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?

This week’s readings from Jaimie Baron’s The Archive Effect focused on what constitutes a “digital archive” and what this means for users and filmmakers/narrators who choose to appropriate materials from these types of digital archives. Baron wrote that the very notion of a digital archive “destabilizes the notion of an archive as a particular kind of professional institution” (139). Baron pointed to YouTube as an example of “an archive without an archon” (140) with “no unified oversight” or “significant principles of collection” (140). I’m not convinced that this is necessarily a bad thing. There are a multitude of digital archives that are now in the hands of the general population. Each individual has the ability to create an archive and develop their own unique principles of collection.

Each individual’s own personal digital archive on apps like Tumblr and Instagram (and many more) do allow for a very personalized version of the past to be told through these mediums. Like Baron and Paul, I’m inclined to believe that the difference between the material archive and digital archive is not of content, but of structure. The interactivity of apps like Tumblr and Instagram which permit users to connect and impose order via the use of hashtags “add a further level in understanding the data as information” (141). All of the theorists Baron cites (Ricoeur, Paul, Spieker) all imply that the difference between material archives and digital archives is not in the content but “in the different relationships… enabled and established among these contents by both archons and users” (141).

As Baron says, “any kind of digital object that can be accessed by a user can be easily appropriated and combined with other digital objects in a new media work” (142). It was incredibly easy for me to go onto Instagram and find a video to use for this week’s assignment. Instagram accounts permit users to share photo and video content, and then to organize them and make them searchable using hashtags. (Granted, some users like to use hashtags on materials that are not entirely relevant to what they posted…) Most of the time, hashtags serve to connect one user’s post with other similar images/videos, and also help to connect users to each other based off of similar interests. The use of hashtags here in some ways helps to deal with the problems of excess of digital materials, and makes the materials slightly more searchable and manageable. There is still no one single archon controlling this process, however I would argue that the human archivist has not become irrelevant (146). The human intentionality is still very much present, though slightly less visible.

The discussion of Mass Ornaments tied in nicely to what I decided to use for my appropriated video clip today. I chose a clip of a friend hula hooping, that she shared on Instagram for the world to see. She is performing by herself in an empty dance/work out studio, but at the same time this clip was clearly made for public consumption. Mass Ornaments consisted of multiple clips of individuals performing dance moves, which is not an editing process I was able to do for this week’s assignment. It would be entirely possible, however, to compose a similar video of hooping videos of individuals performing their own unique performance that actually could demonstrate both “individuality and conformity” (152) among these clips. On Instagram, the hooping community is able to connect with one another and through the use of hashtags and user’s account names, are able to “call out” a friend to #stopdropandhoop. This starts an almost endless series of short video hoops. One user uploads a video of them stop, drop, and hooping wherever they happen to be (at home, on the front lawn, at the park, at a festival, etc.), then in the comments section identifies which friends they are now calling on to #stopdropandhoop. It connects the users and it would prove interesting to see what happens when one follows this train of videos, and combines/appropriates them into a new visual experience, and what kinds of patterns or discontinuities would emerge when the materials are viewed together sequentially.

In any case, the clip I chose was from a #stopdropandhoop challenge by a friend (whose user name I will not share, though her account is not private.) The purpose of hooping with a color-changing hoop (especially in a dark space) is for the hoop to move so quickly that it is almost impossible to see the individual movements of the hooper and the hoop itself. This creates a “trail” of light, and another hashtag besides #stopdropandhoop that gets used by hoopers is #showmeyourtrails. With this particular video, I decided to intentionally reverse the intended effects of the color changing hoop. I slowed down both the video and the audio. The original audio was a very upbeat, fast paced song and slowing this down considerably brought an eerie quality to this video that the original clip did not possess at all.  This is a “metonymic fragment” of a human life, and “before digital video cameras and the internet” (150-151) my friend could not have posted this video for others to find (and for myself to reappropriate, with her knowledge.)

I have created a short clip from a footage Doctor in Industry in the Prelinger Archive.  Instead of overlapping the images, I select five scenarios from the video and integrate them into one short clip. Each of them lasts about 5-8 seconds and forms different angles of viewing the story. At first sight, viewers may find it difficult to understand this short clip, but as Baron argues in chapter 4: “the film acts as a succession of encounters and interruptions that are only tentatively held together by the delicate narrative thread of the narrator’s reflexive meditations” (118), it seems that, to some extent, the narrators’ reflections of a video clip come from not only the completeness of a storytelling but also the fragments of a story that shape viewer’s thoughts in a figurative sense.

This clip covers different parts of a certain history of industrial medicine in the first half of the 20th century, consisting of an introduction in the beginning which, I think, makes it like a traditional movie, a love story of a doctor at that time, the doctor’s behavior in the hospital, the scenery of a hospital and the communication between doctors. Though these are just fragments extracted from a footage film, they still, in my opinion, picture the lives in the past as a whole. I end the clip where the doctors are talking and as a viewer, I’m still curious about what they are talking about and how the story will develop in the next step. It represents the idea of the footage are both explicitly about memory and culture, which“…not only enacts the desire to turn archival fragments into a narrative but also suggests that certain fragments can never be contained by a story”(118).

