Silence, Cacophony, Crosstalk: New Talking Points

Silence, Cacophony, Crosstalk:
New Talking Points
Rick Prelinger
#orphans10, 2016-04-07
@footage
1Thursday, April 7, 16

We collected more
We collected in new ways
Now it is time to say why we collect

what motivates the archival impulse
to trigger Proustian remembrance
to buttress doctrine and belief
to feel intensity of expression
to collect yarn for historians
to substantiate reparation
to scenarize the future
to arrest deterioration
to legitimize a culture
to trap us in the past
to sustain resistance
to touch documents
to eternalize power
to love a platform
to restore justice
to fill in outlines
to allay trauma
to inflict pain
to enclose
to hoard
to share
what motivates the archival impulse
to trigger Proustian remembrance
to buttress doctrine and belief
to feel intensity of expression
to collect yarn for historians
to substantiate reparation
to scenarize the future
to arrest deterioration
to legitimize a culture
to trap us in the past
to sustain resistance
to touch documents
to eternalize power
to love a platform
to restore justice
to fill in outlines
to allay trauma
to inflict pain
to enclose
to hoard
to share
[45 seconds]

I've been speaking publicly about archives for about ten years, and one of my most sobering take-homes has been that most
people, especially our users, don't think very imaginatively about us. They think of archives as somewhat gloriﬁed warehouses or
as service organizations, rather than as incubation points for culture, works of art, histories and social change. The silence
separating those who think about archives and those who work in them is striking and unproductive. And we see this lack of
crosstalk manifested in language, in status and in workﬂow.

Our Librarian emeritus, James Billington, liked to say: "Stories unite people, theories divide them." It's funny -- I always wanted it
to be the other way.

Because I'd like to ﬁnd deeper ways to think about working with moving images, and this means trying to pull archival theory out
of academia and bring it into the places where archivists work. Could we catch up with our colleagues in textual archives and the
digital humanities, and ﬁnd ways to think harder about the purposes and goals of our work?

Though our workplaces may seem quiet and our workﬂows seem to appear apolitical, archives overﬂow with contention. To
collect is to commit to the survival of certain records over others; to arrange and describe is often to enclose; to preserve is to
resist power, violence and constraint; to enable access is to invite misunderstanding and aggression. And yet "archives" yearn for
praxis; even menial archival labor is practice in search of theory. The alternative to thinking all of this through is not to think, and
that leaves us with pretty much only one rationale for moving image archival work that remains the same even as the world
changes around us.

cinefilia
Zinemazaletasunak
filmofilije
cinefíliacinefilie
cinéphilie
Cinephilie
κινηµατογραφοφιλίας
az igazi mozirajongó
シネフィル
시네필синефилия
цинепхилиа
cinephilia
Sinefili
синефіли
ַ‫א‬‫סינעפילי‬
translate.google.com
That rationale is cinephilia. Yes, we're all cinephiles in our own ways. [I love home movies, so I am not here to bury cinephilia.] But
cinephilia isn't enough.
We need to articulate reasons for our practice, not simply accept it on an unspoken level
We need to look outward beyond our walls, and understand that even if we work in a private institution or deep within a government
department, we are effectively working for everyone and for those of us not yet born
Films are powerful, but they lack the power to preserve themselves.
And the reasons to preserve them are not always apparent.

“When Beth walked with Connie she met on the street a towhee, a
sugar maple, a Darwin tulip. Other beings crowded the spaces
between human habitations. When she was with Miriam, the space
between things was filled in with human cries and colors of
relationships; the needs, the hungers, the plots and plans of people
they knew swarmed around them. With Laura, streets were political
manifestations: on this block the scars of urban renewal showed, on
that a particular corrupt combine owned apartment houses and
gouged rents, here was the site of a busing controversy.”
— Marge Piercy, Small Changes (1972)
I like to think of moving images and sound as privileged evidence, but observed closely, moving images and sounds often appear
as suggestive, enigmatic anecdotes, rarely adaptable to single interpretations. I sometimes worry that the institutionalization of
archives has limited the imagination with which we approach their holdings. Consciously or not, we gravitate towards imagining
uses that we approve of, or uses that fit into familiar frameworks. And use restrictions are likely the greatest factor that limits our
(and our users') ability to imagine new uses. (Lockdowns also contribute to deterioration.) There are not many films like we saw
last night being made.

Could we throw out our preconceptions, or perhaps better our predispositions, about archives and try on some new deﬁnitions?
In fact, forget deﬁnitions. Let's try dreams. Here's a cacophony of archival utopias:

-- How about a storage and delivery infrastructure for evidence and memory that is as reliable as city water or gravity-propelled
Roman sewage systems and scalable and ﬂexible enough to remember or forget as needed?

