Charles Hardy’s use of quadraphonic audio to create pieces of “audio ephemera” such as “This Car to the Ballpark” are not just aural artwork, but soundscapes. The movement of a train across the four speakers and the layering of sounds such as rain and crickets behind singing and William Robison speaking create the illusion of various levels of proximity to the listener. The (abstract, nonmaterial) train appears to travel southwest to northeast as the whistling sound that emanates from it moves from one speaker to another (while in fact, the original audio is flat). In this way, the audio-scape is made three-dimensional through form.

Hardy creates a similar affect when he pairs a woman’s narration with the jangle of a name tag and the pitter-patter of dog paws in “Virgins.” The narrator tells about meeting a man at the same time the sound of his voice emerges, giving the listener both the voice of recollection and the present-tense audio of the plot. In this way, the piece of audio art conveys two temporalities at once. While not as synesthetic as the “movement” in quadraphonic audio tracks, this technique constructs a sort of travel that’s imagined.

This clear manipulation of “space” and “time” seems to be an integral element in aural art making, unlike the more historical audio pieces that Hardy’s career focuses on. However, the presence of these spatial and temporal illusions in Mordecai Mordant’s Audio Ephemera reminds a listener that these aural devices are available to historians and journalists too. While historians typically attend to the structure of audio with a fidelity to “fact,” these topographical and temporal manipulations are possible in the development of those truthful narratives too. In fact, I can recall Ira Glass of This American Life explaining how radio newscasts will switch from one journalist to another to give the illusion that the newscaster delivering a specific story is somehow closer to the real action. This illusion of temporality and geography seems to be one of the elements that Hardy celebrates through his artwork—one of the “performative elements” that he hopes will keep historians and documentarians interested in the form of audio and its true material, the sounds themselves (159).

While I’m wary of a historian getting too exuberant about these techniques and can envision a misguided attempt to create propaganda, I agree that developing these technical skills will make historians better analysts of audio and its aural devices. A strong understanding of the devices available to audio recorders and mixers enables a historian to investigate the integrity of any produced piece of oral history. In this way, Charles Hardy has the expertise to both create and analyze complex sound landscapes, but also to fabricate audio history, if he should so choose.

However, it feels unfair to evaluate Hardy’s work in these ethics. Mordecai Mordant’s Audio Ephemera is a nostalgic celebration of sounds that are easily overlooked and lost. The presence of the whistling train or William Robinson’s muffled mumbling—and the ability to play each again and again—is the point in and of itself. They’re ephemera in an ephemeral medium—the sections that would be edited out for the very purpose of “sticking to the facts” or “point.” Ironically, maybe it’s the art, which uses these manipulative techniques to map space and sound, that creates the “truer” history—one that presents the sounds alone rather than the meaning that language fashions those sounds into.

To create this composite digital image, which I’ve crudely dubbed “Haunted Maternity Ward,” I first over-enhanced the contrast of a digital photograph of a new mother, baby, and sister in a maternity ward. Then, I cut and pasted in clips of three children at the Bourke Street Baby Clinic’s Alice Rawson School for Mothers and a dog with a backpack from two additional digital images. Using the spot-healing tool, I blurred the edges of the various layers to create a merging effect between the background image (the maternity ward photo) and the four clips, which created somewhat of a halo around each pasted in child and the dog. The dog fragment stands out for its more yellow pigment, a quality that most likely reflects the original photo paper, as well as its position in the far right.

One question in particular arose for me after considering the product of this Photoshopping process: Have I ruined all possibility for this composite image (and its original three images) to provide any historical evidence? Is it possible for “Haunted Maternity Ward” to carry any authority that the original archival photographs do? Baron argues, about film and audio, that “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). Surely such as problem could apply to still images too. If someone gazes as “Haunted Maternity Ward” and cannot locate the original contexts (times and places, and the narratives that belong to them), they may not give any part of the original photographs authority as historical evidence. The yellow pigment of the dog alone may cause a viewer to distrust the cohesion or unity of the three original photographs. Thus, the process of cutting up the digital material may also have cut up any status of the original three images as “archival.”

The inspiration of this collage comes from a book of world’s greatest oil paintings I read before. On the left of the top is the original version of The Scream. Later I find some interesting pictures that derive from The Scream and make them into a composite image. I’ve tried to extract the character who’s screaming from each picture and paste them all onto the original one, but it turns out to be a little bit disordered and weird. So I just put them into a sequence and see what I can get from this collage.