I’m also considering the idea of “gap” discussed by Baron who argues that“…such a gap in the archive visible may give rise not only to intellectual acknowledgement of how the archive effect can be simulated but also to an intensified experience of the archive affect, the overwhelming sense of time’s passage and of all that has been irrevocably lost to the present”(121). In my understanding, the gap which exists in footages between narrating and meditating generates the “history desire” to explore the past and present among all the fragments. In this sense, looking into those gaps makes it more interesting than just sitting there and watching appropriation.

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?

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.

Food Porn from MJC on Vimeo.

I was having trouble doing anything productive with the hyper-short-form, so I decided to play around with conjoining two different types of (vintage) video instead: a ~1965 warning film on the dangers of pornography entitled Perversion for Profit, and several ads and educational documentaries on the food industry, including primarily the Miracles of Agriculture film produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Of course, I had to call it “food porn.”

Using the audio decrying the moral filth, degeneracy, and destructive effects of erotic literature over shots of mass-produced agriculture and agricommerce is at heart “a film with a punch line, a joke on the audience who is always looking at and trying to understand the wrong image.” (Barron 132) If “the joke may be the form best suited toward exploring the archive” because every use of archival materials is in some way a misuse, this is the unjustifiable reinterpretation of the archival material par excellence: it literally just seeks to exploit the similar vintage effects (film coloration, etc.) of 1960s-era film to mashup two different topics for surreal comic effect.

Sure, here I could make a sweeping claim about how the juxtaposition of food and pornography examines the way we “consume” the female form (or the sexual encounter/description) in general the way we consume food, and how the former is rightly or wrongly pathologized in our culture. I could also say something about wanting to mix two forms of propaganda with negative and positive aspects respectively (pornography is destroying our nation vs. the modern supermarket is the marvel of our times.) The production also theoretically pokes fun at the moral panic of the anti-pornography movement, troubles our relationship to food by putting it within an eery audiovisual disjunct AND highlighting the “manufacturing” of the modern food industry, and directly juxtaposes the 60s-era fear of communism with images of well-known capitalist food advertisers as a version of the perceived communist “masters of deceit.”

And all of those things were on my mind in part (mostly during my choices for the last few seconds of the mashup), but: really it’s just meant to be a joke. I considered making it a 30-second film with the 27-second dramatic leadup from the pornography narrator, followed by three to five seconds of the cherries in the industrial bagger (possibly with cheery music; there was some in the film, but it faded too quickly to a voiceover.) The long lead-up followed by the sudden cut seems to be a very digital-age form of video mashup humor — especially if the content after the cut is itself ridiculously short in comparison or otherwise surreal/funny.

It’s possible I was overly influenced by Trash Night Video, though I don’t think I sunk-slash-ascended to that level of Dadaist supercut humor. I’m also looking at it and cringing at some of the sloppy editing, now, which sort of kills the joke on an experiential level, but this is one of the drawbacks of working with the Healey media lab software.

Using the footage from Here Comes the Circus found in the Prelinger Archives, I have created a 15-second clip that layers introductions to clowns—a composition I hope represents “one of the paradoxes of the archive: [that] it is constituted by both absence and excess” (109). The short video above shows the “absence” part of this paradox by being a trace of a trace of a historical event—fragments of the archived film of the real-life circus show that occurred in 1942. As Jaimie Baron argues, “Every document is always only a fragment of the vast trove of indexical recordings scattered throughout the world in physical or digital form”—so too is the source material for this short video (110). However, the composition of my video—the building layers of clown faces and the audio that accompanies them—draws attention to the massive accumulation of audiovisual material not only in the original 9-minute archived video that the appropriated clips belong, to but also, on a larger scope, the archives that the original video belongs to (never mind all the audiovisual material available in all archives). Considering this context, my video is based on a selection, leaving many parts of the full Here Comes the Circus video and other possible materials in the Prelinger Archives out. By presenting a selection of a selection, my short video shows the “absence” of other footage from within in original circus video, but also the vast possibility of material that could have been included within the Prelinger Archive. In this way, my tiny manipulative video acknowledges “the excess, ambiguity, and disruptive ‘real’” by causing the viewer to think about the material that’s there and not there—the limited (but also impossibly large) bank of possible material I could have spliced into the video clip.

The clip also confronts the temporality a viewer may experience while watching material from a given audiovisual archive by disrupting that experience’s typical linearity. If the archive effect is indeed an event for a given viewer, the event of watching my short film starts and then disruptively restarts again and again as each clips repeats and becomes buried beneath another clip. This restarting and layering draws attention to how “our historical experience is constructed”: a filmmaker gets to decide where each archival clip begins and ends when they fashion a (usually linear) narrative traditional to documentaries (Baron 174). However, the composition of my short film undermines the ‘touch of the real’ that documentaries often rely on by confronting through overlap and replay that this ‘real’ is a construction within the film as well as within the viewer’s perception of that film. In this way, my video too is a joke. The archival material is misused to create a clown nightmare, but also a historical narrative nightmare, in which the record of the circus becomes indiscernible and thus so does the “truth” that Here Comes the Circus  could purport. The play inherent in my video to some degree undermines the false power of the archival document.