Ask yourself now - as the voices fade in and out and the turntable arm lifts, whirrs softly to the outer edge of the spinning disc and drops to start again - where the sound ends and your thinking about it begins. “Hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension”,[1] a question of hearing what is not here. (Here-ing what is not hear).
The digitally reproduced sound of the crackle of vinyl has been pasted into the audio track of several of my Premiere Pro projects. I was perhaps falling into the trap of reacting to “accelerated times and the impact of digital technologies,… (wanting) to overcome and cure… ‘homesickness’ for the past via media itself”[2] and believing what digital media in particular is able to pretend to be, with “growing volumes of digitally available (versions of) analogue content”[3] easy to find and often free to use. I would loop the sound, making sure it never ended. But it was invisible looping, a trick. Although wary of “veering towards excavation of curious instruments and odd gadgets just for their own sake”[4] and producing a “vicarious time machine,”[5] creating a record nonetheless felt like an elegant solution to the need for a symbiotic partner to the wallpaper – the circularly shaped container of sound turning in time but resisting progression, providing a temporal aspect to the installation that makes space for looking, while the wallpaper occupies the eyes, making space for listening. “The crackle of an LP … remind(s) us that we are interacting with something that is a recording of that which is past.”[6] Though not necessarily in this case. The recording is past, yes. The sung words are lifted from the box, translated into voice, recorded, digitally manipulated and pressed onto a record, all before this moment. But the sound is not permitted to end; the player repeats, looping like a carousel, bringing the familiar tune back around and back around again, never complete, always lacking, trapping a moment like a photograph does.[7] The turntable is a loop too, doggedly revolving through the time between the Box and now, unchanged in its mechanism for the most part. Some of what has been written on the role of archive footage and found film could equally be applied to the use of these found mechanisms and media instruments, though these seem to be thought about, on the whole, as if they are separate entities. For example, the use of archive footage has been referred to as having “auratic force,”[8] “a particular sense of modernity that is… deeply compelling”[9] and as creating “a gap, a void, a space (which) leaves way for the processes of interpretation and intervention,”[10] whereas media-archaeological works tend to be treated as metacommentaries on media culture, its motifs, its structures, and its ideological, social, psychological, and economic implications.[11] Fetishism for the past is vast – Instagram filters mimicking outmoded photography long after “the ‘structure of feeling’[12] gave an indication of how successful these images might be if extensively taken up by digital technology,”[13] the return of LOMO, hipsters, dramatic increases in vinyl record production – and the regurgitation of the past in the present often interpreted as indicating taste, stylishness and intellect. Perhaps providing a little ironic counter to the rapidity of social media image sharing, too. Fisher conjects that past hopefulness is haunting, when looking back onto that prior forward-looking.[14] But we can look both ways. That’s the beauty of a loop; of a carousel. That’s contemporary fashion: revival, with a twist. Anyway, can anything ever be new again? Postmodernism will process it, filtering it through ironic discourse, “not articulated simply as mockery, but rather as a rational proof vest that protects… from nostalgia.”[15] But then, “we hardly know what postmodernism was.”[16] It doesn’t matter – let it loop. Let it sweep you along in its eddy. Dive. [1] Fisher, p.120 [2] Niemeyer, K (ed.). Media and nostalgia: Yearning for the past, present and future. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. [3] Russell, P. (2014) Re:found footage. www.bfi.org.uk [4] Parikka, J. (2012). What is Media Archaeology?. Cambridge: Polity, p.144 [5] Russell, P. (2014) Re:found footage. www.bfi.org.uk [6] Fisher, p.21-22 [7] Barthes, R. (1993). Camera Lucida. London: Vintage, p.4-5 [8] Malik, A. (2006) ‘History in the Present’. Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video. Edited by Jane Connarty and Josephine Lanyon. Bristol: Taylor Brothers, p.48 [9] Malik, p.50 [10] Malik, p.70 [11] Huhtamo, E. (2016). ‘Art in the Rear-View Mirror: The Media-Archaeological Tradition in Art’, in: Paul, C. (ed.) Blackwell Companion to Digital Art. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 69-72 [12] Williams (1977), cited by Bartholeyns, G. (2014). ‘The Instant Past: Nostalgia and Digital Retro Photography’. In: Niemeyer, K. (ed.) Media and Nostalgia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p.52 [13] Bartholeyns, G. (2014). ‘The Instant Past: Nostalgia and Digital Retro Photography’. In: Niemeyer, K. (ed.) Media and Nostalgia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p.52 [14] Fisher, p.21-25 [15] Apolloni, p.2 [16] Ihab, H. (2003) cited in Apolloni, p.5
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