Looking at the transcript of “The Car to the Ballpark” is very different from the experience of listening to the audio clip. One thing that sets them apart is “temporal disparity”, a definition raised by Baron in her book The Archive Effect, in which she gives her readers a further explanation of it, “the perception by the viewer of an appropriation film of a “then” and a “now” generated within a single text.” (18) When I read the transcript of “The Car to the Ballpark”, I can clearly find out the time each moment of his audio work is recorded and I know that what he is doing is to arrange these different moments together. But listening to the audio work, it is rather hard to detect the time when the voice of a character speaks out his or her story. To put it more simple, we cannot easily find out the time the human voice is recorded since it is something that exists from past to the present. How can one definitely say that this particular voice is from a person who is dead or this voice is from a person who lives centuries ago? It seems that sometimes there is the problem of conveying the message of time by the audio clips. I try to think about some examples of voices that could be less susceptible to this suspicion. Suddenly it strikes me that one peculiar circumstance of human voice seems to be the most convincing of “temporal disparity”. As it has been estimated that a great number of languages of ethnic minority have been lost with time, I think listening to the recording of a lost language is more likely to give us the feeling of “temporal disparity”. One thing that also raises my attention in listening to “The Car to the Ballpark” is that I have little knowledge of those performers in the audio appropriation work. If they are the deceased celebrities, that will be another case. Listening to the voice of a deceased celebrity will produce the kind of “temporal disparity” that Baron says in her book because we know a lot about this person and we know that we are now listening to the voice of a dead person.

One thing I am concerned about audio appropriation works is that the performers whom we listen to are not necessarily to be several persons. I mean sometimes, a person can imitate different voices of different persons, say a young woman, a child, a mid-aged man, a senior man. This is not rare today. How can the listeners make sure that what they are listening are the voices of different persons instead of only one person performing for arousing the interests of the audience? This is just some speculation for the audio appropriation works. But I do think that voice can be misleading sometimes and can be fake sometimes. What I was also thinking about is the definition of “archive effect” in Baron’s book, in which she points out that “two constitutive experiences that make up the archive effect are a sense of ‘temporal disparity’ and ‘intentional disparity’ between different sounds and/or images within the same film.” (11-12) Is there a connection between “archive effect” and “archivalness”? Everything that is repurposed in an appropriation film has its archivalness or not? How could we decide the things that are appropriated in a film are “archival”? The reason for me to think about these questions is that I see too many things are being appropriated nowadays. I am just wondering do those things that have been repurposed in an appropriation film really have some value in itself. How should we define that an appropriation film speaks to the audience in a larger human condition context? Because “The Car to the Ballpark” seems to mean something like concerning the human condition, but how could we evaluate its goal in conveying such a message? Does it really do its job in showing its concern for the conditions of human beings? What I have listened in the audio work is just that two women and a man have been through some difficulties in their lives and suddenly they say that things have been improved and this is a “star-lit world”. I can’t see why things have been improved in their situation. I have no idea how their conditions have been transformed and how it happens to them. It seems rather a sudden transition to me to move from the former miserable human condition to the better present one. I just don’t know how these three characters can represent the mass of the people to say something about human conditions.

Another question arouses my interest in listening to the audio appropriation works is the way people use or misuse the original archival documents. Warren’s work “Son of Strelka, Son of God” is a good example to say something on this. His appropriation reminds me of Baron’s words in the introduction in her book. I think that in his work, what attracts the listeners more is not the content of the video clip but the quality of the voice of Obama. Talking on the “problem of the indexical archival document”, she says that “the unruliness of archival objects became even more pronounced with the emergence of archives collecting indexical audiovisual documents such as photographs, films, videos, and sound recordings…there are always too many documents and too many possible ways of reading them.” (3) What I want to say is that the unruliness of the audiovisual documents also lies in the big possibilities of being misused to change history. As Warren just does something fun with President Obama’s self-read autobiography, changing his original version to some religious texts, there are also someone else doing something really bad to change what history was like. If a person is capable enough to grasp whatever he or she needs to appropriate a new version of a historical document, there exists no such thing as real historical document. Since the technology advances so fast, smart people can do everything they want with the archival documents. The ethical problems accompanying this issue becomes more and more urgent. Those who want to take advantage of people’s desire to fill in the gap of history can design something fake to attract people’s attention and make their fortune by that business. It is hard for people to believe in the true value of a picture nowadays as Photoshop is so popular and easy to learn. Every time a person sees a picture, he or she will probably ask the question: is it a real one or an edited version? Those who have acquired much knowledge of the editing tools, such as Adobe Premiere, can take control of the historical figure, who will speak what the editor wants him to speak. Also if the person controls the sound wave of a particular person, he or she can definitely produce the very voice of this person. As we can let Nixson speak with Forrest Gump in the film, we can also let other historical figures to do something he or she never did before. If this is case, how can we detect historical truth in the archives? How can we evaluate the reality in our own archives for the future generation?