This clip is a first draft of my final project audio piece. Using an interview between Joe Biden and Katie Couric and making the parts that appear as silent in this clip resonate as a destructed file, I am attempting to display how partially compromised archives can relay a much different narrative than the original form.

On page 24 of Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars, she writes, “One historical-existential trace has been hunted, captured, guarded, and preserved in aversion to waste by an avid collector, then shut carefully away, outside an economy of use, inaccessible to touch. Now it is re-animated, re-collected (recollected) through an encounter with the mind of a curious reader, a researcher, an antiquarian, a bibliomaniac, a sub sub librarian, a poet.”

The thing that really struck me about this passage, and from then on its representation in Howe’s works, are the ideas of re-animation and re-collection, or recollection. While Howe may be positing them as things that occur simultaneously when archives are encountered by curious readers, it seems to me as though re-animation and recollection are working in two very different ways in her pieces. Though not dealing here with the disembodied voices of the oral histories we’ve studied, the idea of the disembodiment of the written works Howe presents is brought forth in her visual representation of the archived material accompanied by her comments on the person who inscribed them—his/her handwriting, family, love-lost, etc. In this way, Howe conjures the archive affect in viewers/readers who are confronted with a piece in original form, contextualized in the life of a person since-past and thus separated from his/her intimate writings. This, I believe is the recollection side of handling/analyzing/presenting archives.

The reanimation, then, I believe arises when Howe takes her experience of the archives beyond their affect and into embodiment. Perhaps the best example of this comes in the beginning of This That when she not only presents the “furiously calm” (13) words of Sarah Edwards following the death of Jonathan Edwards, but embodies them, confronts, and struggles with them as she makes sense of the death of her own husband. In a much more subtle form of reanimating archives, Howe writes on page 31 of Spontaneous Particulars, “Running over affinities and relations, as was her practice, Dickinson could discover on the previous STI page of her Lexicon Companion the definition for STICH pronounced STICH.” Here, Howe takes on the practices of Dickinson, reanimating something she may likely have done in order to think through and puzzle together Dickinson’s experiences with some of her expressions. Another instance of this reanimation in Howe’s work arises in her conversation of Henry James. He says, “All our employment of constituted sounds, syllables, sentences, comes back to the way we say a thing, and it is very largely by saying, all the while, that we live and play our parts.” To this, Howe responds by questioning how to then pronounce James’ character “Theale” and what to make of the pronunciation. Here, Howe again seems to take on James’ mind, acting out the possibilities of what he may have considered in choosing to include the grapheme, “h.” Like the previous examples, Howe uses the embodiment of the possible techniques of the author of the archival material, coupled with his/her thoughts, in order to make sense of her own question.

The reanimation of archives, as Howe exhibits in these varying ways, seems to exemplify the words she quotes of Wallace Stevens speaking about W.C. Williams, for “whom writing is the grinding of a glass, the polishing of a lens by means of which he hopes to be able to see clearly” (Spontaneous Particulars, 24). In recollecting archives, Howe exhibits how we feel the past in this action, perhaps cultivate an emotional connection to it and its loss. In the embodiment of reanimating archives, though, we make sense of it in our own lives—we grind the glass, take on words and feelings that are not our own, in hopes of being able to see clearly.

In Charles Hardy III’s essay, I was most intrigued by his discussion of Greame Miller’s “Linked” project and Toby Butler’s “MemoryScape Audio Walks: Voices from the hidden history of the Thames.” Both of these projects utilize oral histories and other audio ephemera__ surrounding particular locations, then presents them to be heard at the locations about which the audio refers. Here, we can see a use of archival setting to alter the archive effect and affect of the audio. This is not the same as what I would refer to as archival context, like that heard in Hardy’s “Mordecai Mordant’s” audio creations wherein oral histories are surrounded by real archival recordings from the era being spoken about.

In Hardy’s (or Mordant’s) works the archive effect arises in the juxtaposing of the reflective oral histories with the archival recordings wherein the oral histories thus affirm the pastness of the archival recording and conjure temporal disparity between the two. The archive affect, then, can be seen as arising from the vibration and tone of the speakers’ voices which are identifiable as elderly, coupled with the real sounds of a world since-passed for both the recollector and the listener.

Much differently, the archival setting, rather than context, of Miller and Bulter’s works places the audio within the place of occurrence, not a mock resemblance of it. While the audio recordings may not have taken place at the location, they are only heard within the setting about which they speak, thus transforming the recordings from being listened to in (what listeners would understand to be) the setting of the interview room itself. Instead, temporal disparity is created between the since-passed place that is referenced in the audio and the listener’s experience of present place within which he/she is listening.

