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This is not the most profound insight, nothing incredibly new here. However, it’s worth noting if not repeating: to read Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives is to discover a key to Howe’s poetic method and intuition. The text not only reveals, but also enacts the mystic flash generated through concrete encounter. “…[W]e need to see and touch objects and documents…”(9). The scraps of broad-cloth, embroidery, notebook covers, annotated manuscript pages, envelopes, prescription slips, linen folios—all of these, which animate the pages of S P, speak to Howe’s essay, which is composed substantially out of quotation, not through transcription (or even translation), but through a charged intuitive process of “stitching.”

After listening to Susan Howe give this lecture with the slide accompaniment at Harvard last fall, I was talking with another poet in the audience, and he remarked that he’d been reading Howe for the last fifteen years and would have read her work completely differently had he known that her practice looked and sounded like what we’d just heard. I felt equally demystified, and yet I first encountered Howe’s work with That This, and so this radical method, or the apparent “trust, or granting of grace in an ordinary room” (63) with which Howe uses to illuminate a “deep” text or the deeper realms of human experience seemed to me closer to the Howe I knew. I also felt empowered, because what I’d just witnessed was a clear argument for artistic practice, the role of intuition in that practice, and how to justify the appropriation of material, and it made sense that (though seemed almost secondary) this work took place in the context of archives.

In the “collaged swan song to the old ways” (9), a premise that echoes the romance of Farge and tactility of Steedman, Howe traces the immaterial currents that flow from material encounters to poetic artifice. “What if words posses a ‘spirit’ potential to their nature as words?” Her question tracks a proportional charge: graphemes and phonemes like atomic particles designed to collide. “Then things of experience in their passage between languages might materialize in posthumous vowel notes whipped up with shifting consonantal impact until by a side-step or little jump, the embroidered manifestation of an earlier vernacular reflects authority (edenic justice) through ciphered wilderness and pang” (40).

Maybe what I find most appealing in both S P and That This is the relationship between the surfacing of objects, notes, fragments within the archives, and the initial submersion of that material in to the collections, boxes, folders, databases, code of the archives. The potential or “spontaneity” that Howe links to archival material seems related directly to an act of re-discovery. “Often by chance, via out-of-the-way card catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular “deep” text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy” (18). Howe points to an equal and opposing action—like a Newtonian documentary second law, since the “instant of archivization” according to Derrida in Archive Fever “is not…live or spontaneous memory” (25). The setting-down, the deliberate act of impression, stores and preserves some potential force, and in the case of words creates for Howe “mimetic spirit sparks” (26).

Bound up in this process, which is a a process of contradiction, is loss and disappearance: the instant of archivization is also the removing from view—from the mind’s eye as well as the physical. And so, through a similar set of encounters with the dead, in a home suddenly transformed into an archive of one’s life Howe remembers her late husband in “The Disappearance Approach.” The title suggests that process of losing and finding, surfacing through disappearance. It’s the awareness that Howe calls forth at the beginning of “Frolic Architecture”:

That this book is a history of

a shadow that is a shadow of

me mystically one in another

Another another to subserve (39)

For my audio experiment I stretched 10 seconds of audio into 100 seconds. To be honest, I can’t find (remember) the original source of the audio file from which I cut the initial ten seconds, but it doesn’t really matter. What I’m interested in is the flattening of the audio, which to me immediately reveals its materiality.

It seems that the question of ethical appropriation, or ethical use of appropriated sound recordings, is located in the act of editing. There is a violence there, a “cleaving” that is natural to the archive, as it is often mandated by the space restrictions (temporal or physical) of storage or creation: hours of testimony must be compressed into a ten minute news segment. Or, original intention for the media is subverted/reconstructed/made new. But is it possible that the decision to record (a person’s voice, a natural sound, an instrumental roar) marks the entry point for ethical discussion? I wonder this because to record is to create, as Hardy suggests, from a real voice or acoustic event

“…a close facsimile of their vibrations captured by electro-acoustic technologies” (148).

