blackoystercatcher

Taking history back from the "storytellers"

2009-06-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, a group of moving image archivists that participate in AMIA-L, one of my favorite listservs, started talking about the problem of poorly-produced (and poorly-thought-out) reenactments, and how they had grown to infect historical documentaries. I was on vacation and couldn't participate in a timely way, but the clear desert air incubated a bit of a rant, a slightly revised version of which I'm now sharing.

Please bear in mind that when I say "we," I mean moving image archivists.

While there seems to be agreement that the reenactment trend has spread way too far, I think there's a deeper problem facing historically/archivally oriented docs, and it's actually something we can help to solve.

Some of the most interesting documentary films take their structures from organic phenomena like the hours of the day, or the trajectory of a river from source to mouth. Others are essays that follow a structured thought process. Still others divide into sequences or parts that need to be understood and compared as discrete units for the film to generate meaning in the viewer. In fact, there are nearly infinite possible documentary structures, of which I think we've only seen a small fraction. By contrast, the mainstream documentary focuses on what's now called "storytelling," a highly traditional representational strategy that in recent years has come to imply the omnipresence of characters (good and evil), a narrative arc and a conventional act-based structure in which seemingly insurmountable problems are frequently solved.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with storytelling, whatever it may be, and not all stories are bad. What's wrong is the assumption, which has become not only pervasive but compulsory, that documentaries need characters, that the narrative arc must reign supreme, and that we're obliged to show people wrestling with and resolving problems. I've sat with PBS gatekeepers and heard them refer to programs as "stories," not films or shows. Ultimately this insults potential audiences by assuming they're only able to ingest a limited narrative menu. Is it really true that, when it comes to media, "the best surprise is no surprise?"

The vernacular language of documentaries is freezing in place. If I tried to pitch The River today, they'd say "A river? Where's the story? You need to find characters with great stories who live along the banks." If I sought money for The Man with the Movie Camera, I'd be sent back to research more about the cameraman's inner life and emotions, and to find or invent interpersonal (rather than interframe) conflict. Now, there are indeed essay-based makers, like Adam Curtis, perhaps Errol Morris, and many others (forgive my lack of knowledge, but I'm not a Netflix guy). Sam Green is now making a film on utopia that I think is not shrinking from ideas, even though it does follow a few people around. And then there's James Benning. But it's just harder to make different work and have it seen.

So, where do archives come in? The last 20 years have witnessed the emergence of new kinds of documentation, such as home movies and other unofficial materials. Much of this kind of imagery reflects personal historical perspectives, unlike other kinds of archival material that emanate from institutions, governments, studios and corporations. This is great, but what's happening (especially with amateur material) is that film is being used to construct histories that emphasize personal experience, that rely on the depiction of struggle and transformation at an individual level, and that constitute "stories" in a narrow rather than broad sense. I'm not advocating socialist realism here, just criticizing the reduction of world-historical events and phenomena to the story of "a day in the life of my cranky grandfather who survived the war and is just about to get evicted."

Many of us who collect or take care of moving images and sounds feel that original materials tell pretty good stories on their own. Aside from some courageous DVD collections of uncut archival films, a supplement here and there, and several sketchy sites presenting downloadable archival materials, most original materials don't reach the public without being run through the storytelling Cuisinart. While context is essential to really understand and work with most moving images, overbearing narration, emotionally invasive music and highly personalized visions of history don't constitute context. Bits and pieces from our collections are being woven into works that don't really speak to the value of their components.

So, where do we come in? I propose two ideas.

The first is easy. Let's put original, unedited archival material out in the world in such a way that it competes with documentaries. This isn't going to kill our stock footage income, because producers and directors always feel they can improve on reality by imposing structures of their design, and they'll still come around. But it will insure that audiences can see original documents without the imposition of artificial layers of narrativity. (Plus, I have always wondered how archives can ethically let historical mediamakers use clips without making the original works from which the clips come available to anyone who wants to see the complete continuity. When someone cites a passage of text or a still image, there's a powerful implication that someone can check the citation themselves. We don't make this easy.)

Archives are part of the system of cultural production. So are archivists. Which brings me to a second suggestion.

We have all noted that the cost of production and distribution is going down quickly, even though it isn't zero. Why then aren't archivists making more documentaries, and why isn't production seen as an integral archival mission? Why on earth do we observe invisible barriers of specialization that cause producers (whose interests are often fleeting and superficial) to become the chief interpreters and contextualizers of our collections?

Librarians write books, too. Museum curators make text and media. Why don't we make more movies? Everyone else in the world feels entitled to.

As more and more archivists become curators and preservers of digital files, and as working with physical moving image materials becomes an unjustly underfunded artisanal specialty, we may have to figure out what exactly it is that we do. I suggest we consider becoming moving image authors too.

