I wanted to play around with Motif #1, which is apparently the “most often-painted building in America,” or at least often claimed to be. I probably would have given up on this in a larger project after having trouble finding a public domain / CC-licensed photograph of it, but I settled for one a bit too small for my liking (600×800.)

The reason this building is painted so much is due — in addition to its location, good lighting, and the fact that it’s in Rockport which has often boasted artist’s colonies — to the idea that it’s an almost archetypal New England fishing shack, down to the color. This attempt to evoke the past through a sort of classical aesthetics made me want to reread Prelinger, especially his note about how “remixing is estrangement […] and yet the raw material remains familiar and recognizable. It’s at once a subversive and reassuring process.” My sort of generic idea was just to recolor or decolorize the shed (which was relatively easy, though the reflection not so much), but I wanted to play with Photoshop a little more and also defamiliarize the Motif a little more severely, so I’ll show a few more in addition to that.

We could think of this one in relation to Barron’s discussion of the idea of colorizing WW2 film. Colored film — if “authentic” — feels closer to our lived experience, while artificially coloring that film would be a betrayal of the material’s documentary/evidentiary authority, even though color film from the era exists and it would only bring us closer to representing what life was actually like, since most of us experience reality in color. If Motif No. 1 is famous, and famously red, what does stripping that color do? Presenting a black-and-white image of this would be boring,  but does the contrast here have an effect? I’m not sure. I do find it aesthetically pleasing.

Similar playing with the aesthetic “striking red building” trope, although I couldn’t fix the water/reflection in this one. I almost want the effect here to be experiencing this photo as a digital artifact — the building itself was so clearly wiped out (painted over?) and replaced with an unnatural, intuitively recognizable-as-digital cherry red, or maybe I should say #FF0000. Here the digital format of the experience is a disruption of expectations.

I played around more with basic Photoshopping here — including replacing the building with an image  of the Photoshop “transparency layer” gray-and-white checkboxes, which got me thinking about signaling and framing a piece of material vs. the actual material itself (in this case, the checkboxes signaling transparency more effectively, at least in our current digital era, than actually leaving it transparent could have been.) The image I’d planned to present had thin strips of each of these “effects,” almost a collage of each of those layers, and the overall result was jarring; it might have veered too much into sheer glitch aesthetic, though, and more importantly that’s the only image that seems to have been messed up somehow when I saved (I could pull another copy from the original .psd, because you have to always always always save your .psd file, but I think I like the ones I’m presenting here more.)

I then had the idea of completely reworking the “Motif”: replacing it (since erasing it would be beyond my Photoshop skills entirely) with another building, preferably one that signaled modernity in the way that this signals “classic New England.” So I searched for a few entirely unscientifically conducted surveys on what the most-photographed building in the U.S. was, and the answer seemed to be, of course, the Guggenheim in NYC:

Ceci n’est pas une motif. (I could have gone with something iconic, the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Opera House, something very modern and very recognizable, but I wanted something American; I was considering that one building on the MIT campus, please mentally insert whichever weird MIT building pops into your head first, but maybe that would have been too parochial; this was a good one for the shape of the building and provides exactly the visual discongruity I wanted, although there’s the obvious concern about deciding that an art museum’s exterior is the “most photographed” building in the U.S. based on geotagging.)

Some fun facts to leave you thinking about authenticity, replicating a “real” material object through visual imagery (of whatever medium), and the artifice sometimes involved with that: this historical building was destroyed entirely in the Blizzard of ’78 and they rebuilt it. My next step working along these lines would be to try to find a shot of it (the original or the rebuilt one) from a similar vantage point to the photos of its destruction and try to splice those together.

They also currently use a red paint that looks weathered even when first applied.

My favorite feature in my very amateur practice of Photoshop is the opacity adjustment, as is clear from this photo. To create the image, I used an archived photo of a dress on a mannequin, a color photo of a hotel hallway, and a photo of a glowing blue light.
With this image, I was thinking back to Jaimie Baron’s discussion of conspiracy theorists surrounding the moon landing and other apparently truthful historical documents. She begins this discussion by posing it as an issue of archival authority writing, “At issue is the question of who decides the ‘legitimate’ meaning of the document, which involves the issue of historical authority, of who has the right to evaluate a given appropriation and the version of history it serves” (63).  She then goes on to affirm that a “critical attitude” can be useful when the search for the verity of found films leads to extratextual verification of the found footage’s narrative. However, her attitude is much different when dealing with conspiracy theorist’s desire to prove an image or images wrong in what she calls “finding out,” which she does not seem to find very agreeable.