The recording is the first inscription. Not the thing itself but its facsimile. There is another cleavage—captured instants—that otherwise might have drifted into chaotic memory (heard and forgotten) or passed unremarkably into a collision of open-air vibrations. The audio archive is those collected pieces of recording technology. Working with the voices of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, I listened to digitized recordings in the WPR’s web archive, I also handled a clunky cassette player placed on a table in the physical room to access lectures and readings not yet digitized, but stored on tape and kept on shelves in a closet just behind the door to the curator’s office.

Maybe, memory is the first inscription. Hardy makes the distinction that “[m]y memory, narrated through the sound vibrations of my voice, is another piece of history animated through sound” (148). Memory narrated by the body. I think Robert Pinsky says the medium of poetry is not language, but the column of the body through which air flows.

I appreciate what I understood as Hardy’s lingering desire make audio art beyond the audio documentary/oral history documentary. The expansion Hardy seems to be hoping for is a move towards materiality and the construction of space—soundscapes—rather than narrative. Narrative has a place in the construction, but it is no longer central to the document. Hardy points to Graeme Miller’s “Linked.” The public installation he cites as being “[b]illed as ‘a landmark in sound, an invisible artwork, a walk’” (159). In the creation of the soundscape or audio walk history is returned to the body through geography. Rather than sound pumped into the ears through headphones or ear-buds, the body occupies the same space as sound—it affects the skin.

The audio archive is the body. It not only determines how we sound, how we hear, and how we record: why do more than two channels of audio become disorienting? Is the body the site of first inscription? (Is that different from memory?) I think of Derrida’s discussion of circumcision as the “immemorial archive…on your body proper.” And I wonder to what degree the creation of space through sound—and particularly the sound of archival audio fragments, because these are the fragments captured outside of memory as facsimiles—is part of a desire to return (ethically like restitution) memory, and the physical experience of sound.

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?

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.

Baron’s concept of the “appropriation film” allows for a relational friction that seems to be what makes a film like Penny Lane’s The Voyagers (2010) successful, or at the least unexpected. It’s not just the figure(s) of the Voyagers supplying the metaphorical framework as well as temporally locating the actual NASA/space/Sagan footage of the film, but the incorporation of more “home mode” images that seem to build layers of complexity. This complexity creates, of course, the space for the romantic narrative, but also recontextualizes the mission of the Voyagers—they are as lane suggests: “fearless,” and “seeking.” Their hopeful journey which hadn’t been expected to last more than two years has now an indefinite end, and those golden records and their techno-steel containers will far outlast the life of the Earth.

While the narrative aspect of the film makes relatively clear the temporal and intentional disparities at work, what Baron has to say about the viewer’s struggle to discern these two elements in response to an appropriation film is particularly useful:

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)

Lane is using “archival” footage from the mid-1980’s to make a film in 2010. (Though interestingly according to this interview in The Atlantic her project began by ordering a collection of VHS tapes on eBay.) And the appropriated footage of the space program, Carl Sagan, and the beautiful while potenitally banal boardwalk/coastal images used in the film are in fact about the miraculous risk of love—Lane’s personal voyage—rather than something more universally historic, or so it would seem.

This blend of the “archival” launch sequences (particularly the tragic Challenger explosion) and space walks, and “little-blue-marble” shots, with Sagan and school children and with the more “home mode” shot, for example of a phone booth, unexpectedly create a portrait of what it takes to love—a very universal experience.

The balance of footage from these various sources, according to Baron, “allow[s] us to experience a sense of continuity with or contiguity across different temporal and intentional—or historical and social—contexts, or to experience the sense that “our” context “here and now” and “their” context “there and then” may be extremely similar” (43).

