The Art of Archives

UMass Boston || English 600 || Spring 2015 || Prof. Erin Anderson

Author: jiezhao001 (page 1 of 2)

The Possibilities of Representing Past with the Real Historical Materials

May 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Hi, everyone! This is the final version of my appropriation film “A Story of the Divorce of the Last Emperor”. Eventually I get the access to add the English subtitles to my video. Sorry for posting so lately on the blog.

At the beginning of the video, there is a silent video clip of the emperor and his concubine at the court for the suit of divorce. This clip is originally recorded as the last emperor, Puyi, acted as the witness in a military court for Japan’s aggression against China. Watching the video, I suddenly got the idea that maybe I could use some of the elements in this video in my appropriation film so that the viewers could see the scene in which the emperor and his concubine, Wenxiu, made their presence in the court for the divorce suit. That was the original idea of this project!

After some searching of lots of documentaries on the life of the last emperor and his concubines, I found a short video clip of Li Yuqin, the fourth wife of Puyi, also the last concubine of him as an emperor. This video was originally a short interview with Li Yuqin carried out in the historical museum of Manchukuo. I thought that maybe I could use it in another interview in which the hostess can asked this concubine some questions about the divorce of Puyi and his second concubine, Wenxiu. As to the contents of this appropriation film, I think I could use the contents of another documentary in which the hostess tells a lot about the divorce of the last emperor. So the hostess’s voice will be appropriated in my film as the voice of Li Yuqin, the last concubine of the emperor. I will play the part of the hostess in my interview and I will ask Li Yuqin some questions about the divorce. So I write all kinds of questions according to the materials of the documentary and then recorded my voice, appropriating it into my film.

With the audio clip of my film, I begin to edit the video. I try to make a match between the video and the audio so that the viewers can experience the real scene of history as they hear the voice telling the story of the past. I cut some related scenes from various sources and then combine them together to make the appropriation film. This process could be kind of challenging since sometimes we cannot exactly find the materials to match the real story. We have to fill the gaps of history by using some other materials related to the topic, though not exactly get to the point. Also as I am watching a lot of videos on the stories of last emperor, I see that there are lots of documentaries using the fragments from some historical films or TV series to fill the gap of history. These scenes are, after all, the fake ones. I understand that some of the programs intend to inspire the imagination of the viewers by doing that. But I do think that there exist the possibilities to use the real documentaries to represent history in a faithful way. What I am doing in my appropriation film is to use all kinds of real materials to tell the story of the past.

Sudden Earthquake Hits a Classroom in Music Lesson

April 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

This is an audio appropriation work about earthquake. Some students in the classroom are having a music lesson and suddenly the earthquake hits the building. They are screaming and shouting aloud. The cars in the yard are sending out their alarms because of the sudden shake on the ground. Then there is some silence and the ambulance comes for rescue. People are searching for those who are still alive and help them out. Then there is the news report on the earthquake, a correspondent telling the listeners the current situation of the city hit by the catastrophe.

 

In this audio appropriation work, I have combined some sound effects of car alarms, screams of people, earthquake, and ambulance together in a multi-track so as to create the very situation of a sudden earthquake. The music lesson is from YouTube, recorded by someone from Beijing Normal University. The clip of people rescuing the survivors is cut from BBC news report. CNN news report in the end is also a part cut from the real news.