What I find problematic about this approach is that the verification of the text is found through the extratextual evidence, rather than what is found within the text. For, if the extratextual consists of sources from places that most researchers would use, it most likely bears the accepted historical narrative that affirms the found text in question, thus leaving a “critical attitude” as falling short of the necessary questioning needed to give authority to a historical document and its narrative.

Instead, “finding out,” which consists of locating “minor details within the image which are then used to discredit the document’s documentary status and/or its established historical meaning” (63) focuses on the text’s affirmation of its narrative within itself. While those that Jaimie refers to in this definition are set on disproving the validity of the document at hand, I do think they’re on a much stronger path with which to grant documents historical authority.

While the image I’ve created is representative of a paranormal narrative that many people—and the popular narrative, at least to the extreme I’ve presented—do not put stock in, imagine that the ghostly presence of headless 17^th century women was commonplace. Then, you are shown this image and understand it to be a found or historically accurate photo because your critical attitude and the extratextual sources that it has led you to all agree that the occurrence is frequent, true, and photographable. This, unfortunately, does not take you far enough to notice the few missed pixels of the layered dresses that are floating above the left shoulder, or the irregularities in the lighting, etc. that a questioning technique like “finding out” where the text must prove its own validity would. In essence, I am a proponent of the text proving itself first and foremost, and then creating the historical narrative from there, rather than the historical narrative being created, then serving to verify the truthfulness of the archived image. (Please note, though, that my experience in how well somebody can Photoshop a picture is seriously lacking. So, if an entirely perfect and false image can, indeed, be made with no remnants of its falseness, it problematizes my argument.)

With this photo and my little know-how, I was also trying to create movement in the skirt of the dress (a back-and-forth swaying) through the layering of duplicated skirts. As I’m sure that pros can more accurately represent movement in a photo, I’m interested in that idea and what implications it may bear on digital/archival ideas that we’ve talked about, but I’m just not sure where to go with the thought, so if anybody has any directions, please throw them out!

So I’m staying with an image of waves and swimmers in this composite exercise. I’m not yet experienced using Photoshop, and so knowing that, theoretically, I could do just about anything to an image in the program, I really wanted to work with just a few functions, namely the orientation of the layers as well as their opacity. In the video from last week I tried to dissolve/complicate the movement of the figures below the surface of the water with the movement of the floating raft at the surface by varying the opacity and scale of the video clips. Beyond a brief (suggestive) narrative what seemed to resonate were the feelings of floating and sinking, maybe even the haptic awareness of both sensations simultaneously.

While manipulating the layers of this composite image, I had that same affect in mind. Obviously the fluctuation of the video isn’t replicable in a still format, and so in order to generate visual movement I duplicated the two primary layers and then flipped them to add to the number of figures/textures in the image and then adjusted the opacity. The re-orientation in conjunction with the alteration in opacity seemed to challenge my perception of the image, which I guess means that I lost my sense of top and bottom, surface and depth. I could now look at the image in multiple ways: the swimmers, mirrored and abstracted, lost their original context and became figures, repetitions—also, there was no longer a clear horizon, rather the wave form of one layer, which marked that orienting line, when duplicated, morphed into the central horizontal blue band. Baron discusses the idea of plurality in the digital archive as part of her discussion of Bookchin’s Mass Ornament, how the multiple screens of Mass Ornament assert the archival material’s inherent synchronic and simultaneous qualities (149). It seems to me that the ability to duplicate layers, to repeat and re-orient in the same space, presents a similar resistance to a causal (though I’m not sure that’s the right word, maybe diachronic or logical) understanding of the image. Here, while the shifts in opacity create depth, there’s also a sense of flattening since the hierarchy of the layers is no longer apparent. Is it one figure repeated, or many different bodies repeated? Are the swimmers swimming or sinking, moving or static? Is there a particular body of water evoked, or, simply, water?

This week’s readings from Jaimie Baron’s The Archive Effect focused on what constitutes a “digital archive” and what this means for users and filmmakers/narrators who choose to appropriate materials from these types of digital archives. Baron wrote that the very notion of a digital archive “destabilizes the notion of an archive as a particular kind of professional institution” (139). Baron pointed to YouTube as an example of “an archive without an archon” (140) with “no unified oversight” or “significant principles of collection” (140). I’m not convinced that this is necessarily a bad thing. There are a multitude of digital archives that are now in the hands of the general population. Each individual has the ability to create an archive and develop their own unique principles of collection.