Perhaps a similar example will help in the differentiation I’m attempting to make between context and setting. Chapter 1 of Dan Warren’s Son of Strelka, Son of God provides listeners with a creation account while simultaneously hearing sounds from nature. Now, we know that Obama was not speaking these words out in a cricket-ridden field of the Midwest because of the collection’s description, so we understand Obama’s words to be contextualized within the nature sounds in order to conjure a temporal disparity between the time about which Obama speaks and the sound of nature that we are well-familiar with. Now, let’s pretend for a moment that we don’t know that Obama’s words have been manipulated and placed within the context of nature sounds. Rather, the audio, at least in some places, could be understood as Obama’s setting as he uttered the words heard the track.

With the first experience of audio contextualized in nature sounds, any archive effect/affect is being produced through the relationship of the speaker and the speaker’s words to the archival recordings being used as the context for the audio. In the second experience, however, a pairing of tracks, or a relationship between separate archival recordings has not yet been formed by the producer of the audio—there is only one track encompassing the speaker and the setting, leaving a relationship yet unformed. Instead, any relationship concerning the audio remains to be formed by and with the listener. The archive effect and affect are produced, thus, not in observation of an existing relationship between speaker and context, but by a participatory relationship between the listener and the understanding of what it is to be in that setting.

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

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

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

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

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

For my collection, I ventured out on the T (for many, many hours) and collected oral histories from riders about their oldest memory in life. I set out to create a collection that reflects the diversity of the T–a place where people from all ethnicities, ages, and socioeconomic statuses collide amidst the rattle of the tracks, the seats with ’80s upholstery, and the booming voice of the conductor.

Being an introvert, the longest portion of this process was the time it took to muster the courage to approach people and ask them an intimate detail of their past before even knowing their name. Then, about half of the time I could actually get the words out of my mouth, the answer was, “No.” After several hours of working on the collection, only asking people who sat down next to me, or stood by me on the platform, I broke the set parameters of my collection. In reflecting on my partial archive, I realized that only white, American English speakers had sat/stood next to me and agreed to help me with my project. Since my goal was to capture the diversity of the “T,” I decided that I needed to focus on getting people from a variety of backgrounds with different voices to agree to participate, whether they sat/stood next to me or not. So, through many, many, nos, I finally landed with a group of diverse voices telling their stories. Some groups, such as those whose English isn’t entirely fluent, are absent from audio archive, as I couldn’t seem to convince any of them that their English was, in fact, great.

Another contributor to my goal of a diversified collection can be found in the anonymity of the collection.  Out of the 17 “T” riders who agreed to share their stories, I only learned the names of a few, and the greater story of the rider’s life from even less. I purposely didn’t record names, take photos, or elicit extra information from the subjects because I wanted these stories to be universaliz-able, in a way. I believe hearing a person’s story, however small, can promote empathy, and a feeling of connectedness between strangers, even if they don’t share the experience. Thus, the anonymity of the collection is intended to allow the feeling of connectedness created by stories to go beyond the speaker in the audio clip, and be applied to fellow riders. Essentially, after listening to the collection, you are able to board the T and wonder if the story came from the older woman sitting next to you, etc., causing you (hopefully) to want to hear her voice to see if it’s the same as the storyteller’s, and thus produce a connection through conversation that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. I hope that the collection will, in some small way, remind people that, when we all board the T as if in our own little bubble, we each have stories to be told and can all find connections in some way.

Some of them are funny, some sweet, and some tragic. I hope you enjoy!

OLDEST MEMORIES FROM THE T

The two readings from this week had me considering several things about audiovisual installments in both traditional and digital archives. On page 90 of Digital Memory and the Archive, Ernst reiterates Volker Kahl’s idea that “…electronic communication ‘is based on time. It leaves no traces apart from the result, which lies outside this process, unless traces are deliberately laid…’ Audiovisual media art is, by its nature, transient and unarchivable.” Applying this idea to film archives, such as the Scottish Screen Archive, discussed by Roscaroli, Young, and Monahan, seems to become particularly problematic (252). For, if audiovisual media art is “transient and unarchivable” then a film is, in essence, a highly incomplete text, missing not only the process that led up to the resultant film, but the contextual data—political, historical influences and the like—that spurred on the creation of the film before the process even began. Thus, what exists in the film archives is (contentually, not materially) a single version of a film, vacant of the multiplicity of narratives that were involved in its composition; it is a captured moment in the transient process that has been archived and considered the totality of the film, a “latent archive” (Ernst, 82). Thought of in this perspective, brought about by Kahl and Ernst, can it then be said that the film archive is merely a great collection of last pages torn from thick manuscripts? There is, of course, the possibility of bridging this incompleteness with written documents to scaffold the unseen/unheard political unconscious, and to supply for viewers deliberately laid traces of the process. Would this not, though, disrupt the precedent of the films in the film archive, making traditional documentation of equal importance in the archiving of the films, and thus transforming the film archive into more of an archive that contains some films, amongst other things?