The Abuse and Misuse of the Historian Archives

April 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The first time I got the two books from Amazon, I thought there must be some printing problems with them. Opening the books once more and reading them for many times and tasting them as they are, I suddenly have the feeling that these words are never exhausted with their meanings. Howe uses really poetic language to express her peculiar thoughts and feelings in an amazing way. She uses such a beautiful metaphor to talk about her opinions of “quotations”—“Quotations are skeins or collected knots…Quotations are lines or passages taken at hazard from piled up cultural treasures. A quotation, cut, or closely teased out as if with a needle, can interrupt the continuous flow of a poem, a tapestry, a picture, an essay; or a piece of writing like this one. (31) I think this “definition of quotation” explains what Howe is doing with the sentences of prose in her two books. Actually what she is doing is more like embroidering the quotations taken from their original contexts in a new circumstance. She takes her delight in cutting out the papers and then stitching these fragments together so as to make up a new poem of her own. Her appropriation practice of “quotations” makes me think of the way historians embroidering archives by themselves. What Howe is doing in her two books is more or less the same as what the historians are doing with the archives in a historical past—searching though the historical and cultural treasures, cutting some quotations from their original contexts and stitching them together so as to make an appealing embroidery. If there is still someone accusing Howe of doing some “misuse” of the archives, he should examine the process in which an archivist is doing with the historical fragments. What the archivist doing is to separate an archive from its original context and “stitch” them into a file folder with a name on it. As the practice of taking a quotation from its original context can be venturing too much for its sake, the way an archivist separates an archive from its original context can also become hazardous. Every time he takes out an archive from its historical context and combines it with other archives into a folder, he makes his own “appropriation” unconsciously. There is apparently the “intentional disparity” as Baron says in her book The Archive Effect. Jonathan Edwards’ letters, originally for correspondence, now become a member of a great number of archives in the library. The time an archive is separated from its historical context, it is always at the risk of being misused or abused by anyone. What we are seeing today in our historian books are the embroidery of historians—taking some “quotations” from a historical context and stitching them to make up his own artful design. It seems to me that there becomes an even blurring boundary between what the historians are doing with history and what the authors of appropriation works are doing with the archives.

The way that Howe plays games with the words also arrests my attention. Quoting the definition of “skein” from Webster’s dictionary, she looks upon words as “skeins, meteors, mimetic spirit-sparks”. (26) On another page, she talks about words for their sake and comes up with her questions on their nature —“Names are supposed to be signs for things, but what if things are actually the signs of names? What if words possess a ‘spirit’ potential to their nature as words?” (40) To me, her appropriation works are generally a visual feast of words arrangement for the viewers. She takes her delight in seeing words as something they shine through the pages with their own spirits. What she is doing reminds me of Harold Pinter’s speech on his receiving the Nobel Prize for his outstanding works of drama. He points out the fact that nowadays we are doing violence to our language. Apart from Howe’s pleasure in treasuring words for their own sake, people tend to impose their own power to the words and make language a tool of in the battlefield. In most of Pinter’s dramas, he explores different ways in which people use language as a weapon to attack their neighbors, friends, and relatives. Words in these circumstances are no longer the “skeins, meteors, mimetic spirit-sparks” as Howe sees them to be. (26) They are misused and abused by the speakers to achieve their own goals to get the upperhand in the field. This makes me to think further on the use of archives today. Are we also doing some violence to the archives? This also raises the question of the boundary between using and misusing archives. When the archives are separated from their historical contexts as the quotations are taken out from their original contexts, there are many possibilities to misuse the archives. Some nations are using the so-called archives to defend their ownership of an island, but it is just hard to detect the truth in the archives. Some of the historians are good at using the specific archives for their own interpretation. In the excess of the good number of archives, one fragment may give advantage to illustrate a specific period of the past while the other may not. In this circumstance, a nation can makes use of a certain fragment from the historical records and then even make some exaggeration of it to reach their own goals. But since the contexts of using a certain archive has been changing from time to time, it is also hard to detect the truth behind it. Every time we are “interpreting” an archive, we are at the risk of misusing or abusing it. Also we are, consciously or unconsciously, doing violence to the archives. We just cannot let them alone.

The Peculiar Experience of “Archivalness” in Two Appropriation Works

April 15, 2015 / / 0 Comments

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?

Farewell, Hutong!