Each individual’s own personal digital archive on apps like Tumblr and Instagram (and many more) do allow for a very personalized version of the past to be told through these mediums. Like Baron and Paul, I’m inclined to believe that the difference between the material archive and digital archive is not of content, but of structure. The interactivity of apps like Tumblr and Instagram which permit users to connect and impose order via the use of hashtags “add a further level in understanding the data as information” (141). All of the theorists Baron cites (Ricoeur, Paul, Spieker) all imply that the difference between material archives and digital archives is not in the content but “in the different relationships… enabled and established among these contents by both archons and users” (141).

As Baron says, “any kind of digital object that can be accessed by a user can be easily appropriated and combined with other digital objects in a new media work” (142). It was incredibly easy for me to go onto Instagram and find a video to use for this week’s assignment. Instagram accounts permit users to share photo and video content, and then to organize them and make them searchable using hashtags. (Granted, some users like to use hashtags on materials that are not entirely relevant to what they posted…) Most of the time, hashtags serve to connect one user’s post with other similar images/videos, and also help to connect users to each other based off of similar interests. The use of hashtags here in some ways helps to deal with the problems of excess of digital materials, and makes the materials slightly more searchable and manageable. There is still no one single archon controlling this process, however I would argue that the human archivist has not become irrelevant (146). The human intentionality is still very much present, though slightly less visible.

The discussion of Mass Ornaments tied in nicely to what I decided to use for my appropriated video clip today. I chose a clip of a friend hula hooping, that she shared on Instagram for the world to see. She is performing by herself in an empty dance/work out studio, but at the same time this clip was clearly made for public consumption. Mass Ornaments consisted of multiple clips of individuals performing dance moves, which is not an editing process I was able to do for this week’s assignment. It would be entirely possible, however, to compose a similar video of hooping videos of individuals performing their own unique performance that actually could demonstrate both “individuality and conformity” (152) among these clips. On Instagram, the hooping community is able to connect with one another and through the use of hashtags and user’s account names, are able to “call out” a friend to #stopdropandhoop. This starts an almost endless series of short video hoops. One user uploads a video of them stop, drop, and hooping wherever they happen to be (at home, on the front lawn, at the park, at a festival, etc.), then in the comments section identifies which friends they are now calling on to #stopdropandhoop. It connects the users and it would prove interesting to see what happens when one follows this train of videos, and combines/appropriates them into a new visual experience, and what kinds of patterns or discontinuities would emerge when the materials are viewed together sequentially.

In any case, the clip I chose was from a #stopdropandhoop challenge by a friend (whose user name I will not share, though her account is not private.) The purpose of hooping with a color-changing hoop (especially in a dark space) is for the hoop to move so quickly that it is almost impossible to see the individual movements of the hooper and the hoop itself. This creates a “trail” of light, and another hashtag besides #stopdropandhoop that gets used by hoopers is #showmeyourtrails. With this particular video, I decided to intentionally reverse the intended effects of the color changing hoop. I slowed down both the video and the audio. The original audio was a very upbeat, fast paced song and slowing this down considerably brought an eerie quality to this video that the original clip did not possess at all.  This is a “metonymic fragment” of a human life, and “before digital video cameras and the internet” (150-151) my friend could not have posted this video for others to find (and for myself to reappropriate, with her knowledge.)

I have created a short clip from a footage Doctor in Industry in the Prelinger Archive.  Instead of overlapping the images, I select five scenarios from the video and integrate them into one short clip. Each of them lasts about 5-8 seconds and forms different angles of viewing the story. At first sight, viewers may find it difficult to understand this short clip, but as Baron argues in chapter 4: “the film acts as a succession of encounters and interruptions that are only tentatively held together by the delicate narrative thread of the narrator’s reflexive meditations” (118), it seems that, to some extent, the narrators’ reflections of a video clip come from not only the completeness of a storytelling but also the fragments of a story that shape viewer’s thoughts in a figurative sense.

This clip covers different parts of a certain history of industrial medicine in the first half of the 20th century, consisting of an introduction in the beginning which, I think, makes it like a traditional movie, a love story of a doctor at that time, the doctor’s behavior in the hospital, the scenery of a hospital and the communication between doctors. Though these are just fragments extracted from a footage film, they still, in my opinion, picture the lives in the past as a whole. I end the clip where the doctors are talking and as a viewer, I’m still curious about what they are talking about and how the story will develop in the next step. It represents the idea of the footage are both explicitly about memory and culture, which“…not only enacts the desire to turn archival fragments into a narrative but also suggests that certain fragments can never be contained by a story”(118).