This painting, which is part of a series of paintings done by Munch, has always been interpreted as a symbol of human emotion in relation to expressing despair, anxiety and agony in various ways. The distortion of the figure and color can be easily spotted in the top left picture which is originally a counterfeit. In the second row and third row, things become much different. I think these interesting pictures have already been more or less photoshoped by someone else. By viewing them, I have a feeling that the consolidated interpretation of desperate human emotion is falling apart and something of postmodernism can be mixed into the understanding as well. Like, the first and the third in the second row are mocking politics to some extent; the cute one, at least I think so, in the middle seems like a droll conversation between two great powers in a certain field. Pictures in the third row are much more diverse in the colors and figures. They offer a subtle blend of cartoon, Pop art and popular Emoji with the famous painting.

Baron restates Derrida’s argument in her book that “archives are structured according to the logics of power that determine which objects are preserved stored, and revered and which are excluded, thereby creating the past rather than simply preserving it”. It reminds me that apart from the impressive symbolization of human surviving, The Scream also represent a power of art that people tend to respect for the most part, but there are still many who’d love to make something new out of it. I think this process is in accord with the archive effect in terms of reforming the archival document “as an experience of reception rather than an indication of official sanction or storage location”. Now I find myself more affected by this collage in an interesting way of being attracted and fascinated rather than the “feeling of loss”.

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?

I wanted to play around with Motif #1, which is apparently the “most often-painted building in America,” or at least often claimed to be. I probably would have given up on this in a larger project after having trouble finding a public domain / CC-licensed photograph of it, but I settled for one a bit too small for my liking (600×800.)

The reason this building is painted so much is due — in addition to its location, good lighting, and the fact that it’s in Rockport which has often boasted artist’s colonies — to the idea that it’s an almost archetypal New England fishing shack, down to the color. This attempt to evoke the past through a sort of classical aesthetics made me want to reread Prelinger, especially his note about how “remixing is estrangement […] and yet the raw material remains familiar and recognizable. It’s at once a subversive and reassuring process.” My sort of generic idea was just to recolor or decolorize the shed (which was relatively easy, though the reflection not so much), but I wanted to play with Photoshop a little more and also defamiliarize the Motif a little more severely, so I’ll show a few more in addition to that.

We could think of this one in relation to Barron’s discussion of the idea of colorizing WW2 film. Colored film — if “authentic” — feels closer to our lived experience, while artificially coloring that film would be a betrayal of the material’s documentary/evidentiary authority, even though color film from the era exists and it would only bring us closer to representing what life was actually like, since most of us experience reality in color. If Motif No. 1 is famous, and famously red, what does stripping that color do? Presenting a black-and-white image of this would be boring,  but does the contrast here have an effect? I’m not sure. I do find it aesthetically pleasing.

Similar playing with the aesthetic “striking red building” trope, although I couldn’t fix the water/reflection in this one. I almost want the effect here to be experiencing this photo as a digital artifact — the building itself was so clearly wiped out (painted over?) and replaced with an unnatural, intuitively recognizable-as-digital cherry red, or maybe I should say #FF0000. Here the digital format of the experience is a disruption of expectations.

I played around more with basic Photoshopping here — including replacing the building with an image  of the Photoshop “transparency layer” gray-and-white checkboxes, which got me thinking about signaling and framing a piece of material vs. the actual material itself (in this case, the checkboxes signaling transparency more effectively, at least in our current digital era, than actually leaving it transparent could have been.) The image I’d planned to present had thin strips of each of these “effects,” almost a collage of each of those layers, and the overall result was jarring; it might have veered too much into sheer glitch aesthetic, though, and more importantly that’s the only image that seems to have been messed up somehow when I saved (I could pull another copy from the original .psd, because you have to always always always save your .psd file, but I think I like the ones I’m presenting here more.)

I then had the idea of completely reworking the “Motif”: replacing it (since erasing it would be beyond my Photoshop skills entirely) with another building, preferably one that signaled modernity in the way that this signals “classic New England.” So I searched for a few entirely unscientifically conducted surveys on what the most-photographed building in the U.S. was, and the answer seemed to be, of course, the Guggenheim in NYC:

Ceci n’est pas une motif. (I could have gone with something iconic, the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Opera House, something very modern and very recognizable, but I wanted something American; I was considering that one building on the MIT campus, please mentally insert whichever weird MIT building pops into your head first, but maybe that would have been too parochial; this was a good one for the shape of the building and provides exactly the visual discongruity I wanted, although there’s the obvious concern about deciding that an art museum’s exterior is the “most photographed” building in the U.S. based on geotagging.)

Some fun facts to leave you thinking about authenticity, replicating a “real” material object through visual imagery (of whatever medium), and the artifice sometimes involved with that: this historical building was destroyed entirely in the Blizzard of ’78 and they rebuilt it. My next step working along these lines would be to try to find a shot of it (the original or the rebuilt one) from a similar vantage point to the photos of its destruction and try to splice those together.

They also currently use a red paint that looks weathered even when first applied.

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!