April 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments

farewell hutong

 

(please click to make it bigger and clearer)

The collection of composite images is called Farewell, Hutong. Eight pictures, consisting of some fragments of cartoons, pencil pictures, oil paintings, real photographs. Each picture, symbolizing a singular moment of my past in Hutong and the courtyard forms a big scroll of the old times spent there. Thinking about the definition of “archive affect” raised by Baron in her book in which she says, “the presence is the desire for the archive affect, for an awareness of the passage of time and the partiality of its remains, for an embodied experience of confronting what has been lost, and the mortal human condition”, I am wondering about the reasons for the emergence so many nostalgic inventions nowadays. Farewell Hutong certainly is the product of the personal wallowing in the nostalgia. Making the appropriation of these pictures gives me the chance to revisit the past in which sweet memories come back in the most unexpected moments. I find that nostalgia has its pervasive power on me as well as on the others. It is in the form of subtle propaganda with targeted audiences and clear intentions. Like the nostalgic films spreading out their advertising slogans of “the golden age” American films, nostalgic picture collections send off its signals to its viewers of a shared experience. Farewell, Hutong may not arouse any sentiments in those who have never been living in the courtyard before or have never heard anything about it. This is why some nostalgic film has its own limited influencing boundary.

Also nostalgia is selective on its materials. The chosen images must be those which can stir the feelings inside and cause some resonance of the audience, otherwise it will not do. Like some Chinese films featuring old Beijing contextual culture, hutong and courtyards are the typically established elements which could embody the local characteristic of the city of Beijing. In my collection, there are rows of small houses on the two sides of the narrow and intricate alley, the small table surrounded by a couple of chairs with chess on it, the crooking tress with thick boughs which is indicative of the message of time, and some old tricycles and bicycles idly leaning against wall. These items point to the core of old Beijing hutong culture. They can cause the remembrance of a person spending years in such a place, especially those with a profoundly unforgettable memory.

The function of such a nostalgic collection poses another question, which seems even problematic sometimes. The audience can never revisit a past without making their sacrifices. For most of the cases, nostalgic films are not all about pure sentiments as they apparently seem. Audiences are invited to re-experience a past they share some common knowledge or emotional attachment. Some film critics reveal some unsatisfaction about the excess of “time travel films” in China. In these films, a person died in an accident (usually traffic accident) in the modern times and miraculously travels back to the ancient time either by the soul or by the body. The time periods the character travels back are often the most splendid historical periods in China without any doubt. Viewers of such kind of films will be led to the greatest historical moments, for example, the pomp of an imperial coronation, and participate with the character in changing the past history, especially the national history. The popularization of these films derives from the sense of honor linked with the national identity and status. The splendid historical past ties the civilians of a nation together and serves to strengthen the national pride. It also reflects some disappointment of the present and some lamentation on the loss of an irretrievable glory of the past. Also it offers the viewers some voyeuristic pleasure to look at a nobody transforming the grand history once belonging only to the great powers. (81)

Dwelling on her meditation on the possibility of the transformation of material archives by the digital ones, Baron quotes Derrida’s  thoughts on this problem: “new technologies of memory may alter our conception of the physic apparatus and, by way of these new technologies, transform human memory itself.” (135) The “time travel film” has indeed changes the human memory of a past. It changes the history of a nation by inserting a nobody into the ancient time and gives him or her the power to transform as one likes. It reminds me of the collage of my collection which, I have to admit, really interests me a lot. Taking a look back on the appropriation experience, I identify a similar pleasure in me as that in the audience of a “time travel film”. We think highly of the power in changing the old pictures taken in the past. By making a scrapbook of various materials, we are taking advantage of these items as the command and we do love it! We are now empowered as we are to direct all these materials as we desire. We use the cartoons of other stories to tell our own stories in the participation of a distant past. As the chariot of time never slows down its pace, human beings are working hard to catch up with it desperately. However, we can now reverse the order of time and even change the past in our revisit. We cherish most cordially the feeling of being the master of time and doing whatever we want in constructing our own history.

