Having seen Susan Howe deliver Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives as a lecture at Harvard University, I could not help but contemplate the effects of technology that are present in the composition and presentation of this project. Circling and dissecting the ideas of materiality, expression, knowledge, and experience, the content of Howe’s project directly addresses the issue of media translation in the introduction: “As they evolve, electronic technologies are radically transforming the way we read, write, and remember” (9). Spontaneous Particulars takes up the issue of what’s lost, recovered, degraded, and enhanced by moving from analog to digital collections, both in terms of our of-the-body experiences and our of-the-mind knowledge in relation to our interactions with archival objects. However, the ways that these issues are taken up in Spontaneous Particulars as a lecture and as a book seem distinctly different to me.

As a book, Spontaneous Particulars juxtaposes reprinted digital scans of archival selections with poetry, quotes from various thinkers, and Howe’s reflections on the processes of collecting, confronting, and interpreting archival materials. We encounter text and image side-by-side, each symbols of either aural or physical material (the text a symbol of speakable language and the image a symbol of a touchable object). The process of printing the text and images in facing pages has essentially flattened the tactile and sonic presences of the original materials on a single, symbolic plane.

In contrast, the “reading” experience of Spontaneous Particulars as a lecture is not so singular. An audience member listens to Howe—hears the sonic elements of her voice—while encountering projections of the digital images of archival materials. It’s possible to experience what would be the textual or language-based portion of the lecture as mere aural material—to encounter the sounds-in-themselves, if you will. The simultaneity of processing Howe’s reflection on names (sonic stimuli) and a visual projection of a prescription written by William Carlos Williams (visual stimuli) has a much different effect on the way one reads and remembers Spontaneous Particulars. It feels bodily, now.

In this way, Howe’s project reenacts the very issue that it addresses. While listening to Howe recite the lecture is a performance and not the initial thoughts that she captured through language, experiencing Spontaneous Particulars in person does remind me of the experience of touching an archived object. There’s a now-ness to hearing Howe speak that’s similar to the now-ness of touching WCW’s prescription pad. Howe’s voice and WCW’s handwritten notes are material objects that no longer exist in their original context, but remain present for us—the listener, reader, researcher—in a sensory way that interpreting text on a page does not. In the same manner that the archive effect may fool us into deeming an image or clip historical or “real,” I can see Howe’s voice as fooling us with its ephemeral yet salient presence in material validity. Thus, I view Howe’s intentions for Spontaneous Particulars the book to be “a collaged swan song to the old ways” as a celebration in the book’s relationship to the process through which it was created (rather than in the product itself). Like Farge, Howe’s fervor for digging within the physical archives seems to place value in the act of seeking, not the products that seeking creates.

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.”

Using the footage from Here Comes the Circus found in the Prelinger Archives, I have created a 15-second clip that layers introductions to clowns—a composition I hope represents “one of the paradoxes of the archive: [that] it is constituted by both absence and excess” (109). The short video above shows the “absence” part of this paradox by being a trace of a trace of a historical event—fragments of the archived film of the real-life circus show that occurred in 1942. As Jaimie Baron argues, “Every document is always only a fragment of the vast trove of indexical recordings scattered throughout the world in physical or digital form”—so too is the source material for this short video (110). However, the composition of my video—the building layers of clown faces and the audio that accompanies them—draws attention to the massive accumulation of audiovisual material not only in the original 9-minute archived video that the appropriated clips belong, to but also, on a larger scope, the archives that the original video belongs to (never mind all the audiovisual material available in all archives). Considering this context, my video is based on a selection, leaving many parts of the full Here Comes the Circus video and other possible materials in the Prelinger Archives out. By presenting a selection of a selection, my short video shows the “absence” of other footage from within in original circus video, but also the vast possibility of material that could have been included within the Prelinger Archive. In this way, my tiny manipulative video acknowledges “the excess, ambiguity, and disruptive ‘real’” by causing the viewer to think about the material that’s there and not there—the limited (but also impossibly large) bank of possible material I could have spliced into the video clip.

