scott has used Gilmore’s tape archives to resurrect the IUMA site.... ” The rescued archive doesn’t have everything that ever appeared on IUMA, but it does resurrect some 25,000 bands and artists and over 680,000 tracks of music. That’s 243 days worth of music for those of you more accustomed to iTunes than IUMA"
who on earth has the time to trawl through this tranche?
as with private press stuff, can't help thinking that anyone who couldn't get signed in the 90s, to one or other of the myriad small-scale, niche-market oriented labels in existence.... perhaps they were deservedly unknown...
but i suppose it's Good that It Was All Documented, for the sake of future anthropologists / sociologists / historians of amateur music production...
intro to the reclamation project from that Jason Scott dude
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
sacre bleu ! / sacrilege?
Radiophonic Workshop to be reopened
"Yesterday it was announced the renamed New Radiophonic Workshop will compose fresh work as one of the highlights of The Space, a new freely-available digital arts service. Part of the London 2012 Festival, The Space will offer a platform for contemporary artists as well as historically important archive film, accessed on mobile and tablet devices and Freeview. The New Radiophonic Workshop (NRW) will be led by Matthew Herbert, the electronic composer who has collaborated with Björk and been nominated for an Ivor Novello award for his soundtrack work"
Matt H is great, but can this really be a good idea?
The Space are the outfit responsible for the archive-febrile idea of turning John Peel's home office and record collection into a virtual museum -- you can look but not listen to the records
(at Quietus David Stubbs reviews the discs under 'A' while Everett True reviews the discs under 'C' )
(sweet that Peelie clung onto so many albums by Camel)
they also have some Peel shows, but not many
meanwhile at Pitchfork, Eric Harvey has a think about what the Peel collection and Dilla's collection mean in this age of music as dematerialised data
Radiophonic Workshop to be reopened
"Yesterday it was announced the renamed New Radiophonic Workshop will compose fresh work as one of the highlights of The Space, a new freely-available digital arts service. Part of the London 2012 Festival, The Space will offer a platform for contemporary artists as well as historically important archive film, accessed on mobile and tablet devices and Freeview. The New Radiophonic Workshop (NRW) will be led by Matthew Herbert, the electronic composer who has collaborated with Björk and been nominated for an Ivor Novello award for his soundtrack work"
Matt H is great, but can this really be a good idea?
The Space are the outfit responsible for the archive-febrile idea of turning John Peel's home office and record collection into a virtual museum -- you can look but not listen to the records
(at Quietus David Stubbs reviews the discs under 'A' while Everett True reviews the discs under 'C' )
(sweet that Peelie clung onto so many albums by Camel)
they also have some Peel shows, but not many
meanwhile at Pitchfork, Eric Harvey has a think about what the Peel collection and Dilla's collection mean in this age of music as dematerialised data
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