Here’s a link to an in-progress draft of my project. My goals are to create an experience similar to  Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill: an interactive database narrative that promotes interactivity and the awareness of several choices that the user could make (Baron, 160).

In my project, I wanted to allow the user as much choice as possible when exploring a single archival document: a 1972 Mcdonald’s employee training video. When it wasn’t possible to provide choice, I tried to reveal my process in exploring the video.

When navigating the project, click on the blue links to either follow my exploration, watch the whole video, watch Mcdonald’s commercials from the 1970s, or go see my description of how the exploration was made so that you could, possibly, create your own exploration.

Through this project, I hope to examine the limitations of choice and the various ways that an archival video can be experienced when it is dissected and examined subjectively.

Note: There are a lot of bugs. I haven’t yet figured out how to link directly to internet sources—these failed links are observed by the links highlighted red. Also, some links don’t connect to the correct story element, leading the user to a blank page that says: “click here to edit”. If you hit a dead end you can click on the curved arrow in the left hand corner to backtrack. Also, most screens have a “go back to intro” option (but the link may not always work).

The second section of Howe’s This That, called “Frolic Architecture”, was, I’ll admit, mysterious to me. It consists of copied passages from Hannah Edwards’ diary that have been fragmented and stitched together, separated from their initial context. Often, the words overlap and confound meaning. “Frolic Architecture” refuses interpretation unless the reader can make meaning of the spliced, severed, and hidden words on each page. If the reader is to draw any meaning from this (in itself, rather than from its surrounding texts), it must be from the arrangement of certain words and sounds, or, perhaps, from extrapolating the surrounding words from the fragment. What is most frustrating, is that any way that this work is interpreted becomes entirely subjective. Howe has fragmented the archival document to the point of illegibility, further fragmenting what is already a fragment of history.

This, I think, is the point. Howe is playing with our interpretation of archival documents and our desire to craft a narrative to make the archival fragment whole. Yet, she is also showing how these fragments (a metonym of a metonym) relate to one another when she splices passages—after the splicing we no longer see these fragments as separate, they are related if only in the sounds the words convey. I see Howe referring to this practice in Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives when she quotes Henry James from a preface to one of his collections:

… Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so….All of which will perhaps pass but for a supersubtle way of pointing the plain moral that a young embroiderer of the canvas of life soon began to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of the tendency inherent in his many-coloured flowers and figures to cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes. The development of the flower, of the figure, involved thus an immense counting of holes and a careful selection among them. That would have been, it seemed to him, a brace enough process, were it not the very nature of the holes so to invite, to solicit, to persuade, to practice positively a thousand lures and deceits (22).

This metaphor seems to perfectly define the archival fragment, the gap in the archive, and the homogenizing narrative that forces meaning. It’s impossible to gain recordings or documents that could fully and truthfully depict a historical event (Baron, 110). Thus, those who create history from the archive, must “cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes”, yet the “careful selection among them” inevitably leads to the possibility of “a thousand lures and deceits”.

The archive, in “Frolic Architecture” is thus laid bare as a collection of fragments that intersect and relate, but that are meaningless without intervention from the viewer. Indeed, Howe’s practice provides more possibilities for deceit—a document that is fragmented from its meaning can serve whatever purpose that the viewer can imagine.

This is certainly an exaggeration of the appropriation of the archival fragment/gap, but in revealing our need to contextualize and create narrative around these broken passages, I think Howe is also emphasizing our desire to contextualize language itself—and asks us to explore language as the metonym rather than the archival document. I’m drawn to this passage from “The Disappearance Approach”: “Somewhere I read that relations between sounds and objects, feelings and thoughts, develop by association; language attaches to and envelopes its referent without destroying or changing it—the way a cobweb catches a fly” (13). Much like the archival document is only a fragment of a historical narrative, language is itself a fragment of archival documents, referring to the object, yet never fully describing it. These broken passages indicate Hannah Edwards’s words, but they cannot fully indicate her meaning. Much like an archival document, words cannot provide a comprehensive and final meaning for her object.

I took the farewell address that Nixon gave to his aids at the white house after Watergate and tried to create a dialogue between Nixon and Nixon (from the same speech) in which he appears to be answering his own questions or responding to his own statements. I cut out sections of audio from the speech that could relate to each other and placed them in a sequence that, perhaps, sounds like Nixon attempting to justify and forgive his actions despite his assertion that he has never “ducked” responsibility. The sound clips overlap at points to show a certain loss of control indicative of the days before his resignation.

Enjoy!

