https://theartofappropriation.wordpress.com/

Here is the link to my final project

lewisgeorgefeuer.info/margies-0/

click to navigate

Post Illa Verba: https://postillaverba.wordpress.com/

My final project attempts to recontextualize marginalia by transposing them (via Photoshop) onto other, unrelated texts. Part I juxtaposes commentary on William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience with a mathematical treatise on analytical methods. Part III juxtaposes the notes from a student’s copy of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room with pages from Woolf’s collected letters, specifically the letters written immediately prior to her suicide. (Part II, when it is completed, is going to be a juxtaposition of a graduate student’s — not my — notes on a critical essay transposed onto a piece of poetry.)

I’m concerned here with the conditions of display and with the issue of context: should I tell the stories? Should I cite the source text? Part III stands better alone; Part I doesn’t.

Some brief larger thoughts this is intended to raise:
1. Do marginalia have to be authentic to carry some sort of affective value? The Photoshopping is sometimes, unfortunately, still clear — how does this affect the way it is noticed?
2. Marginalia as “co-reading”: how aware are we of the effects of marginalia/commentary on our reading of a text? Does this change if it is our own vs. others’? Does the quality of the marginalia change that? Does having our attention drawn to it change that?
3. Marginalia as anything other than individual, temporary, & intentional — i.e. the scholar’s research into their subject’s personal library, the annoyance at other people’s notes in a used/course book — are a function of the current market for books: cheap, often resold/circulated, paper texts.

This project features archival video and audio footage of chimpanzees performing in a 1950’s circus act. The original video clip is from the 1950’s, produced by Castle Films and was 8 minutes and 24 seconds long. I went in and chose those parts of the footage I wanted to use, and sliced and rearranged them so my final product is just under four minutes long.

Incorporated throughout this video are audio clips from multiple interviews of primatologist Jane Goodall, as well as interviews of other animal rights activists and philosophers including Charles Magel, Wayne Pacelle, and Peter Singer. The audio clips used date from the 1970’s through the present. The video footage has been fragmented and video clips have been moved out of order, slowed down, or sped up at various points for desired effect. The audio clips used seek to work in ironic juxtaposition with the original video content, and raise questions regarding “speciesism,” keeping wild animals in captivity, and the use of such animals for human entertainment and profit.

The ultimate goal of this project is to explore the historic use and presentation of wild animals in entertainment while causing viewers to reflect upon the exploitation of non-human animal species for human profit and entertainment.

I felt that the project as I conceived it was slightly overambitious for a novice with this software. There were many other clips I wanted to include, and an entire extra segment strictly exploring the use of elephants in the circus that I may very well add as a second “chapter.”

Here’s a link to an in-progress draft of my project. My goals are to create an experience similar to  Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill: an interactive database narrative that promotes interactivity and the awareness of several choices that the user could make (Baron, 160).

In my project, I wanted to allow the user as much choice as possible when exploring a single archival document: a 1972 Mcdonald’s employee training video. When it wasn’t possible to provide choice, I tried to reveal my process in exploring the video.

When navigating the project, click on the blue links to either follow my exploration, watch the whole video, watch Mcdonald’s commercials from the 1970s, or go see my description of how the exploration was made so that you could, possibly, create your own exploration.

Through this project, I hope to examine the limitations of choice and the various ways that an archival video can be experienced when it is dissected and examined subjectively.

Note: There are a lot of bugs. I haven’t yet figured out how to link directly to internet sources—these failed links are observed by the links highlighted red. Also, some links don’t connect to the correct story element, leading the user to a blank page that says: “click here to edit”. If you hit a dead end you can click on the curved arrow in the left hand corner to backtrack. Also, most screens have a “go back to intro” option (but the link may not always work).

This clip is a first draft of my final project audio piece. Using an interview between Joe Biden and Katie Couric and making the parts that appear as silent in this clip resonate as a destructed file, I am attempting to display how partially compromised archives can relay a much different narrative than the original form.

On page 24 of Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars, she writes, “One historical-existential trace has been hunted, captured, guarded, and preserved in aversion to waste by an avid collector, then shut carefully away, outside an economy of use, inaccessible to touch. Now it is re-animated, re-collected (recollected) through an encounter with the mind of a curious reader, a researcher, an antiquarian, a bibliomaniac, a sub sub librarian, a poet.”

The thing that really struck me about this passage, and from then on its representation in Howe’s works, are the ideas of re-animation and re-collection, or recollection. While Howe may be positing them as things that occur simultaneously when archives are encountered by curious readers, it seems to me as though re-animation and recollection are working in two very different ways in her pieces. Though not dealing here with the disembodied voices of the oral histories we’ve studied, the idea of the disembodiment of the written works Howe presents is brought forth in her visual representation of the archived material accompanied by her comments on the person who inscribed them—his/her handwriting, family, love-lost, etc. In this way, Howe conjures the archive affect in viewers/readers who are confronted with a piece in original form, contextualized in the life of a person since-past and thus separated from his/her intimate writings. This, I believe is the recollection side of handling/analyzing/presenting archives.

The reanimation, then, I believe arises when Howe takes her experience of the archives beyond their affect and into embodiment. Perhaps the best example of this comes in the beginning of This That when she not only presents the “furiously calm” (13) words of Sarah Edwards following the death of Jonathan Edwards, but embodies them, confronts, and struggles with them as she makes sense of the death of her own husband. In a much more subtle form of reanimating archives, Howe writes on page 31 of Spontaneous Particulars, “Running over affinities and relations, as was her practice, Dickinson could discover on the previous STI page of her Lexicon Companion the definition for STICH pronounced STICH.” Here, Howe takes on the practices of Dickinson, reanimating something she may likely have done in order to think through and puzzle together Dickinson’s experiences with some of her expressions. Another instance of this reanimation in Howe’s work arises in her conversation of Henry James. He says, “All our employment of constituted sounds, syllables, sentences, comes back to the way we say a thing, and it is very largely by saying, all the while, that we live and play our parts.” To this, Howe responds by questioning how to then pronounce James’ character “Theale” and what to make of the pronunciation. Here, Howe again seems to take on James’ mind, acting out the possibilities of what he may have considered in choosing to include the grapheme, “h.” Like the previous examples, Howe uses the embodiment of the possible techniques of the author of the archival material, coupled with his/her thoughts, in order to make sense of her own question.

The reanimation of archives, as Howe exhibits in these varying ways, seems to exemplify the words she quotes of Wallace Stevens speaking about W.C. Williams, for “whom writing is the grinding of a glass, the polishing of a lens by means of which he hopes to be able to see clearly” (Spontaneous Particulars, 24). In recollecting archives, Howe exhibits how we feel the past in this action, perhaps cultivate an emotional connection to it and its loss. In the embodiment of reanimating archives, though, we make sense of it in our own lives—we grind the glass, take on words and feelings that are not our own, in hopes of being able to see clearly.