-- Or a data corpus that surrounds us like air, manifesting itself through our sensorium and the tools with which we augment our
bodies; or alternatively a mycelial network that feeds on data to propagate and spread

-- A locus (or loci) of preservation of information and ideas capable of collecting both the canonical and the quotidian,
hegemonic and oppositional, personal and institutional

-- An anticipatory network that sniffs out, appraises and collects records of potential interest

Fortune, 1944-01
-- A fully permeable repository that supports a spectrum of access from casual inquiry to deep touching

-- An agnostic system that dissolves formalistic distinctions between physical and digital materials

-- A suite of preservation functions that simultaneously support centralized and decentralized storage schemes

All-woman crew, WBKB-TV (Chicago), World War II and thereafter
-- A repository that embodies the power of the record while simultaneously disavowing it, that is to say it tries both to assert and
reject privilege.

-- A curatorial algorithm that doesn't automatically reject garble and glitch

-- A utility that familiarizes us with its holdings through convenience and defamiliarizes them through inconvenience

-- and an entity that's learned how to cross anachronistic species boundaries. This last is maybe further off than the others, but
I've heard all of these ideas one place or another.

THE ACCELERANDO:
“THE GREATEST EFFLORESCENCE
OF CIVILIZATION IN HISTORY,
A NEW RENAISSANCE.”
—Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars (1996)
This is how the utopian-minded speculative ﬁction writer Kim Stanley Robinson deﬁnes what he calls the Accelerando (AH-CHE-LE-RANDO) It’s
a speeding-up of development in all realms: exploration, invention, science and philosophy. But it also comes with insecurity.

"And yet still, with all the blossoming of
human effort and conﬁdence of the accelerando,
there was a sense of tension in the air, of danger....
A stressed renaissance, then, living fast, on the edge,
a manic golden age: the Accelerando.
And no one could say what would happen next."
"And yet still, with all the blossoming of human effort and conﬁdence of the accelerando, there was a sense of tension in the air, of danger....A
stressed renaissance, then, living fast, on the edge, a manic golden age: the Accelerando. And no one could say what would happen next."
He's talking about the 2200s, but this is also a good description of the present.

Poughkeepsie, NewYork
No one can say what will happen next. But I think it may not be quite what we're being led to expect. A few thoughts.

Prelinger Library, San Francisco, April 3, 2016
To start, neither nostalgia for the physical nor celebration of digital conquest make much sense. To transcode a formulation from
artist and writer Jen Bervin, it's becoming clear that physical and digital materials each have different jobs to do. And I think those
of us who haven't tried to put analog and digital into opposition are on the right track, unless you're talking about obvious
attributes like weight, physical bulk, and dependence upon electron ﬂow, or unless you need conﬂict for yet another pedestrian
news story. Every day in our library I realize that analog-digital hybridity is not a transitional state, and I hope it remains a
permanent one.

Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (Straub-Huillet, 1968)
In fact, the turn to digital revalidates the analog. I make digital films that play before audiences who talk while the film runs. I
thought this was radical, until I realized I was actually channeling the Elizabethan theater whose front pit was filled with loud and
boisterous groundlings. The affordances of digital media — its properties that make certain actions possible — are giving us a
new understanding about how physical media forms actually work. Ebooks have taught us much about physical books, and
weavers take inspiration from screens. As Alex Horvath pointed out, the renaissance of Baroque-era musical instruments is a
relatively recent phenomenon.

San Francisco Chronicle, 1915-09-14
But while digitality may revalidate analog, it's rapidly devaluing it. Physical objects are being disposed of and destroyed at an
accelerated rate. Hey librarians and archivists: do physical objects still have the right to exist? For some media, like newspapers,
journals and videotape, this has already been settled in the negative. Shelves are emptier and stacks gone in many libraries.

This is funny, because some emerging histories of images and sound (like media archaeology) privilege apparatus and container
over content. The story of countless dead or comatose media platforms exists less in the surviving images and sounds than in or
on the containers, labels, reels, caddies, leaders, labels and postmarks. The history of the educational ﬁlm distribution system is
as much recorded on the cans and shipping containers that protected the reels as in the catalogs and trade journals. (Recanning
isn't always a good idea!)
Akin to pioneer electronic publishing executive Bill Dunn's assertion that the importance of metadata exceeds the value of data it
describes.