For me, listening to Dan Warren’s Son of Strelka, Son of God was highly enjoyable. I’ve read some of Barack Obama’s memoir writing before, so, while listening I tried to pick out phrases and sentences that I recognized from that reading. I thought that the ways that Warren combined these phrases to create an epic story (at least in the first 5 tracks) of Strelka’s birth and the rise and fall of a civilization was incredibly creative and sounded convincing. If it wasn’t for the short description of Warren’s project, I might have wondered whether President Obama ever wrote a biblical-style fiction story that is just now being released.

Why did I find it so convincing? Partly because the story seemed to build logically, but mostly because the audio tracks were flawlessly edited (or at least they were flawless to my untrained ears). I couldn’t figure out where the phrases separated from one another. I couldn’t tell where Obama’s words ended and Warren’s intervention began—other than the background music, of course. This perception was in sharp contrast to the other audio clips that we listened to: In Kahn’s Reagan Speaks for Himself, there are many obvious interventions where Reagan repeats phrases with the same intonation and background noise, indicating a replicated audio cycle; Hardy’s various audio projects embed sound effects and audio clips that remind the listener that Hardy is working with appropriated audio; but Son of Strelka, Son of God is not obviously appropriated if we consider the audio evidence alone.

This prompted me, once again, to think about archival fabrication. I keep circling around questions of authenticity, and for audio projects, I wonder: is it easier to create and disseminate fabricated audio?

The question is related to an anxiety described by Baron that is derived from the fear that advancing technology will allow easier fabrication. Baron uses Forest Gump’s appropriation of archival footage and the term “seamlessness” to illustrate this anxiety:

This notion of ‘seamlessness’ […] suggests that it is the fear that the ‘seam’—which marks the boundary between the found actuality elements and fictional elements of the image—will not be recognized that is ultimately most worrisome, particularly in relation to viewers with insufficient extratextual or historical knowledge of the imaged events (Baron, 59).

I hear this “seamlessness” in Son of Strelka, Son of God. What is worrisome is not the text itself—the text is clearly fictitious—but that the “seamlessness” exhibits the possibility of audio projects to trick the viewer into belief. Especially since listening to audio provides less opportunities to notice inconsistencies. In a video there are many clues that allow us to recognize the piece as fabricated: video editing, sound editing, visual extratextual knowledge, and auditory extratextual knowledge. In audio, however there is only sound editing and auditory extratextual knowledge. If there is no evidence of choppy editing and no explicit audio that runs contrary to extratextual knowledge, then a fabricated audio piece could easily be accepted as legitimate audio.

This…is a bit paranoid. But my paranoia is fed by Hardy’s abstract definition of aural histories’ effects on the listener. If aural histories “speak to us in more mysterious and personal ways” (Hardy, 153) then how will we recognize when they are speaking to us falsely? I think that if a scholar who has explored aural histories for years cannot articulate their effects on us, then we should be wary of deception.

This photoshopped image is not unique. If you type “photoshopped moon landing” into any search engine, you will get plenty of results that are either totally absurd or slightly absurd. My image falls into the first category. The background is an old photograph from the Apollo 17 moon landing—the last earthling visit to the moon. The absurd intervention is obvious. I’ve placed a UFO in front of the camera, covered in moon rock and dirt, as if it was dug up and is now part of an archaeological expedition.

I made the archaeological dig site even more absurd by placing artifacts (and the skeleton of…a moon creature perhaps?) all around the UFO and the astronaut’s equipment. The artifacts are from a variety of civilizations from Earth’s past: Roman coins, a pewter spoon found in a shipwreck off Florida’s coast, an Egyptian canopic jar, arrowheads found in Vermont (dating back to 5,000 BC!), and cuneiform writing from Mesopotamia. The image (if taken completely out of context with no knowledge of photoshop, the moon, or the various civilizations) depicts the discovery of an ancient civilization that existed on the moon long ago, and was discovered by astronauts in 1972. And what a mystery! How did these moon people live without oxygen? What did they do in their spare time? Is the sea elephant their friend, their food, or one of the great moon people?

Yes, ridiculous, all of it. But it was so fun and so easy to accomplish that I couldn’t resist, and I’m not the only one. The archival images of moon landings have been appropriated over and over again, spliced with digital images from the internet. The archive effect is obvious—the intention of the image is no longer to preserve a historical record, but to act as an absurd joke.