Baron goes on to suggest that “when we feel that we share the same context across time and space, we are charged with a moral responsibility towards those “others” to whose traces we bear witness” (43). Here, the image of the Challenger as a bisecting plume of exhaust offers the other side of that risk game, simultaneously connecting and tearing apart unfathomable despair with unimaginable optimism. The distant, terrifying, and reverent silence that Lane employs acknowledges that moral responsibility. And since Voyagers was made almost like a wedding vow, could there be the possibility that the temporality of that sense of responsibility might reach into the future, not just the present viewing of the past archival image?

The digital form of this archive is still under construction. This link (wave1 ) represents in-process work.

I’ve proposed to collect waves, which has resulted so far in a mass of digital video. The video, shot in the surf, captures ocean waves breaking along the east side of Block Island, RI.

In some ways the video documents waves, but what is also present is an encounter–meeting the wave in its breaking state. What’s captured by the video is a temporal window, a loop of that encounter.

How to catalog this collection presents the most significant challenge to the project. Physical attributes of the waves might be logical limits for a catalog, as well as location, and maybe even duration—the time elapsed from the wave’s peak to the veil of foam that reaches the beach and finally recedes back towards the ocean. 

However, the experience of being in the wave–having it pass over one’s body, or collect (catch) the body in its forward momentum–seems to so far delimit this archive.

This project proposes to explore what it means to collect something that resists collection.

Are the videos here simply part of a larger (continual?) energy transfer?

Since a wave is not a thing, but rather a disturbance or oscillation that moves through matter or space can that immateriality inform the archive’s catalog.

What does the wave have to do with origin?

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to convert the bin # to text

all Olson references are from the the first page

I’m interested in this idea of forgetting, which Thompson describes as both a “gift and a curse.” He writes, “by chipping away at what we experience in everyday life, we leave behind a sculpture of what’s meaningful to us, even if sometimes it happens to be wrong” (24). On the inverse of this idea is the realization that if we remembered everything—every detail of every moment—our brains would be incapable of discerning anything through the chaos of information. There’s an intentional parallel that Thompson strings through his chapter relating this problematic idea of hypermnesia to the “perfect recall” of the lifeloggers (29). As Thompson describes, sophisticated enough algorithms have not yet been written in order to sort and search the enormous amount of data captured by lifeloggers, which at times renders their comprehensive documentary records useless, or maybe in need of a defined use value.

This all seems obvious to an extent. And so, what struck me in the examples of Deb Roy and Gordon Bell was that in each instance where technology interceded to record and/or fill the role of memory a sense of liberation resulted. Thompson describes Roy watching his son’s first steps as “genuinely lost in the moment, enthralled”(21). And, he writes of Bell: “knowing that there’s a permanent backup of almost everything he reads, sees, or hears allows him to live more in the moment, paying closer attention to what he is doing” (32). I can’t help wonder about how realistic this idea of being freed from the burden of memory really is? And what are its nuances? How much responsibility does one have to turn over to digital record keeping in order to experience the weight of memory lifted from one’s psyche? And is this truly an ideal, since towards the end of “We, The Memorious” Thompson explores the idea of engineering artificial modes of forgetting (42)?

I can feel myself struggling with what seems like a true clash of analog versus digital values. Because there is sense that while a lifelogger might experience a freedom from memory (which even as I write that its seems like a misinterpretation on my part), they may lose the necessary perceptual abilities that the “fear” of memory loss naturally hones in everyone. What does a real time digital back up mean for how we construct our world? If almost everything (encounter/document/moment) is now recordable and therefore replicable, how does that shape what and how we produce? Again this seems like a throwback to Derrida: the act of “archivization produces and as much as it records the event.”

Maybe there’s another way of approaching this question of forgetting as a constructive force. In his essay “Drawn To That Moment” the critic John Berger offers a poignant description of his experience drawing his recently deceased father in his coffin. In addition to elucidating a how we perceive, and how a drawing functions as a collection of moments—the experience of looking—the essay discusses the construction of a drawing in terms similar to our discussion of archives, as a refusal of disappearance. And yet, this refusal comes from a process of construction. The drawing like Berger says “encompasses time,” yet its production comes from the working against time. The digital lifelog seems only to mirror time.