The second main idea I was forced to contemplate with these readings was the idea of YouTube as an archive (Roscaroli, 252). Brought up by Roscaroli, Young, and Monahan, I quickly began to consider the immateriality of the site’s archived videos. Like the three authors also discussed, digital records in past forms, such as reels, VHSs—even on the personal level—are collected and archived for both their form and content. Items like these—and like someday soon, I’m sure, the floppy disk and CD-ROM—are not recognized for their formal archival value until they are part of a closed historical era of technology. For, in the yet-open present, they cannot be recognized or known as something that will soon pass away in light of the next technological advance. In the case of websites like YouTube, however, how should such an archive be preserved in an open present? And, when it is a member of a closed historical era, won’t it have progressed to the then-present, disrupting the data and metadata of its archive as a representative of the historical moment of the then-past? Obviously, as Ernst notes, the Internet is transient along with its audiovisual content, but if something, like YouTube, is to be named an archive, should it be made latent at some point before potentially valuable archival material is lost? If so, would this mean recreating YouTube ever few years, or is their no proper answer for the transient, archival site, but to let it continue moving through time with little trace of its origin and process?

“[Historical archiving organizations] are ‘not dispassionate and impartial venues, but rather institutions that carry out, however subtly, ideological, cultural, and politically informed agendas’” (Cox 12).

In the above quote, Cox discusses archival institutions as shapers, not mere handlers, of history through their respective agendas. The archivists and collectors of these institutions hold within their use and preservation (or lack thereof) of documents the power to create an accurate or fictitious narrative with the collections and to determine what’s worth keeping. When considering the personal, digital archive, then, we should likewise contemplate the power being held and how it can be used.

While Cox notes the risk of digital archives in their vulnerable delete-ability (6), if handled carefully, they can also prove essentially immortal as long as the world continues forth in its increasingly technological way. This leaves those in charge of the personal archive to create a possibly immortal personal history, which would far exceed the life of paper documents. If we consider this in terms of social media, for example, we can see the author of each of his/her posts as the archivist with archival power to determine his/her historical narrative. One can choose to write a fictitious memoir on Facebook, of which they will be reminded each day on their Time Hop. In this maneuver, through what Thompson describes as, “The real power of digital memories [to] trigger our human ones” (39) archivists can use their documenting power to pen a fictitious memoir on Facebook, then in reviewing it a year later via Time Hop, can refresh the falsified memory and affirm through his/her personal digital archive a false historical narrative.

It is in this falsification capability of digital archives that the storage of memories (both personal and cultural) becomes endangered. A similar example can be found in Thompson’s “We, the Memorious.” Thompson accounts how he sat with Gordon Bell and listened to the story of Bell attending a jazz concert in Australia. In his notes, he penned that Bell had seen the show with his daughter. The next day, however, Bell pulled up the audio clip of the conversation, wherein he tells Thompson that he attended the concert with his wife. To this, Thompson writes, “Bell’s artificial memory was correcting my memory” (30). But, was it correcting it, or changing the reality of the conversation? Since the discrepancy was in a story told by Bell, the presenter of the audio clip, couldn’t he have easily returned home, done some savvy work with audio software (being the techy genius that he is) and replaced “daughter” with “wife”? While likely not what happened, the great possibility of a falsified narrative to have replaced the real one, and be accepted by Thompson as a correction to his own memory demonstrates the falsifying capabilities of digitized archives.

Another branch to the falsification issue in digitized archives are the holders of archival power beyond the collectors of personal digitized archives, such as those who run the sites where social media histories are published. There is a power that digital publications possess that is equivalent to print materials where it should not be. While it is clear to note, as Cox has, the different in viewing edits and changes in a printed text vs. a digital one—namely, that those in print can be easily noted, while those in digital form are often invisible—the average person regards a published item on social media as being in it’s original form, though they don’t possess the technological skills to know if it’s been altered. For example, a posting on Facebook from five years ago shows up in your Time Hop. Though you have no recollection of the memory, or had remembered it differently than how you inscribed it on your Facebook wall, you most likely assume that the post is in its original form and that it (unless you make a habit of writing fictitious memoirs) is true to the memory it refers. Not many would challenge the published digital archive in favor of their memory (unless they have hyperthymesia). After all, it fails you on a daily basis and the evidence of your posted memory is staring you in the face. On the other end of that post, however, could easily be a computer genius at Facebook who thought he/she would have some fun manipulating posts from years ago, and successfully manipulates your published account. That hacker would have successfully, in most cases, therein falsified the actual memory in your mind and thus the narrative of your personal history.

While all of these examples are on the very small scale of falsified possibilities in digital archives, and the concerns of the delete-ability of digital archives by Cox, as well as the unreliable record of the brain’s memory that Thompson discusses are valid, there is a vast consideration of the falsification of digital archives to be considered as we slip further into a completely technological age where digitized records are highly favored over those of the body and print.