Baron, in distinguishing the archive effect from the digital archive effect, emphasizes the “opportunities” now available to users of technology that were “not available before” (The Archive Effect, 151). In the case of the photoshopped moon landing images, photoshop and the internet search engine work with human intention to create absurdity. The digital images I found online were found through searches of “ancient artifacts”, “Egyptian artifacts”, and “archaeological artifacts”. These artifacts are photographed and then digitized in an effort to preserve historical record, but the search engine (and Google’s image search) makes it simple to subvert this intention and use the artifacts for whatever purpose the internet user intends.

What my appropriate image (and similar images made by others) shows is the ease with which an archive’s images can be repurposed. Much like The Tailenders, this photograph and others like it, “point to the fact that archives and the indexical traces they preserve often escape the control of the archons” (Baron, 114). This fact is more pronounced in the digital archive because of the new technologies available on the internet. Those who post images, text, and videos online allow users not only to view their content, but also to appropriate their content and subvert their control over the website’s “archive”.

The image that I’ve created and the images that others have created are obviously photoshopped and cannot be taken seriously. Even if a photoshopped image appears “real” it would have to be corroborated by other sources and materials to be authenticated. To what extent do material archives aid in the authentication of the digital archive? If we imagined a totally digital world, is it possible to authenticate an image when appropriation is so easy and there are no outside sources to corroborate those images?

Jamie Baron distinguishes between two nostalgias evoked by the archive affect (“the overwhelming sense of time’s passage and of all that has been irrevocably lost to the present” [121]). Restorative nostalgia idealizes the partiality of the archive and leads to a desire for the past that never was and reflective nostalgia takes an honest look at the past and the passage of time—in the case of the archive, images are not fetishized or fixed and our interpretation of the image remains flexible (129-130).

In my video, I try to take a nostalgic clip from 50s American culture that evokes restorative nostalgia and alter it to (hopefully) evoke a reflexive nostalgia. I chose an advertisement for snack foods) played during the intermission at drive-in movie theaters . Drive in movies were at their most popular in the 50 and early 60s, have been in decline since the 1970s, and are very rare today. The loss of this slice of American culture and the viewing of This advertisement has the capacity (for those who recognize it) to evoke the archive affect and restore the 50s/early 60s idealized past. It displays snack foods singing, urging people to buy snack food for the movie. This is followed by a popcorn machine and then four movie goers happily eating the snack food advertised. The ad is all underlain with the catchy “Let’s all go to the lobby” jingle.

In order to create a more reflective nostalgic experience, I try to re-edit this clip to emphasize the pervasiveness of the snack food products—the true purpose of these advertisements. Although some may remember the jingle in relation to drive in movies and an idealistic time, the intention of the original video is to push the viewer to consume snack food.

I start with the people eating, slow down the jingle to create a slightly disturbing effect, and then allow the food products marching down the movie aisles to appear below the layer of people eating. My intention was to give the impression that the food products have now become ingrained in the people’s (and perhaps our own) psyches through repetition. It’s not just a happy jingle, it’s a sort of invasion into the brain.

I’ll finish by pointing out that in order to recognize this archive affect (and archive effect) one must 1. Recognize that this is an old cartoon and not a contemporary cartoon and 2. Recognize the jingle and its context. If a viewer is unaware of the jingle and its role in advertising, then they will not understand the video, or its attempt to create a different nostalgic effect. This leads me to wonder about the extent of contextual knowledge necessary for nostalgia to be evoked. Is it only necessary to recognize time has passed?  Is it also necessary to recognize the ideal portrayed by the object being observed? In other words, can nostalgia (restorative or reflective) be evoked subconsciously?

Prelinger’s choice of audience discussion over a traditional voiceover narrative or soundtrack draws attention to a complication of the “intentional disparity” discussed by Baron. It is not possible upon viewing No More Road trips? to absolutely define Prelinger’s intentions. Without narrative, the meaning of the film is ambiguous, it “suggests a form of irony that does not just ‘reverse’ meaning, but rather puts it in question indefinitely” (Baron, 36). This disparity—one of the necessities of the archive effect—is further complicated by the presence of Prelinger himself. In class we watched the movie with minimal information about the film. We may have read Prelinger’s blog post about the film, or we may not have. On his blog he has specific questions that he wants him film to explore, such as: “Are we approaching “peak travel?” Is localism, which is a pretty good thing in many ways, edging out the nomadic tradition in America? Will we be staying put more than we have in the past? And if so, how will we react to diminished horizons? Is it possible that the journey TO America, which so many new Americans have made in recent years, might become a more significant part of our shared consciousness than the journey WITHIN America?” (Prelinger blog). These questions show Prelinger’s intention of the production of this film that is distant from the original intention of collecting home movies to document road trips.

