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.”

This clip combines different parts of a 1981 interview of Professor Charles R. Magel with audio clips from a video titled “Animals in the Service of Man” from the 1940s.

I found Susan Howe’s different re-uses of archival material interesting, and with regards to both That This and Spontaneous Particulars I could not help but think of Arlette Farge’s statements about the allure of archives and about Derrida’s association of the archives with the death drive. The death drive stood out to me as an important theme of Howe’s work, as she was obviously grieving for her lost husband and trying to make sense of this loss in This That. The sentence “Peter took eternal wordlessness into himself” (That This, 14) reminded me of the way in which the people who are found in the traces of archives (like the Parisians Farge discovered) are now eternally wordless, as in no longer capable of speaking for themselves. It is up to those who are left behind to reanimate the life that has been lost. In processing her grief over the sudden loss of her husband, Howe ruminates “Now – putting bits of memory together, trying to pick out the good while doing away with the bad” recalled Farge’s description of the archival research process. The historian must sift through the traces found in the archives, discard those that do not fit in with their narrative and keep those materials that work well.

Howe made several observations that conjured up debates about the authenticity of archival traces. “Even if ideas don’t exist without the mind, there may be copies or resemblances” wrote Howe (22), but do these copies or resemblances do justice to the original complex functions of the mind that generated those ideas? Howe’s discussion of names in both works really gets one thinking about the value of words and names as mere traces of what they actually represent. When Howe wrote “can a trace become the thing it traces, secure as ever, real as ever – a chosen set of echo-fragments” (That This, 29) this reminded me of issues surrounded authenticity, especially with regards to audio and other digital media. Can a digital or digitized item ever be as secure or real as the original? Can an audio recording of a person’s voice or of an event ever fully capture the essence and reality of the thing it has recorded as a trace?

I was initially not sure at all what to make of the second section of That This but after going over the segment several times the traces Howe used started to speak more to me. At first I was completely frustrated by this section, trying to impose some sort of order and meaning onto the disarray of text in the center of each page, but I came to have multiple interpretations of Howe’s chosen arrangement and presentation of these materials. The different sliced up and pasted selections of text reminded me immediately of absence and unfinished thoughts, and implicitly about the absences in historical records and archives. Some statements stood out as being intentionally separated and profound (“distemper I was seized with it” – p 55, “pursuing shadows & things” – p 62, “something delirious and therefore lost I was to a degree rational” – p 64). It is clear that Howe (for her own reasons) wanted these statements (or fragments of statements) to stand out to the reader. The fact that these are fragments and Howe intentionally placed gaps implied gaps in the historical record, even in the presence of such excess. In addition, I felt these gaps served to represent the void left behind after Howe’s husband passed away.

Howe wrote that “Maybe there is some not yet understood return to people we have loved and lost. I need to imagine the possibility even if I don’t believe it” (This That, 17). Though I think that Howe was speaking quite literally of somehow being reunited with the dead in some afterlife, I think that pouring through personal archives after someone has passed away is indeed a way to return to that person. We may never physically be with them again, but we can reanimate and reimagine them. “I’ll go to him – I’ll find him,” writes Howe. I often think these same thoughts when I stumble across the name of a long deceased person, involved with a movement I am researching. I resolve to go and find that person, to bring them back to life through research and writing. Howe expresses that she feels intrusive for looking over personal family items in her mission to “find him,” but this is what the historian does all the time in archival research. We are always the unintended reader, the unanticipated researcher come to disturb the peace of the deceased in order to reanimate them for our own purposes. The archival materials that are so necessary to resurrecting the past are usually “enclosed in a world of their own” and do seem “to offer reluctant consent to being viewed,” but these are the types of “secretive” sources that Farge would argue can reveal so much.

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.)

There are a number of issues related to “current” digital formats because technology changes so rapidly. When technology is advancing so rapidly and “entire generations of data carriers are made obsolete by hardware developments” (90), how will future generations access these types of digital media? I think this is part of why Ernst believes that the Internet is not, in fact, an archive. “The archive is defined as a given, preselected quantity of documents evaluated according to their worth for being handed down,” he says. “The Internet, on the other hand, is an aggregate of unpredictable texts, sounds, images, data, and programs” (86). If our society is shifting toward a primarily digital interface for communication, however, this raises a lot of questions about the status of “archives” in our society what will happen to the “traditional” archive in the future. It indicates that a number of changes will be necessary in archival procedures/standards in the future if archives are to successfully adapt and evolve significantly in order to remain relevant in the future.

