Like the shooting techniques that discussed in Baron’s The Archive Effect, Hardy also brings the recording technology that helps uncover the history that may be forgotten long ago. Hardy makes a repeated mention of “audio art” that develops from “shattered radio, phonograph record, audiocassette, and CD into an expanding option of new media”. These techniques skills disseminated for decades have greatly affected the development of oral history. But after I finish listening to the “Regan speaks for himself”, I start to doubt whether there is a gap between the appropriated audio track and research of the real history. In this track, obvious repetition and pauses are appropriated, which makes me doubt whether the producer of this audio is trying to stress something on purpose. The appropriated part will definitely impacts on people’s different understanding of this history. In the words under the audio track, it says that this audio is made of two versions from different time period of Regan. This kind of mixture definitely helps present one possible understanding of history in that period, but how can I tell whether the “one possible understanding” is getting closer to the real history? What if it is made out of some reasons that will distort the true story? I think I’d prefer to hear the original versions of each audio track, which make me feel more persuasive.

I agree with Hardy argument that “Audio art and oral history have a natural affinity. Storytelling and reminiscence, as we oral historians repeatedly intone, are by their nature aural forms” (58). In the “This Car to the Ballpark”, it seems that extra sound effect of melodies is embedded into the audio track, which offers the listeners to look into the perception of aesthetic in terms of audio art. For those who barely have any history knowledge, the audio art sounds fascinating and attracting. But in the perspective of history research, I still believe that it may somewhat affect our interpretation to the reality when we are trying to get a glimpse back into the history.

Apart from the consideration for authentic and professional research, I actually like the idea of preserving the history orally. Hardy mentions that “Oral history interviews are performative, and each person’s vocalizations-language, accent, intonation, sonority, cadence, tonality, vocabulary-the whole complex symphony of verbal expression”. It strikes me that there is a crossing point of art and history. Imaging people acting themselves in an audio arena and murmuring the old stories in a mysterious and personal way, by which the invisible memory is transformed to the material that can be preserved ever since.

For me, listening to Dan Warren’s Son of Strelka, Son of God was highly enjoyable. I’ve read some of Barack Obama’s memoir writing before, so, while listening I tried to pick out phrases and sentences that I recognized from that reading. I thought that the ways that Warren combined these phrases to create an epic story (at least in the first 5 tracks) of Strelka’s birth and the rise and fall of a civilization was incredibly creative and sounded convincing. If it wasn’t for the short description of Warren’s project, I might have wondered whether President Obama ever wrote a biblical-style fiction story that is just now being released.

Why did I find it so convincing? Partly because the story seemed to build logically, but mostly because the audio tracks were flawlessly edited (or at least they were flawless to my untrained ears). I couldn’t figure out where the phrases separated from one another. I couldn’t tell where Obama’s words ended and Warren’s intervention began—other than the background music, of course. This perception was in sharp contrast to the other audio clips that we listened to: In Kahn’s Reagan Speaks for Himself, there are many obvious interventions where Reagan repeats phrases with the same intonation and background noise, indicating a replicated audio cycle; Hardy’s various audio projects embed sound effects and audio clips that remind the listener that Hardy is working with appropriated audio; but Son of Strelka, Son of God is not obviously appropriated if we consider the audio evidence alone.

This prompted me, once again, to think about archival fabrication. I keep circling around questions of authenticity, and for audio projects, I wonder: is it easier to create and disseminate fabricated audio?

The question is related to an anxiety described by Baron that is derived from the fear that advancing technology will allow easier fabrication. Baron uses Forest Gump’s appropriation of archival footage and the term “seamlessness” to illustrate this anxiety:

This notion of ‘seamlessness’ […] suggests that it is the fear that the ‘seam’—which marks the boundary between the found actuality elements and fictional elements of the image—will not be recognized that is ultimately most worrisome, particularly in relation to viewers with insufficient extratextual or historical knowledge of the imaged events (Baron, 59).

I hear this “seamlessness” in Son of Strelka, Son of God. What is worrisome is not the text itself—the text is clearly fictitious—but that the “seamlessness” exhibits the possibility of audio projects to trick the viewer into belief. Especially since listening to audio provides less opportunities to notice inconsistencies. In a video there are many clues that allow us to recognize the piece as fabricated: video editing, sound editing, visual extratextual knowledge, and auditory extratextual knowledge. In audio, however there is only sound editing and auditory extratextual knowledge. If there is no evidence of choppy editing and no explicit audio that runs contrary to extratextual knowledge, then a fabricated audio piece could easily be accepted as legitimate audio.