The clip also confronts the temporality a viewer may experience while watching material from a given audiovisual archive by disrupting that experience’s typical linearity. If the archive effect is indeed an event for a given viewer, the event of watching my short film starts and then disruptively restarts again and again as each clips repeats and becomes buried beneath another clip. This restarting and layering draws attention to how “our historical experience is constructed”: a filmmaker gets to decide where each archival clip begins and ends when they fashion a (usually linear) narrative traditional to documentaries (Baron 174). However, the composition of my short film undermines the ‘touch of the real’ that documentaries often rely on by confronting through overlap and replay that this ‘real’ is a construction within the film as well as within the viewer’s perception of that film. In this way, my video too is a joke. The archival material is misused to create a clown nightmare, but also a historical narrative nightmare, in which the record of the circus becomes indiscernible and thus so does the “truth” that Here Comes the Circus  could purport. The play inherent in my video to some degree undermines the false power of the archival document.

In her Vimeo bio, Penny Lane identifies her short film, The Voyagers, as one of her “short experimental films.” Her biography also remarks that she often creates “essay films” in addition to documentaries. In the description of the film itself, Lane defines the The Voyagers as a love letter to her (then future) husband. These carefully worded introductions seem to place The Voyagers in the “found footage” category on the “archival footage” / “found footage” binary that Jaimie Baron breaks down and complicates through the analysis of the ways in which these two black-and-white footage categories no longer suit appropriation films. In my personal experience of watching The Voyagers, the heart-felt narrative spared me of viewing this “love letter” with the same critical analysis with which I might typically approach a documentary. My objective eye seemed less important to tasks such as locating the time of each clip regarding the launches of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

Despite the “experimental film” label, I did experience various levels of “realness” while watching this short film. The clips of the space ship launches, the NASA staff at their computers and desks, the reactions during press conferences, and Carl Sagan’s speeches in the school classroom and on other films all appeared historical to me in a way that the clips of rides at Coney Island and somewhat context-less images such as planet Earth as viewed from space or a telephone dangling from its wire did not. One reason I perceived these spacecraft and Carl Sagan clips as appearing more historical than the Coney Island clips was a result of temporality. With pale color and grainy composition, the clips from the 1970s actually appeared older.

This materiality alone most likely would not have created the gradations of “realness” that I experienced as a viewer. In The Archive Effect, Jaimie Baron argues “what makes footage read as ‘archival’ is, first of all, the effect within a given film generated by the juxtaposition of shots perceived as produced at different moments in time” (17). Had these clips of the spaceship launches not appeared alongside clean, crisp, more saturated footage of Coney Island and our solar system, the appropriated 1970s clips would not appeared “archival” to me. The intention of the film to serve as a love letter, not a documentary, and the narration and sound effects that support Lane’s personal intention, could have effectively removed The Voyagers from the possibility of interpreting the “experimental short film” as “archival,” but these pieces of footage appear distinctly archival when the “‘temporal disparity,’ the perception by the viewer of an appropriation film of a ‘then’ and a ‘now’ generated within a single text” is taken into account (18).

While it’s hard to separate my perceived temporality of the 1970s footage from the materiality of that footage, my reception of the clips of the twin spacecraft launches illustrates Baron’s point that “certain documents from the past—whether found in an official archive, a family basement, or online—may be imbued by the viewer with various evidentiary values as they are appropriated and repurposed in new films” (7). While the assumed historical nature of the Voyager 1 and 2 launches doesn’t alter my perception that the use-value of The Voyagers is an emotional one, personal to Penny Lane and offered to the public as an “authentic” experience, the footage of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 appear archival if only in their material presence as a record from the past. This leads me to the questions: How does materiality influence a viewer’s definition of “archival footage” and play into what Baron calls the archive effect?