Seen at the Detroit Public Library last month

2009-04-17T19:58:00.001-07:00

Media in Transition conference

2009-04-17T19:33:00.001-07:00

OK, I'm going to try to be a better blogger. But it's been hard — the combined effort I pour into Facebook, Twitter and email feels like an unpaid, half-time job.

Anyway, I'm attending the Media in Transition conference at MIT next week. It looks great.

Anyone want a partial run of Printer's Ink magazine?

2009-03-11T17:39:00.000-07:00

Ad historians, culture historians, collectors: We have a partial duplicate set of Printers Ink (the weekly, not the monthly), starting about 1927 and running through 1957. Some volumes great condition, others not. We would be delighted to offer it to someone with an interest in this material and the ability to pick up in downtown SF, as it's too much to ship.

It is full of interesting copy and fascinating ads about the ad industry. Let me know!

--> Printers Ink found a home.

New films starting to trickle online

2008-09-13T23:09:00.000-07:00

Thanks to AV Geek Skip, new films from our collection are starting to come online. Many of them are as new to me as they will be to you. Check out the latest uploads here.

Oh -- this is a repeat post, I see. Whatever.

New films coming online

2008-09-02T07:24:00.001-07:00

For most of the year we've been promising that we'd upload 500 new films to our collection at the Internet Archive. This has taken longer than we anticipated, and we're sorry to have dangled this possibility in front of our archival fan community for such a long time. The reason for the delay has been that this year we started our "tapelessness" project — a project to convert all of our material presently living on Digital Beta and Beta SP videotape to high-bitrate digital files — and wanted to make the digital files for the Archive at the same time we were making our own. This is a complex workflow and we're still experimenting with getting it right, but I'm delighted to say that new films are starting to trickle onto the Archive site. It's going to be a diverse bunch of material with many items that haven't been seen in quite a few years.

Watch this link for new items as they appear.

Remembering Bill O'Farrell

2008-09-01T21:18:00.000-07:00

Bill was an uncommonly kind, generous and convivial person, a sympathetic enabler of archival activity and a collector and redistributor of evidence that might help to contextualize films that seemed without history. We will all miss him. We're thinking of his loved ones.

Coming to Berlin and Budapest

2008-05-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

I'm doing a mini-Grand Tour in June, presenting at the Deutsche Kinemathek's Kolloquium on Friday, June 13; doing a screening that afternoon and then two evening screenings on Sunday and Monday, June 15 and 16. The schedule is here. Berliners and travelers, please come and say hi.

Note that the June 16 program will be an all-35mm show, featuring the recently restored Master Hands, the even-more recently restored Tuesday in November (a project of Mark Toscano at the Academy Film Archive) and a vintage IB Technicolor and SuperScope print of Chevrolet's Populuxe classic, American Look.

Then on June 19-21 I'll be in Budapest for the NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) conference.

Microsoft ends Live Book Search program

2008-05-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

This morning MSFT announced it was ending its Live Book Search program, and will be taking the site down next week. They're also ending their support of key digitization initiatives, including many of the library scanning projects operated by the Internet Archive.

Prelinger Library books that MSFT paid to scan will still be available through the Internet Archive and the Open Library, which also offers full-text search and download of over 300,000 public domain books.

The blogosphere is buzzing on this and I anticipate hearing more today.

Brewster has just posted an announcement, with some good news.

We had fun today at MakerFaire

2008-05-03T22:20:00.000-07:00

About 200 people visited our little satellite library in the Fiesta building. If you can, come by tomorrow!

Photos.

Mock Up On Mu

2008-04-29T00:31:00.000-07:00

Just saw Craig Baldwin's new (and, he says, unfinished) film. It is beautifully done. Whatever limits it may have, and I can't pin down any walls it might hit until I've seen it again, will be the limits of found-footage films, not any deficits of his skill and imagination. The first interview is pretty good.

Google peers into our living room, and sees...

2008-04-28T17:19:00.001-07:00

M first found this on Google Street View. It points up at our living room, and you can distinctly see the split reel behind the window, though you can't see the Elmo (a special kind of projector used to make quick-and-dirty film-to-video transfers) to which it's attached.

how could I forget?

2008-04-28T17:00:00.001-07:00

Pix from the Orphan Film Symposium in March.

Murketing's Virtual Festival of Sponsored Film

2008-04-28T16:53:00.000-07:00

Rob Walker writes "Consumed" for the NY Times Magazine and keeps up quite a pace with the Murketing blog. In the last week he's been viewing, reviewing and contextualizing a bunch of films from the Field Guide, five so far. This is exciting.

Recent presentations

2008-04-28T13:29:00.001-07:00

I recently attended the Economies of the Commons conference at de Balie in Amsterdam. This was at once a provocative and congenial meeting, and it was fascinating to hear from people who are working on major national moving image digitization projects in Europe and from members of the "freer culture" community. The sessions were blogged here and elsewhere.