This…is a bit paranoid. But my paranoia is fed by Hardy’s abstract definition of aural histories’ effects on the listener. If aural histories “speak to us in more mysterious and personal ways” (Hardy, 153) then how will we recognize when they are speaking to us falsely? I think that if a scholar who has explored aural histories for years cannot articulate their effects on us, then we should be wary of deception.

Charles Hardy’s use of quadraphonic audio to create pieces of “audio ephemera” such as “This Car to the Ballpark” are not just aural artwork, but soundscapes. The movement of a train across the four speakers and the layering of sounds such as rain and crickets behind singing and William Robison speaking create the illusion of various levels of proximity to the listener. The (abstract, nonmaterial) train appears to travel southwest to northeast as the whistling sound that emanates from it moves from one speaker to another (while in fact, the original audio is flat). In this way, the audio-scape is made three-dimensional through form.

Hardy creates a similar affect when he pairs a woman’s narration with the jangle of a name tag and the pitter-patter of dog paws in “Virgins.” The narrator tells about meeting a man at the same time the sound of his voice emerges, giving the listener both the voice of recollection and the present-tense audio of the plot. In this way, the piece of audio art conveys two temporalities at once. While not as synesthetic as the “movement” in quadraphonic audio tracks, this technique constructs a sort of travel that’s imagined.

This clear manipulation of “space” and “time” seems to be an integral element in aural art making, unlike the more historical audio pieces that Hardy’s career focuses on. However, the presence of these spatial and temporal illusions in Mordecai Mordant’s Audio Ephemera reminds a listener that these aural devices are available to historians and journalists too. While historians typically attend to the structure of audio with a fidelity to “fact,” these topographical and temporal manipulations are possible in the development of those truthful narratives too. In fact, I can recall Ira Glass of This American Life explaining how radio newscasts will switch from one journalist to another to give the illusion that the newscaster delivering a specific story is somehow closer to the real action. This illusion of temporality and geography seems to be one of the elements that Hardy celebrates through his artwork—one of the “performative elements” that he hopes will keep historians and documentarians interested in the form of audio and its true material, the sounds themselves (159).

While I’m wary of a historian getting too exuberant about these techniques and can envision a misguided attempt to create propaganda, I agree that developing these technical skills will make historians better analysts of audio and its aural devices. A strong understanding of the devices available to audio recorders and mixers enables a historian to investigate the integrity of any produced piece of oral history. In this way, Charles Hardy has the expertise to both create and analyze complex sound landscapes, but also to fabricate audio history, if he should so choose.

However, it feels unfair to evaluate Hardy’s work in these ethics. Mordecai Mordant’s Audio Ephemera is a nostalgic celebration of sounds that are easily overlooked and lost. The presence of the whistling train or William Robinson’s muffled mumbling—and the ability to play each again and again—is the point in and of itself. They’re ephemera in an ephemeral medium—the sections that would be edited out for the very purpose of “sticking to the facts” or “point.” Ironically, maybe it’s the art, which uses these manipulative techniques to map space and sound, that creates the “truer” history—one that presents the sounds alone rather than the meaning that language fashions those sounds into.

To create this composite digital image, which I’ve crudely dubbed “Haunted Maternity Ward,” I first over-enhanced the contrast of a digital photograph of a new mother, baby, and sister in a maternity ward. Then, I cut and pasted in clips of three children at the Bourke Street Baby Clinic’s Alice Rawson School for Mothers and a dog with a backpack from two additional digital images. Using the spot-healing tool, I blurred the edges of the various layers to create a merging effect between the background image (the maternity ward photo) and the four clips, which created somewhat of a halo around each pasted in child and the dog. The dog fragment stands out for its more yellow pigment, a quality that most likely reflects the original photo paper, as well as its position in the far right.

One question in particular arose for me after considering the product of this Photoshopping process: Have I ruined all possibility for this composite image (and its original three images) to provide any historical evidence? Is it possible for “Haunted Maternity Ward” to carry any authority that the original archival photographs do? Baron argues, about film and audio, that “when temporal and intentional disparity are uncertain, the viewer is faced with a constant struggle around how much authority to give the indexical recording. This struggle is crucial to our understanding of history, because it both depends upon and determines what we give the status of archival—and, thus, historical evidence” (30). Surely such as problem could apply to still images too. If someone gazes as “Haunted Maternity Ward” and cannot locate the original contexts (times and places, and the narratives that belong to them), they may not give any part of the original photographs authority as historical evidence. The yellow pigment of the dog alone may cause a viewer to distrust the cohesion or unity of the three original photographs. Thus, the process of cutting up the digital material may also have cut up any status of the original three images as “archival.”