 

The Peculiar Sense of Digital Archives in “Gangnam Style Parody Dance”

April 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Exploring through numerous digital archives online has gradually offers one a “real historical touch” with the excess and the absence of meaning of the pervasive computerized record-keeping system of the internet. (153) The digital archives have their own ways to deal with the exceeding numbers of items housing in it. As Baron argues in his book, The Archive Effect, that the search engine has now taken the position of an archon in guiding the access into the constituent documents online, a specific question on selecting, filtering and organizing the digital archives comes to my mind. (142) When the “absolute authority” of an archon has been replaced with an automatic search engine, the power has no doubt been transferred to somewhere else. People might say that the search engine is all behind the curtain—-manipulating the results showing on the pages. The search engine really does its job in selecting the items, but it certainly cannot erases the fact that the invisible hand further behind the search engine has entered into the power realm. Numerous cases have shown that some videos are intended to be listed at the top on YouTube. Change the key terms whatsoever, it might end up with the same videos on the top. For most of the cases, videos like that are related to advertising and propagandas. The ads company pays for a website to put their videos on the top just for spreading their products. Or it might be the amateur film of someone who pays for the website to advance his fame with some ambitious goal to move on the social ladder. The seemingly “democratizing” searching tool no longer holds its neutral stand. Or it might never hold it before. It strikes me that the power within the archives always functions its way be it explicit or not. As people celebrate the idea that the authoritative power finally comes to its end in the digital age, they ignore the fact that power always exits in one way or another with its transferring between hands.

 

As “democracy” of a search engine becomes gradually problematic, “conformity” seems to be another issue arouses much concern. (152) The majority of the “Gangnam style dances” videos are but parodies of the original Korean version, be it Egyptian style, farmer style, Navy style, etc. Viewers, in the split-screen, could examine the sameness of the way the performers shake their arms, raise their legs and spin their hands. Apparently it does not do the performers justice if the singularities of their movement are erased completely. They certainly have their own unique features within themselves. Their differences exist in their precise similarities. (149) This has no doubt advanced the statement of the recognizable conformity among the individuals of the world despite their races, ethnicities and classes. (152) It appears to me that the culture industry still sweeps the world with its ever-present and ever-pervasive power. People make their own choices to conform with certain fashion patterns because they want desperately to fit in. The miraculous charm of the digital archive certainly resides in the way it shows conformity in a split-screen, which is unknown to the generation before. The four small windows shockingly manifest the movements of different groups of people, reveals how powerful the mode of fashion can influence people and how eagerly the performers aspire to go with the wind. The strong visual contrasts among them certainly worth a thousand words to say out aloud the fashion of today. No more need to be talked about on the topic of “Gangnam style”, the eyes of the viewers can detect it themselves. This is what the physical archive cannot achieve in the former times with only texts and old photos. It evidently shows the powerful function of the digital archive in unfolding the social scenes and emphasizing on the social issues.

 

One thing seems ironical to me is that the videos entitled as the “parodies of Gangnam style” laugh at the fashion of the dances of the original version as well as their own. Those who come up with their parodies with the “Gangnam style dance” have already given the dance itself the rewards. You would probably not make a parody to something that does not hit the fashion. The fact the performers imitate the singers of “Gangnam style dance” means that they really think this dance is something to them. But still they make up their mind to mimicry the dance and direct their sarcasm to the so-called fashion. They do not realize that they have already formed another “fashion” to be laughed at. They are doing exactly what somebody else is doing. They do not single themselves out by the way. There exists nothing creative in their parody dance. This could be particularly shown from the split-screen of the movements almost at the same pace with each other. The “sense of the digital archive” can also be clearly detected from this moment of fashion parody. (147)

The Unresistedness of Voyeuristic Pleasure in Watching Home Mode Appropriations

March 25, 2015 / / 0 Comments

It seems rather a common experience for modern viewers to have so many accesses to the home mode appropriations in the age of mass media. Sometimes we just cannot resist the desire to go to the movie theatre and see a film telling a story of someone we have no knowledge of in our former times. Meditating on the archive effect of home mode documents, Baron argues that “the interest we may have in such documents as they appear in appropriation films is also fundamentally and unavoidably voyeuristic—offering us the pleasure of seeing something we were not “meant” to see—and may come with an ethical price.” (82) This kind of voyeuristic pleasure really causes me to think about the relationship between the viewers and the performers in a home mode appropriation film. I am also eager to find out the reasons that lead to this voyeuristic pleasure in watching somebody else’s history.