But how important is the author when there is no narrative? If this film were to stand alone without any framing by Prelinger, there may be very different perceptions of what this film’s intentions are. Does it document American travel?  The changes in fashion? In architecture? In automobile design? Even with Prelinger’s framing, the film seems to be distant from him. Without an explicit narrative there appears to be no author—there is, then, a third disparity: a disparity between the author’s intention and the intentions perceived by the audience. This sort of ambiguity effectively elides the author from the film. Yes, the home movies were clearly placed in order by someone—but if there is no explicit intent, then it is possible that the document was found in that order.

The danger of this ambiguity of authorial intention is that the film could be seen as a document rather than a documentary or an appropriation film. It would appear that nothing was altered. Baron notes that, to a degree, this depends on the audience: “if the viewer does not perceive this difference, as a difference within the text, the archive effect will not occur and the text will remain a document. Not a documentary and not an appropriation film”. Prelinger makes one other choice in order to avoid the confusion of his film with a document: he chooses the venues where his film is shown.

When discussing Jones’ choice to show his film, Tearoom, in only “unalienated” settings, Baron defines the term “unalientated” as “contexts in which it will be regarded through a critical lens” (Baron, 33). Similarly, Perlinger does not just post his film online—he makes sure to send his film to events where discussion will be possible. Intention is dictated by the environment where the film is shown. It privileges the collective interpretation of the audience over the author and avoids the classification of the film as document. The archive effect, then, is dependent on the audience and the environment rather than textual narrative or extra-textual knowledge of the individual.

What does this show us? This does exhibit a very clever way or removing the dictatorial control of the author and creating a democratic interpretation. Yet Prelinger still has the power to choose where and how he shows his film. I think this also points to the yearning for an open and public archive. Prelinger plays between document and appropriation film in order to realize a certain democratic influence that the institutional archive has been without. It is not totally democratic, but it does reach for that ideal.

I work at Merck: a large pharmaceutical company. Here, in Boston, research is conducted to find treatments for cancer, asthma, arthritis, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis. The records that are kept, for the most part, preserve the characteristics of the company (financial records, receipt records, inventory, protocols, etc.). They are representative of the actions of a corporate entity, but not of the thousands of people that allow the entity to function.

When I first started collecting sticky-notes, I was interested in analyzing material that is easily disposed of in this age of digital storage.  As I collected, however, I realized that the easy disposal of sticky notes makes them material that is outside the purview of Merck. These handwritten reminders, directions, notes, and other ephemera, then, could represent the actual individuals within a corporation. (I thought about emails, but they would have been impossible to collect [protection of confidential information]).

After collecting these sticky notes from the seventh floor (the floor I work on), I decided that I wanted to maintain the materiality of this medium because it is the materiality that allows for the individuality I was interested in. So I pinned sticky notes and category labels to a cork bulletin board.

Poor quality photo, weak camera phone, hopefully you at least get a sense of what it looks like.

Cataloguing was a challenge. I could not decide on a way to organize that would accurately and fairly depict the individuality of the handwriting and content of each sticky-note. So, I chose to make a dynamic archive. The categories and the organization of the sticky notes within the categories can be constantly changed. Just as people’s writing, memory devices, and syntax are not easily categorized, so must the sticky notes avoid permanent categorization. For the time being, I have placed the sticky notes into four categories: directions, reminders, notes, and miscellaneous. I used strips of dry erase board for the category labels. They can be erased and renamed at any time and more strips of dry erase board can be used to create more categories. The sticky-notes themselves can be moved with the push pin that fixes them.

What can be drawn from this? It depends upon how someone interacting with the archive chooses to organize. If the sticky notes are arranged by color or type, then the information could be used by a sticky note company to discover what kinds of sticky notes are most popular (imagine this on a wider scale). If the sticky notes are arranged by context of the writing, then there is insight into the ways in which people go about their day within a corporate entity—how they work, how they remind themselves, how they interact, how they express themselves, and how they connect to each other.

Practically, this is not an archive that would normally be saved. This archive reflects more of what we throw out than what we keep. It’s a neglected collection that includes aspects of the personal that cannot be seen in company records. It eliminates the impression of a singular autonomous company voice and produces many voices that are often silenced by a paycheck and subordinated by the hierarchy of a large company.

The archive can also act as an exploration into the merging of a dynamic and material archive. What are the consequences of an ephemeral archive that is categorized by the viewer? What is lost? What is gained? Is there a place for it?