The inspiration of this collage comes from a book of world’s greatest oil paintings I read before. On the left of the top is the original version of The Scream. Later I find some interesting pictures that derive from The Scream and make them into a composite image. I’ve tried to extract the character who’s screaming from each picture and paste them all onto the original one, but it turns out to be a little bit disordered and weird. So I just put them into a sequence and see what I can get from this collage.

This painting, which is part of a series of paintings done by Munch, has always been interpreted as a symbol of human emotion in relation to expressing despair, anxiety and agony in various ways. The distortion of the figure and color can be easily spotted in the top left picture which is originally a counterfeit. In the second row and third row, things become much different. I think these interesting pictures have already been more or less photoshoped by someone else. By viewing them, I have a feeling that the consolidated interpretation of desperate human emotion is falling apart and something of postmodernism can be mixed into the understanding as well. Like, the first and the third in the second row are mocking politics to some extent; the cute one, at least I think so, in the middle seems like a droll conversation between two great powers in a certain field. Pictures in the third row are much more diverse in the colors and figures. They offer a subtle blend of cartoon, Pop art and popular Emoji with the famous painting.

Baron restates Derrida’s argument in her book that “archives are structured according to the logics of power that determine which objects are preserved stored, and revered and which are excluded, thereby creating the past rather than simply preserving it”. It reminds me that apart from the impressive symbolization of human surviving, The Scream also represent a power of art that people tend to respect for the most part, but there are still many who’d love to make something new out of it. I think this process is in accord with the archive effect in terms of reforming the archival document “as an experience of reception rather than an indication of official sanction or storage location”. Now I find myself more affected by this collage in an interesting way of being attracted and fascinated rather than the “feeling of loss”.

This photoshopped image is not unique. If you type “photoshopped moon landing” into any search engine, you will get plenty of results that are either totally absurd or slightly absurd. My image falls into the first category. The background is an old photograph from the Apollo 17 moon landing—the last earthling visit to the moon. The absurd intervention is obvious. I’ve placed a UFO in front of the camera, covered in moon rock and dirt, as if it was dug up and is now part of an archaeological expedition.

I made the archaeological dig site even more absurd by placing artifacts (and the skeleton of…a moon creature perhaps?) all around the UFO and the astronaut’s equipment. The artifacts are from a variety of civilizations from Earth’s past: Roman coins, a pewter spoon found in a shipwreck off Florida’s coast, an Egyptian canopic jar, arrowheads found in Vermont (dating back to 5,000 BC!), and cuneiform writing from Mesopotamia. The image (if taken completely out of context with no knowledge of photoshop, the moon, or the various civilizations) depicts the discovery of an ancient civilization that existed on the moon long ago, and was discovered by astronauts in 1972. And what a mystery! How did these moon people live without oxygen? What did they do in their spare time? Is the sea elephant their friend, their food, or one of the great moon people?

Yes, ridiculous, all of it. But it was so fun and so easy to accomplish that I couldn’t resist, and I’m not the only one. The archival images of moon landings have been appropriated over and over again, spliced with digital images from the internet. The archive effect is obvious—the intention of the image is no longer to preserve a historical record, but to act as an absurd joke.

Baron, in distinguishing the archive effect from the digital archive effect, emphasizes the “opportunities” now available to users of technology that were “not available before” (The Archive Effect, 151). In the case of the photoshopped moon landing images, photoshop and the internet search engine work with human intention to create absurdity. The digital images I found online were found through searches of “ancient artifacts”, “Egyptian artifacts”, and “archaeological artifacts”. These artifacts are photographed and then digitized in an effort to preserve historical record, but the search engine (and Google’s image search) makes it simple to subvert this intention and use the artifacts for whatever purpose the internet user intends.

What my appropriate image (and similar images made by others) shows is the ease with which an archive’s images can be repurposed. Much like The Tailenders, this photograph and others like it, “point to the fact that archives and the indexical traces they preserve often escape the control of the archons” (Baron, 114). This fact is more pronounced in the digital archive because of the new technologies available on the internet. Those who post images, text, and videos online allow users not only to view their content, but also to appropriate their content and subvert their control over the website’s “archive”.

The image that I’ve created and the images that others have created are obviously photoshopped and cannot be taken seriously. Even if a photoshopped image appears “real” it would have to be corroborated by other sources and materials to be authenticated. To what extent do material archives aid in the authentication of the digital archive? If we imagined a totally digital world, is it possible to authenticate an image when appropriation is so easy and there are no outside sources to corroborate those images?