In “Saving Private Reels: Archival Practices and Digital Memories (Formerly Known as Home Movie) in the Digital Age,” Susan Aasman defines cinema as “the perfect instrument for making a record of fleeting moments, of time itself” and describes the movement from the archive’s pre-modern concern with evidence to its post-modern concern with collective memory (245, 247). This new digital archive, with a “‘democratic’ spirit” that reveals the “inner life of people,” can be seen today in social media applications such as Instagram and Vine. Through these two specific applications, individual users can post short videos (as well as photos), typically taken on their smart phones, to their network of “followers” and any public audience that they may allow to view their content. Each clip is a ‘digital memory’—of a home-cooked dinner with friends, a drunk night at the club, a Sunday hike with the dog, grandma’s 75^th birthday party, an ephemeral sign seen on a morning commute, or the most recent snow bank formed silently overnight. As an aggregate, these Instagram and Vine accounts are “keeping a record of our lives,” individually and collectively (253). But as Aasman points out, it’s more complicated than the good old days of storing our memories as we would have in a printed photo album or a home movie tape. Purely digital, Instagram and Vine are “fluid archives” (255). They’re open (changing and accumulating constantly), communal and diverse (accessible to many users who can ‘connect’), self-referential (hashtags can be seen as “finding aid[s] in the documents themselves”), and allow for simultaneous collection and reflection  (photos and videos are capture, shared to networks, repopulated on other devices, and stored as data in the same two exchanges) (Ernst 84). As Aasman and Ernst both point out, these “archives” are not designed for long-term storage and memory, but for “immediate reproduction and recycling” (95). The structure and function of Instagram and Vine carry the added goal of communication. In fact, Instagram’s tagline is “Capture and Share the World’s Moments.”

When considering the traditional intention of archives to keep documents as “proof” of events, the temporality of applications such as Instagram and Vine become problematic. If collected documents are always being reproduced (posts can be “re-grammed” or “re-posted” days, months, even years later and show up in today’s “news feed”) and don’t have clear origins (posts do not need to be credited with an original author or date/time—everything pretends real-time “news”), videos on these two applications cannot be trusted to authenticate an event with a specific time and location, especially a “live” event. This seems to be the “permanent broadcast” that Ernst speaks of (111). However, unlike the traditional home video, these digital posts capture the myriads of connections surrounding a particular “document.” The videos aren’t screened to an audience in a concrete location, they shared in cyberspace. Instagram and Vine both have data trails ( or data mazes maybe) that show who posted what when, who liked or commented on particular posts when, and who reproduced the images with their own accounts when. As Aasman describes, using these apps is a practice, each one “a democratized archive that embraces new methods of participatory and collaborative archival work” (255).

The libertarian socialist in me cannot help but think of the political implications of archiving data about networks of users instead of the documents themselves. On my Instagram, I have recently seen videos of organizations and individual activists unionizing adjunct professors, promoting the Fight for 15 campaigns to raise fast food workers’ wages, and celebrating MLK Day by protesting against police militarization. Historians and archivists may not always have the benefit of hunting down “original copies” of protest clips or the “first instance of instant replay” of a poet performing on the National Mall, but they may someday (legal and copyright ownership pending) have a list of usernames that connect to individual IP addresses and the timestamp for when those IP addresses connected . Using metadata, archivists may be able to track how the NAACP or Fight for 15 campaign shared information in 2015. Furthermore, Instagram and Vine as archives could include, similar to a record of written correspondences, the representational network of individuals who may have attended a protest. We can see who is responsible for archiving our cultural heritage, which may in fact be more valuable than what’s being collected.

While the videos of the real-life actions are a “performative form of memory,” the metadata from Instagram and Vine could provide pertinent information to an archivist or historian who would like to capture records of who was doing what with whom. If we embrace these new digital spaces as archives of transfer rather than storage, can’t we track the movement of discourse, even if the temporality and document ownership are wonky (Ernst 100)? If the goal of this digital video medium is different than analog media—based on participation in democracy, perhaps—the goal of the archive and the purpose of reviewing the archive itself must be different. The records may become less of a “he said, she said” and more about whose IP address was connecting to whom and why. Does a collected object’s temporal location really matter during an era when every reproduction is “news”?