I’m also considering the idea of “gap” discussed by Baron who argues that“…such a gap in the archive visible may give rise not only to intellectual acknowledgement of how the archive effect can be simulated but also to an intensified experience of the archive affect, the overwhelming sense of time’s passage and of all that has been irrevocably lost to the present”(121). In my understanding, the gap which exists in footages between narrating and meditating generates the “history desire” to explore the past and present among all the fragments. In this sense, looking into those gaps makes it more interesting than just sitting there and watching appropriation.

Jamie Baron distinguishes between two nostalgias evoked by the archive affect (“the overwhelming sense of time’s passage and of all that has been irrevocably lost to the present” [121]). Restorative nostalgia idealizes the partiality of the archive and leads to a desire for the past that never was and reflective nostalgia takes an honest look at the past and the passage of time—in the case of the archive, images are not fetishized or fixed and our interpretation of the image remains flexible (129-130).

In my video, I try to take a nostalgic clip from 50s American culture that evokes restorative nostalgia and alter it to (hopefully) evoke a reflexive nostalgia. I chose an advertisement for snack foods) played during the intermission at drive-in movie theaters . Drive in movies were at their most popular in the 50 and early 60s, have been in decline since the 1970s, and are very rare today. The loss of this slice of American culture and the viewing of This advertisement has the capacity (for those who recognize it) to evoke the archive affect and restore the 50s/early 60s idealized past. It displays snack foods singing, urging people to buy snack food for the movie. This is followed by a popcorn machine and then four movie goers happily eating the snack food advertised. The ad is all underlain with the catchy “Let’s all go to the lobby” jingle.

In order to create a more reflective nostalgic experience, I try to re-edit this clip to emphasize the pervasiveness of the snack food products—the true purpose of these advertisements. Although some may remember the jingle in relation to drive in movies and an idealistic time, the intention of the original video is to push the viewer to consume snack food.

I start with the people eating, slow down the jingle to create a slightly disturbing effect, and then allow the food products marching down the movie aisles to appear below the layer of people eating. My intention was to give the impression that the food products have now become ingrained in the people’s (and perhaps our own) psyches through repetition. It’s not just a happy jingle, it’s a sort of invasion into the brain.

I’ll finish by pointing out that in order to recognize this archive affect (and archive effect) one must 1. Recognize that this is an old cartoon and not a contemporary cartoon and 2. Recognize the jingle and its context. If a viewer is unaware of the jingle and its role in advertising, then they will not understand the video, or its attempt to create a different nostalgic effect. This leads me to wonder about the extent of contextual knowledge necessary for nostalgia to be evoked. Is it only necessary to recognize time has passed?  Is it also necessary to recognize the ideal portrayed by the object being observed? In other words, can nostalgia (restorative or reflective) be evoked subconsciously?

So I may not have been as faithful to the guidelines of the prompt as I could have been. I say that only because you’ll notice that in the video I made there are clearly two video clips—one overlaid atop the other. The initial image that you see is of a deflated Navy life raft. This clip I acquired through the Public Domain Project. From this video clip I selected a roughly 5s section, and it more or less repeats 5-6 times. The major alterations to the clip involved opacity (which decreases than increases), as well as scale (which increases from 50% to 100%). As a side note, I did run into some issues with figuring out how to scale the clip so that it appeared in Premiere as it looked in its source file—a process which in turn lead to the “zooming in” decision as a compositional effect.

I appropriated the second clip, which also provides the video’s audio, from the Prelinger Archive. The selection is a 30s slow motion underwater shot of a group of female swimmers. The source video (which was a also an appropriation film) titled “AquaFrolic” also contained shots of male cliff divers. I appropriated part of the original title for my “FrolicFloat.”

I used this second clip as my temporal foundation to mark out an approximately 30s sequence onto which I could collage the life raft footage. While working with the two clips in this way it was clear that the interaction between the images generated the suggestion of a narrative, as well as a sense of distance from their original and archival sources. In the new context the levity and buoyancy, which the word “frolic” might connote seems to be not just overshadowed by a literal floating object, but also subverted, as what were playful swimmers appear more like ghostly figures reaching for (and failing to reach) the raft. I like the word “frolic”—and it seemed, given the material a place to explore Baron’s idea about the relationship between the archive and “the joke.” As she suggests,

the affinity…has to do with the fundamental ambiguity of the meaning of the archival fragment as both figurative (it stands for something else as a sign of history) and literal (it gains its evidentiary power from its specificity and particularity), which lends itself not only to factual assertion but also to “misuse” and play. (112)

Initially, the footage of the swimmers had a playfulness about it, as did the bright orange floating raft. However, the title of the video and the appropriated video fragments become much more ambiguous placed on top of one another and generate an unexpectedly dark/melancholic mood.