One thing that comes up to mind when I am thinking about voyeuristic pleasure is the position of both viewers and actors or performers. Actually we should not, in a strict sense, use “actors” to describe those who perform in the home mode appropriations, because they are not acting for us as viewers but acting for their family members in front of the camera. But they are, as the home documents have been appropriated into a film, being watched by us, those who are not supposed to watch it. The different position of “watching” and “being watched” certainly distributes different kinds of power between them as performers and us as viewers. As we are watching the Jews going to have a picnic in the fields, travelling to Paris, or making a ceremony of marriage, we as viewers are watching their stories and certainly not being watched by them. So there is obviously this inequality between the power of them and the power of us. We know for sure their final destiny as long as we have some former knowledge about modern history. Before we go to the ending of the film, we already know what is waiting around the corner. We have every superiority beyond them as innocent performers having no sense what is becoming of them. We, as viewers, feel that we are assuming the position of “God”, anticipating their tragic fate beforehand. Getting on the upper hand of this field, we are quietly waiting the last moment to unclose everything to these performers who are in the dark. It is kind of like a person of modern age, taking a time travel machine to the past, having all the wisdom of the trend of history, and watching the people beside him in a position of superiority. As those beside him are worrying about problems of their age, he, as a person of all the sagacity of time, watches them with all the disinterestedness and detachment. The moment one assumes the position of detachment, one has already taken the position of superiority. So are the viewers in watching an old home mode appropriation film.

One thing that also contributes to the drive of watching a home mode appropriation film lies in the feeling of comfort from the viewers. For most of the times, the tragic home mode appropriation films seem to arouse more feelings from the viewers than those happy ones. As a good saying goes in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Happy moments in the family archives are sort of like the same while the most frustrating and the most tragic moments can touch us to the deep of ourselves. It also reminds me of something like bad news travel even faster than the good ones. We love to see and to hear the tragic moments of others though we really feel sorry for them and give our pities to them. But the moment we lament over their unhappiness, we are no longer seeing them as our equals. Instead, we feel our superiority over them. This is, in my opinion, one of the reasons that cause the voyeuristic pleasure of viewers. When we are seeing the Jews being persecuted by the policies of Nazi, we seek our private comforts from our own families in our own circumstances. We, at least, have the rights to live in this world, but they don’t. We can go camping or whatever in the outside, but they are confined to their house roof. It is kind of like the time one hears a bad news from others, one gives his pity as well as seeks his own comfort from his own situation of not being a victim of such an accident. Since we are necessarily members of our own families, the time we see those similar domestic settings in a home mode appropriation, we tend to recall the details of our own. When we see how the family in the film has gone through a great number of hardships, we feel relieved that we have narrowly escaped such tragedy by our own. The more the settings are familiar to us, the more we will enter into the context of the film and receive our reliefs that hopefully we are not the unlucky guys in that film.

 

Midterm Project: The Beverage Diary

March 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Something needs to be traced back and connected with its peculiar links so that our past is called back to the present. The Beverage Diary consists of some old pictures of the drinks ranging from the early 1990s to the 2010’s, the nutrition facts fundamentally translated based on the original versions, advertisements of these drinks in the old days and some diaries with a short introduction of the beverages. The volume intends to be something like an electronic journal intersecting with pictures and words. Some audio and video files will be inserted into the collection, for example, the short video of the ads in the past. One thing I like best for the collection is that it is primarily in the format of a diary, which means that it is carried out through an intimate conversation from the present to the immediate past. This does not intend to be something like an official record stating out a host of facts which stand apart from us with some distance in thoughts and feelings.

