Motion and immobilisation: the audiovisual archive
Whereas the scripture-based classical archive is a static array of records on the grand
scale and letters on the microscale, which could be brought in motion only by the act
of human reading line by line, the Edison phonograph is the first form of a truly
"performative" archive in motion, since its recording (notably the early
ethnographic field recordings around 1900, leading to the Vienna Phonograph
Archive and the Berlin Phonogramm Archive) is based on a rotating, technically
moving apparatus both in recording and in replay (parallel to early
cinematographical recording and projection).
In a very simple thought experiment, imagine an early phonographic recording.
Whatever the song or speech that will be, parallel to the harmonic timbre of this
sound one will for sure acoustically hallucinate the scratching, the aperiodic noise
of the recording apparatus, as well. True media-archaeological awareness starts here:
the exercise is to be aware that at each given moment media culture is dealing with
the past. It is a technological memory. The noise, the scratch of the wax cylinder is
the pure message of the medium; in between, the human voice is literally
incorporated. Such a recording primarily memorises the noise of the wax cylinder
itself - which is not cultural-historical, but cultural-technological, a different kind
of information of the real. Media archaeology opens our ears to listen to this as well,
not to filter it out. Thereby the phonograph as media artefact does not only carry
cultural semantic like words and music, but - like any work of art - is at the same
time an archive of cultural engineering as well, by its very material fabrication -
a kind of frozen media knowledge, which media-archaeologically waits to be
defrosted, liquefied.
Moving Media archaeology: Technology as "archivist" (Phonovision)
For media memory, archival dynamics replaces „archival space" (Michel de
Certeau). The earliest known recording from a Television Transmission is the revue
Looking In, performed by the Paramount Astoria Girls on the BBC Baird television
system (30 lines) in April 1933, recorded by an enthusiastic amateur on his
recording equipment (the Baird Phonovision system) on aluminium disc. Processed
and restored by digital filtering, the key to clarity seems to be movement itself. Any
reproduction of one of the 30-line television broadcast as stills in a printing medium
(photography in the book), gives a wrong impression of what had been actually
seen.6 Here the time-critical comes in, since printed records (be it texts, be it images)
miss a crucial element: the time-base of perception.
"A single frame of the Paramount Astoria Girls may be crudely recognisable, but
when seen as a moving dynamic television image, the girls come to life before our
eyes. it has much more to do with what we perceive than what is there in pixels,
lines and frames. What we are experiencing is not the detail that the eye sees, but the
recognition of movement that the brain sees. our brain somehow builds up a
model of what we are looking at." (McLean, 2000, p. 211f)
wolfgang ernst order by fluctuation? classical archives and their
audiovisual counterparts
As a physical item and as a technological monument, the Baird Phonovision
recording disc is part of the classical archival techniques (subject to inventorisation)
such as any other classical paper record. The difference is operative: as a document it
comes only into being, i.e. it becomes "readable", recognisable when being processed
and replayed by a technical medium (first the Phonovision electro-mechanical Baird
equipment, now the digital restoring computer). Furthermore, it needs to be kept
operative by an ongoing medium, which requires the archival artefact to be
processed online.7
The chrono-archive
Only with the arrival of chrono-photography (Muybridge, Marey) and with
cinematography an impossible occidental dream came true: to catch the dynamic
element in movement, the kinetic. Technical media (both for acoustic and visual
movements) thus have created a new kind of archiv(e-)ability.
It took generations of archivists and librarians to take account of this new option
which for a long time did not fit into traditional archival and classificatory
terminology, which has rather been fixed on static relations between objects (mostly
verbal). The National Library of Australia has been among the institutions which
have created a special task and collection of folk dance and artistic dance (both
scriptural and pictorial, mostly videographical documentation).8
Australia had already been path-breaking in institutionalising a multimedia
approach: The National Film and Sound Archive. In the meantime, Europe (where
France has been at the front by establishing the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel,
and recently the Norwegian National Library in Oslo achieved a similar
encompassing task of multimedia and multi-modal archivisation of national
culture) follows Goethe's idea of a "virtual library": if it is not possible to physically
assemble the audiovisual cultural heritage, there is at least the option of collecting
its information. The Gateway to Archives of Media Art (GAMA) is primarily
dedicated to ephemeral forms of art.9 This ephemerality relates both to the artistic
form (performances) and the techno-electronical content, the so-called "variable
media".
This is the answer to an archival challenge: how can not only material traces and
textual documents, but temporal expressions themselves (movements) be preserved
for future historiographies? Dynamic reiteration of access needs a flexible tool
which allows for the coexistence of different orders without destroying the structure
of the database. Not only the target, but also the mediality of the archive has been
extended.
The answer lies in discovering, reflecting and techno-mathematically realising new
options of flexible access. The most immediate medium for this to take place is the
electronic form of an open source software as content management system which
includes search functions which are not limited to logocentristic addressing any
more.
archives in liquid times
6 See the Restored Video Recordings 1927-193 5, online http://www.tvdawn.com/recordng.htm
172
7 See http://www.tvdawn.com/silvaton
8 On the National Library of Australia's Collection Development Policy see http://www.nla.gov.au/policy/cdp
9 See http://www.gama-gateway.eu
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