The crisis ecosystem of evidence-bearing physical objects has become really fascinating. The displacement and expulsion of
physical materials in favor of digital surrogates is akin to urban gentriﬁcation, and as archivists, scholars and citizens we will one
day have to answer for it. Because the attributes that distinguish the physical are exactly what we should be preserving, and they
are a pain. Physical objects, no matter how many we discard, are incredibly persistent. And their persistence is inconvenient.
They're the table scraps, the leftovers of digitization, and there aren't enough dogs around the table to gobble them down. We
are basing entire new phenomenological, philosophical and scholarly agendas on one recent technological turn, and for some
reason we ﬁnd ourselves staging a battle against physical materials in order to make room for apparent digital abundance.

This is what historians call presentism. We are presentist when we apply current modes of thinking to the past and future. Right now it is
tempting to eternalize the present and imagine a future based on disturbing trends that have not been with us for very long. It is short-term
thinking to regard the apparent end of film and the collapse of the photochemical manufacturing chain as the definitive threat to film
culture. It is presentism to regard digitality as the negation of film culture, or, for that matter, to think of digitality as the negation of analog
culture. Deeply-held feelings of cinephilia drive us to read current history in apocalyptic terms, and deep cultural anxieties heighten our
most appropriate concerns about digital longevity.

Despite its apparent victory over physical media, digitality is fragile. It requires a compliant social order, the accommodation of
governments, and the steady availability of energy. It is not a monolith; the Chinese digital world works differently than the North
American. And its corporate structures and business models are experimental. We shouldn't overreact today to a force that will
behave differently tomorrow.

East St. Louis, Illinois, 2009-11-04
The air of romantic obsolescence that surrounds a lot of historical media and communications technology today is quite striking
and entertaining, and we might actually enlist it to help build a bridge between media archaeologists, their complex assertions,
and the public, but we need to push it hard to really learn something. It's fun to touch and revive obsolete or failed tech, but
what exactly does it tell us? While the landscapes of our many deindustrialized cities are rich texts crossed by threads of
evidence that implicate many players, most visitors see only ruin porn.

A.M. Low, Wireless Possibilities, 1923
Dead media, failed kludges, speculative engineering ventures that pass neither usability nor smell tests and express poorly
integrated relationships between information and its embodiments are all deeply fascinating, but we need to squeeze those
"neglected margins" hard. And yet anything we can do to question the unreasonable faith much of the world seems to have in the
robustness and persistence of the digital is most welcome. As long, perhaps, as we are not fetishizing digital fragility, or
mourning losses not yet incurred.

The archival axioms of permanence and provenance don't remap well into the digital domain, where everything is as fragile as
the next spike, brownout or coronal mass ejection. In the aggregate, archivists have thought a great deal about the implications
and contradictions of digital archives, but like many who think as futurists, they have yet to reﬂect on how these peculiar
databases will function socially.

Seaside,
Oregon
2015-01-02
Why do we love glitch so much? It's becoming a real 21st-century fetish. But it's nothing new. It's proudly and joyously
traditional: people have stepped on snapshots, cried over letters whose ink smeared, wondered what's on the pages missing
from library books, felt the thrill of ﬁlm burning and blossoming in the gate. Where I come from, the fast-growing city of San
Francisco, glitch is perhaps the most-used mode of appropriation.

In fact, glitches aren't only challenges to preservation — preservation itself is a glitch. The normative lifecycle of digital media is
ephemeral. As Howard Besser stated in 2001, the default condition of electronic objects is to disappear. It's a bit like filmmaking,
where it takes an aggressive producer to make movies — to push back against resistance, to deploy and coordinate money,
properties, people — because the default condition of movies is not to be made unless they are forced to be made. Each
completed film is a flaunting of the odds.
Preservation is the realest of glitches, especially in our age of massive media abundance. The archivists’ job is to hack media so
that it can be preserved against its will.