 

This is basically a digital archive, which means that some useful means of technique could be employed hopefully. I have inserted some flash into the collection to make it more pleasing to the eyes. I think this could be a creative attempt to combine archives and technologies all together. The digital archive, as it appears to me, can make its good use of all sorts of resources available at hand to make a more vivid description of what we, as the record-keepers of the old times, aspire to convey. By inserting some of the models of displaying the pictures, the space of the collection will be used more effectively, which seems to be hardly imagined in the physical archives. Four or five pictures or even more, whatever the number should be, could be presented in a consecutive order by using the space of only one. This could be something really amazing about the digital archive, which is being made full use of in this collection.

 

Also what I am thinking about is that how an archive could stand out less as an archive. It appears to me that sometimes, the official one used to intimidate some of its readers with its thick volume filled with cold facts of a distant past and its reserved manners devoid of some proper dynamic powers. What I intend to make would be something more like the engagement of a conversation between the past and the present with some nostalgic emotions. This is more like some family archive, or a personal everyday collection. Thus the format of a diary suits this purpose best. Some of the attachment to the beverages in the old days, some short descriptions of the drinks in particular and some of the interesting events connected with the specific beverages will be poured out in the diaries. This would be something like a person in her twenties addressing to the very same person in her childhood and teenage years. This could be like the most intriguing part of this collection to observe the development of the years progressed.

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Under the Continuous Monitoring of a Camera

March 4, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Forgetting has become a gradually hard matter. If an old picture fails to represent a past buried in the rubble, a video clip can always tell its own story. The ubiquitous cameras at every corner of the street conscientiously fulfill their duties to watch everybody passes by and forth and records everything down to the smallest detail. The modern city seems to base itself on the framework of a Panopticon in which the inmates are constantly being watched and examined. The reinforced monitoring of the highly regulated society forms a vast quantity of archives based on the social scene of the unremarkable day-to-day existence in a modern era. The database is huge while the content is enormously rich. Memory cannot fade in a surveillance tape where one can always spot the tracks of the old times. The moment in an immediate past is frozen in the unexpected shots.

 

A whole chapter of the book called “modern age” is devoted to the cultural memory practice of archiving on various levels. The advent of audiovisual records has brought some transformative advances into the way memory is stored and preserved. One picture presented to the eyes fades out while another one grows clearer. The fleeting moments are composed upon the reels. The practice of audiovisual archiving connects the fixed moments of the old photos in the stream of time and refill the imagination tank of the curious minds. The experience of watching oneself in the surveillance tape stimulates one to think about the blurring boundary between the past and the present. The person who appears in the camera seems nothing more than a phantom, something less than human and hard to define. Just imagine the scene: a person happens to be the spectator of the video in which he acts out a part in the past. This is a totally brand new experience offered only to the modern human being who ever watches around while being watched himself.

 

Forgetting is being dreaded in this age. Not even a single day has ever been passed without being recorded and examined. The archive fever extends itself incessantly in the modern era while gathers its momentum in an even stronger manner. The death drive to possess an immediate past pushes one even further in recording every detail of the fleeting moments of time. In the battlefield of memory, people fight to get the upper hand. The idea of collecting the fragments of a past in the surveillance footage serves to take control of a society in a real sense of the word. The loss of a single tape cuts off a portion of the memory. One who is devoid of the ability to recall the past is impotent in some sense. The person who passes by the camera registers himself as a member of the community who stores his memory in the collective archives of the government. He never intends to show his face in front of the camera yet he becomes an actor in the motion picture directed by an invisible powerful hand. No one can ever escape the memory of a surveillance camera.

L. P. Hartley has once said in The Go-Between that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” The past is no longer the past in the ancient times. It has become a past under the continuous monitoring of the camera. The advances of the modern era give rise to a detailed record-keeping of an immediate past which could be otherwise different. If there is no surveillance camera, would a past be rewritten somehow? Those who behave themselves under the constant monitoring might change into another person if there is no camera at all. The “impossibility of verifying the reality” (556) of a past still remains. I am just thinking about in an era of 24/7 monitoring, a person is becoming more and more like an actor in front the camera, even if he intends the least to be one. But the camera is there, the time one gets used to it, one runs the risk of becoming a person acting out in the stage.