Ernst noted that “it is not the data here, however, but their metadata that are the archival elements” (89). The random assortment of material on the Internet is not organized in any way to construe meaning. It is simply collecting items, but “cyberspace has no meaning” (138). The metadata is required to introduce meaning and context for the assortment of materials on the web. Through the metadata, one can learn far more about the multimedia, why it was shared, who shared it, why it was important to them or why they felt it may be important to others. The metadata proves crucial to defining and “cataloging” the Internet’s contents. I personally am finding writing succinct and informative metadata for digital objects a challenge, in trying to find the best way to both describe the digital item and also explain its digital provenance. In describing the provenance of digital items I’ve been archiving I have certainly found myself contributing to hyperlinkability. While collecting images from the web, in describing them I try to link back to the original source page or to other descriptive media, thus contributing to the “interconnectivity of different media” (119) on my own inconsequential blog. I can see now that in doing this, the emphasis on this digital archiving has indeed shifted to regeneration and I am “(co)producing” by using these materials for my own needs (95). Do my references and descriptions now make this collection of random multimedia “self-operant and self-aware” and does this Tumblr page now constitute “a self-referent archive” (84)?

Ernst argues “the so-called cyberspace is not primarily about memory as a cultural record but rather about a performative form of memory as communication” (99). On sites like Facebook users are not recording memory on their pages for the sake of recording memory. They do so in order to share and communicate their memory and experience to others. Your Facebook friends were not on that vacation with you, but you attempt to document and thus communicate your own memories through your photos, posts, etc. These repositories of one’s personal life experiences are not “final destinations” for memory storage like traditional archives, but are “frequently accessed sites” (99) of communicated memory. If “memory is literally permanently in transition” (97) and constantly being constructed in our digital world, what can accurately be identified as “memory,” and what does this mean for collective memory and the historical cultural record as well? Maybe Ernst is right and the internet “will turn memory itself into an ephemeral, passing drama” (117).

We consider our personal computers, or at least I know I do, as safe and permanent storage for documents, photographs, etc. A lot of Ernst’s arguments made me entirely reevaluate that view, and wonder about the inherent impermanence of digitized items I consider important and worth saving. Ernst says that “your own private computer as a mere temporary holding tank for data, not as a permanent file cabinet” (120). If “cyberspace has no memory” (138) and your personal computer is a “mere temporary holding tank” and a media machine that will soon be obsolete, what would be an actual safe and “permanent file cabinet” or “memory spaces geared to eternity” (86) for these digital materials? Do we need to in fact, archive the protocols and algorithms that make our digital memory creation possible in order for future generations to access these? I wished Ernst would discuss and explore the specific protocols and formats he frequently mentioned in more detail in these chapters, and he did not really explore the fact that these formats and protocols are themselves the products of social, political, and economic factors that speak about our current culture. I was hung up on Doron Swade’s observation that “the operational continuity of contemporary culture cannot be assured” (93) any longer, and wondered what others’ thoughts were about this in relation to constantly changing technologies, protocols, and formats.

**Hi all – I posted my post #3 response to the wrong blog site last week. My bad!**

The Arcades Project represents a collection of Walter Benjamin’s notes, organized into “convolutes,” concerning the Paris arcades. Benjamin considered the arcades to be “the most important architectural form of the nineteenth century” (ix) that embodied the social, political, and cultural trends of the time. The arcade, as the physical representation of bourgeois and capitalist ideals, provides evidence of the growing gap between the public and private spheres. The advent of capitalism and consumerism complicated and changed conceptions of the public and private, and how individuals identified and defined themselves within the workplace and the domestic sphere. (There was a quote somewhere about increasing tobacco use and its popularization by Louis-Philippe’s sons I found interesting. It described how practice started in smaller, private establishments and then spread into more generally accepted public use, and it made a brief comment on the impact on human health from this increased sale and use of tobacco.)

Benjamin’s text is a varied, though ordered, collection of images and cultural traces of the nineteenth century. There were various new types of cultural materials that could be produced with new technologies, like the daguerreotype, and these new technologies and trends are the topics of many featured quotes in the text. All of the documented quotes and objects are connected to particular historical trends, technologies, and moments in the nineteenth century. In this way, the reader is able to reconstruct the changes taking place during this time period, viewing and comprehending them through the eyes (or voices) of its contemporaries.

Benjamin includes a quote from Grenoble that states: “The past has left images of itself in literary texts” and the “future alone possess developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly” (482). In Arcades, Benjamin attempted to recreate the arcades and Paris with a structure of meaning within this particular historical context. These he compiled for future “developers” to interpret and reconstruct this society for themselves. The concept of official “history” is part of the dream that Benjamin wanted readers to use dialectical thinking to awaken from.