10/8/15 10:55 AMThe Consortium for Slower Internet
Page 1 of 3http://slowerinternet.com/principles.html
THE CONSORTIUM FOR
SLOWER INTERNET
Slower Internet is about more than speed. The Consortium for Slower Internet pursues
projects that promote the following principles.
DURATIONDURATION
There is no inherent concern with information that is transmitted and distributed with
great speed, but Slower Internet suggests that information be consumed at a more
contemplative pace. If information is to be a central part of our lives, Slower Internet is
interested in finding ways to live with it on more human time scales; news, facts,
updates, etc should be absorbed slowly and given time for consideration. Systems that
PRINCIPLESPRINCIPLES
FORFOR
SLOWERSLOWER
INTERNETINTERNET
10/8/15 10:55 AMThe Consortium for Slower Internet
Page 2 of 3http://slowerinternet.com/principles.html
updates, etc should be absorbed slowly and given time for consideration. Systems that
emphasize duration are central to a Slower Internet.
DEFAMILIARIZATIONDEFAMILIARIZATION
The information delivered by Fast Internet is the white bread of data: predictable,
lifeless, sanitized for mass appeal. Slow Internet delivers content in unexpected formats
and spaces. The practice of defamiliarization encourages users to scrutinize their role and
participation in a given system. Seamless experiences are suspect.
AUTONOMYAUTONOMY
Fast Internet dazzles with maximum features at minimum price, but it often does so at
the expense of user autonomy. Increasingly, users are encouraged to sacrifice their rights
to own material they produce with a given system when services are rendered free of
charge. Slower Internet respects user autonomy by giving creators control and ownership
over their data. Charging reasonable fees for a service is always preferable to spying on
customers and appropriating their data to serve advertisements.
DIVERGENCEDIVERGENCE
Computers have long been universal machines, able to perform any calculation regardless
of content. A Slower Internet, however, requires that dissimilar tasks occur in a diversity
of spaces on a multitude of devices. Living with information does not mean that we have
to give any type of machine a monopoly over our attention. Slower Internet is a process
of cultivating a garden of machines that fit localized, individual desires.
The Consortium for Slower Internet
Made in Minneapolis, MN
http://slowerinternet.com/principles.html
From time to time I've felt part of a digital vanguard: making CD-ROMs with the Voyager Company in the early and mid-1990s.
Putting archival ﬁlms online. Scanning books from our little library. Feeling one step ahead of those on the other side of what was
then a digital Grand Canyon. But that's changed. Digitality and privilege have been inverted. Getting the personal attention of a
bureaucrat, collecting and touching artisanal objects, writing with a nice pen, these are privileged encounters. The rest of the
world wrestles with touchtone menus, disrespectful algorithms and poorly designed websites. But if you have privilege, there are
no stray bits in your slow food. And slow media is coming back. Some friends are building an intentional community in
Mendocino County, on the northern California coast. They're installing ﬁber on their farm, but it moves bits slowly, and their
Internet service is only up between 8 am to 5 pm. Voluntary inconvenience.

From Elmer Dyer Film Library looseleaf catalog books, Hollywood, spring 1970
Angry ﬁlm librarian venting
Inconvenience may be our best friend. Archival enclosure is a systemic problem and a bad inconvenience. But there are also
formative inconveniences, which I like to think of as good affordances. Wrangling with inconvenience is like choosing to write by
hand instead of typing or dictating. You learn more about the words you are processing. And you learn about ﬁlm by touching its
physical constituents. Inconvenience enables defamiliarization, which is what makes all art possible.

U.S. President's Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom,
v. 1, 1951; excerpt from preface, probably written by Eric Hodgins
And if we can learn from the current state of archives, it will be prompted by inconvenience. As in the histories of media, the
lessons arise out of breaks in continuity, imperfect narratives and interruptions in order.

Abandoned "Druid Heights" commune, Marin County, California
And we'll need to interrupt archival theory itself, whose pretensions to permanence read quixotically in an age of mass
extinction. There are communities of archivists and thinkers generating a wealth of new thinking about what archives are and
what they could be — notably feminist-focused archivists, queer theorists, activists, people who work around traditional
knowledge and traditional cultural expression. I was privileged to join a meeting at the Re-Build foundation in Chicago three
weeks back, during which the question of whether there was a "Black style of archiving" was discussed. We need to be talking
about these issues in the moving image and sound space, especially because I have come to suspect that the history of the
formative years of the AV archives movement is very much LGBT history, and if I'm not mistaken this history mostly remains to
be written.

W1UX, Killingworth, Conn.
And I want to end by mentioning a forbidden topic that's lately been interesting me. Hoarding violates everything we think of as
"archival." We generally think of hoarding as pathology, but I feel that it is often an attempt at re-rooting, at halting the
supersonic trajectory of modern cultures, at building a coherent nest in a windy world. Scott Herring, in his really courageous and
beautifully written new book The Hoarders, tries to depathologize hoarding in a number of ways, and it is well worth reading. Is
there something about the needs hoarding may ﬁll that tells us about the needs we might ﬁll as archivists?

Red-Tailed Hawk nesting, Great Highway & Taraval St., San Francisco, June 2015
We need to think of archives as players in an environment that is all about transmission and reception. And the archival projects
of the moment — thinking beyond superﬁcial differences between platforms and superseding a heritage of enclosure with a
culture of hospitable transaction — resonate with important concerns in broader cultures. So we are like scientists working in
laboratories devoted to hacking on major projects. And we should therefore look up from our rewinds and our screens and take
responsibility for the future.

Eugene, Oregon, 2015-07-03@footage / rick@ucsc.edu
Thank you.

Silence, Cacophony, Crosstalk: New Talking Points

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