Cox and Thompson describe many reasons for and benefits of personal archiving: supplementing organic memory, augmenting institutional archives, freeing oneself of the “anxiety of committing something to memory,” creating meaningful narratives, defining social relations and communities, achieving political power, and surviving “by leaving something behind” (Thompson 32, Cox 3). Within each example of archiving that Cox and Thompson explore, there’s a curious feedback loop that occurs to the personal archivists from the archives that they create. Not only do the individuals’ life experiences (and any historical events that they may have participated in) become archived as significant “‘atypia’” in their personal collections, but these documentations and recollections often shape the future behavior of the individual curators themselves (Thompson 39). Studying how users of Timehop may change how they engage with current experiences because they’re aware that they will review their check-ins and posts in a future “memorial moment” or how Chinese immigrants could have shaped their community and cultural identities through the documentation of “‘paper families’” caused me to reflect on the ways in which my archiving practices may affect my future behavior and identity (Thompson 38, Cox 14).

With the use of smartphones, many of us are capturing loads of data about our mundane day-to-day activities. In my own life, a couple apps readily came to mind when I considered active documentation I use on my iPhone. Through Mint, which markets itself as an app for “managing your personal finances,” I track my income and expenses. The decision to track the comings and goings of money in my life was active: when faced with a meager graduate student’s wages, I decided to budget (or at least track) my monthly expenses. However, once I made that decision, the app ran on its own: by inputting my account information, the app used data from various online banking platforms to collect and archive all income and expenses that passed through my checking, savings, credit card, and retirement accounts. Mint offers ways to categorize expenses through type and date, and compare them to any goals you set for yourself. Similar to Deb Roy or Gordon Bell’s digital lifelogging practices, once I pressed “go,” I could have simply let Mint record and never take a second look through the data. However, I tend to log in once a day to categorize the new expenses that have popped up and check if the green income bar is higher than the red expense bar for the given month. This is where the feedback loop comes in: Mint has affected my spending decisions. Checking my Mint account influences the price of the drinks and food I buy, when I decide to get my overpriced hair cuts downtown, and when I use my menial stipend as an excuse to get out of travel I really don’t want to take. While using the app, I feel organized and conscientious, maybe even downright frugal. But when I take advantage of the option to pull the data into an Excel spreadsheet to determine how my expenses fluctuated throughout the year, sometimes the data illuminates ways in which I tried to live beyond my means. The app augments my organic memory of where my money went, but also allows for a big-picture view of my behavior. Similar to Roy’s warped memory of his son’s first steps, sometimes Mint robs me of the possibility of a sunny image of my perfect frugality for one of a staid, but imperfect spender. Now, sometimes I make better financial decisions simply to avoid the feeling of disappointment I know I will feel when in the future I look back at the data and could have spent smarter.

Cox and Thompson both bring up the role personal archiving plays in survival. Cox describes archiving as instinctive as “eating, drinking, seeking shelter, and sleeping”—“linked to the human impulse for resisting oblivion” (3). In a concrete example, Thompson brings up how Bell’s obsessive lifelogging has helped him with his healthcare in the wake of a heart attack (31). Similar to Bell, I used archive information to support my medical treatment. After a bout of stomach problems, my doctor asked me to keep a food diary. I used My Fitness Pal, a web-based food diary and activity log with a searchable database of more than one million foods, to track my eating habits and any related symptoms. While the intention was to determine food sensitivities, I gained access to a plethora of information regarding my nutrition. The days I overate or had a burger and fries instead of chicken and spinach, the app collected the nutritional consequences of those decisions. As an unintended consequence of using My Fitness Pal, I began to educate myself about healthy diets to understand the data I was collecting and viewing through the app’s various graphs. Similar to my interaction with Mint, I began to make better health choices simply to avoid the terrible feeling that I had behaved in ways that were detrimental to my own wellbeing. Through some strange form of punishment, the data collected in the app enabled me to eat healthier to avoid the disappointment of seeing how poor meal choices impacted my health. The app gave me accountability through futurism.

While my use of Mint and My Fitness Pal are different from lifelogging since they only capture one aspect of my life, both apps support my survival financially and physically. They foster my ability to spend within my means (well, sometimes) or eat with greater self-awareness, as well as create a narrative of my own contentiousness and self-care. Like Jonathan Edwards’ devotion to recording and archiving his experiences as a means to lend credibility to religious awakenings, by using these apps, I can develop my own proof that I am a frugal, healthy person who will clearly live till one hundred. I’m archiving to ‘resist the oblivion’ of bankruptcy and disease (at least that’s the meaning I create for myself).