 

What I am also thinking about is our excess dependence on the technique means for storing the memory which will inevitably engender the danger of memory descend of a whole generation free from the fetters of “physical record-keeping”. The memory machine will always be there for help, so what is the big deal for memorizing the things by heart? That would be the one of the most crucial predicaments which human beings aspire to extricate themselves from in a modern era. The surveillance camera fulfills its task of archiving the details of the everyday scene of unimportant lives and it even does a better job than most of us could ever have done. The human beings still need to maintain themselves a little bit so as not to be overwhelmed by the memory machines. As we are entrusting our memories to the technique means, there might exist the possibilities to turn the memory away from us too far.

Busy Archiving or Busy Living a Life?

February 25, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The age of forgetfulness is now making its way through updating the memory of each single day. The time you walk into the subway in Beijing, you will see people there doing their busy work on Wechat, a popular social networking device or another version of Facebook which allows a person to do some digital recordkeeping on a daily basis. Personal archiving seems to have now incorporated itself into the unremarkable day-to-day existence. A person who leaves a blank space in the blog loses the way to keep up with the fashion of everyday archiving. Everywhere you go in the city you could easily find those, holding their mobile phones and doing some selfies (sometimes even with a selfie stick) with a well-designed facial expression. Just within seconds, the self-portrait photograph is posted online with a few words illustrating beneath the picture, as if sending a signal to everybody else, “hey, buddies, here I am!” I am not even fussing about the orders I could usually receive from my friends before starting a big meal—-“Wait a minute! I am just going to take a picture first.”

 

We, with much more access to a bunch of simplest ways to archiving than the generation before, are desperately grasping the slightest traces of our memory in the age of forgetfulness. It seems like a paradox, but it also acknowledges some truth of an era which aspires to claim every connection with the years before and those coming after. The way to “seize the moment” has undergone a tremendous change from our time before. Personal archiving has transformed its way from a private business to a public concern in a digitalized century. The target reader has evolved from the solitary self to a host of friends and even strangers who has never been intended for. The digitalized archiving open to the public becomes the place for showing off or acting out something which one deliberately reveals.

 

A second thought on the personal archiving on the social networking services, I develop some mixed feelings about it. It has no doubt advanced our way through recording life on a daily basis with its easy access to instantly updating personal archives at any time in any place. Exquisite pictures of bright colors, audio and video clips of various lengths can be attached to the blog posts as long as one wishes. But still there is something missing in the digitalized archives online. Hard to explain but easy to get. I could still remember the time when I rummaged through the shelves and suddenly discovered some notebooks of my father exactly recording the days when he was preparing for the entrance examination. Leafing though the pages, a little yellowed by the past years, I realized that I could travel through the passage of time with these diaries. It was like I was getting involved in a conversation with my father, a twenty-something much younger than his own age now. It was amazing that the traces of time could be detected with these pages of an old notebook. Call it miraculous as you may, this is the unexpected encounter with an immediate past in our daily life. But years after our present time, I am just thinking about what will the generation to follow respond to those digitalized archives on the social network (or they might never get a chance to look these things up). These things are at most images captured at a random thought with an obscure purpose.

 

What I am also thinking about is the way we are archiving on the social networking services. As people are swarming to “the most photographed barn in America” in White Noise, it is definitely perceived that no one actually even cares about the barn itself. “They are taking pictures of taking pictures”, as Murray argues. That is exactly what we are doing with our digital archives online. It is like we are all attending a ceremony. Posting one or two pictures and a few words online is exactly among the procedures of the ceremony which claims our membership of a society. Failure to obey the orders of the ceremony essentially disconnects one from the rest of a community. But the time we are busy archiving online, we sometimes lose the chance to live just for the sake of life itself. The time we take the pictures of the scenic spots, we miss the opportunity to appreciate the true beauty of the scenery itself. It seems that we are pushed to live a busy life with a busy archiving task weighing on our shoulders. The process of recording life itself should not deny the possibility of living a real life in the present.

 

 

 

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