My keynote, "Audiovisual Archives and the Social Contract" is downloadable here, but beware, as it is a 24MB pdf.

Future Histories keynote

2007-11-21T09:51:00.000-08:00

This was a great conference, intimate enough to get to know almost everyone and to have really interesting discussions. The organizers put together a memorable event and the Northern hospitality was heartwarming.

A few resources:

My keynote (pdf, 10.8MB)
My photoset, mostly people
The conference program and abstracts

Many of the papers will probably be published in a future issue of Convergence (which unfortunately seems to be behind a paywall).

Future Histories of the Moving Image

2007-11-14T08:04:00.000-08:00

I'm off to the UK to speak at this very promising conference (you will have to click on "conference" to see the program). Stay tuned for more from Sunderland.

San Francisco Bay oil spill

2007-11-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

Megan (who is trained as an oil spill responder) has been activated and is working up at International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia. IBRRC's blog is updated regularly and gives a good sense of what they're dealing with up there.

DLF Forum, Philadelphia

2007-11-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

Working on my talk. It's about to start.

Later: The organizers posted the pdf, but it lacks my notes, so you will have to interpret the pretty pictures for yourself.

OCA digitization contract

2007-10-30T17:39:00.000-07:00

By permission of the Boston Public Library and Internet Archive, here is their book digitization contract.

Venice

2007-10-20T15:40:00.000-07:00

I hadn't known what to expect; in fact, that was my perspective on Italy in general.

Venice's feeling of historicity is overwhelming, and it is filled, jammed with tourists, but there are quieter parts where families and children predominate. Built on the lagoon, water is both frame and circulatory system. All public transportation on the center islands is waterborne, and the vaporetti pull up to the dock, disgorge and load passengers, and pull away faster than buses in most cities. When for the first time I exited the railroad station onto the plaza that lay between me and the canal, I saw boats of all shapes and sizes moving in every direction, a crowded, purposeful waterscape, and I found myself overcome with emotion, for I wasn't just lucky enough to see a living relic of the past, I was seeing one possible utopian future, the water city.

Pictures.

Oh, and we hadn't planned our trip to coincide with the Biennale, but there it was, and there were few restrictions on shooting pictures, so.

And one day we went to Gorizia, a border town, and walked into Slovenia.

Pordenone

2007-10-06T04:29:00.000-07:00

Here at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto. Pictures accumulating.

Illuminated Corridor last night

2007-10-04T10:49:00.000-07:00

This was wonderful.

Our pix; Nicole's pix (great); and check Boltron's panoramas!

And also see Dill Pixels, thenicoleharvey, and Amor de Cosmos.

And, two weeks later, Tara McDowell's review.

Google co-opting LibraryThing?

2007-09-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

Google has rolled out My Library, which looks a lot like a skeletal version of LibraryThing plus an anonymous corporate skin and minus community spirit.

LibraryThing is a massive, participatory catalog of people's private libraries, enabling people to share, tag and review the contents of their collections, collect and contact like-minded people (what better way to find like-minded people than browse their bookshelves?), and put together neat stats.

As of this morning, 265,965 members have catalogued 18,261,561 books. We like LibraryThing and its friendly and open feeling, and hope it lives long and prospers.

Turning the library inside out

2007-09-01T12:30:00.000-07:00

Illuminated Corridor is mounting a big event around the library on the evening of October 3. Live music and performative projection will happen in the alley and on the walls of our building, and there will be live musical accompaniment (a new score) to Panorama Ephemera, conducted by Gino Robair.

From their description:

This Corridor seeks to illuminate the Prelinger Library, a private research library open to the public with collections encompassing some 50,000 books, periodical volumes and printed ephemera. The Library is linked to the Prelinger Archive, a collection of ephemeral films that are a key creative resource to artists of the Illuminated Corridor, and serve as a touchstone for the broader community of film, sound and bricolage artists.The Corridor will take place during the Library's traditional Wednesday Open House evening hours, where you are invited to lose yourself in the stacks of an extraordinary library turned inside out for an evening.

Mark your calendars.

Library on the radio and in print

2007-09-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

The library's gotten attention lately — Megan and I were on Pacifica's Against the Grain last week (listen here), and In These Times recently published a great piece built around an interview with M.

Internet Archive Collections Blog

2007-08-24T08:52:00.000-07:00

I've been remiss in not pointing to the IA's Collections Group blog. It's filled with great posts and pointers to interesting items, including many of our films.

BBC's online archive trial is a big hit

2007-08-13T12:54:00.000-07:00

Hannah points me to this Independent piece reporting that the BBC's online archival access project is moving into its second trial phase. The uptake is huge — the call for volunteer testers for the trial brought in 45,000 applications. This testifies to the high level of public interest in archival material. Some of this interest, of course, is purely entertainment-based, but BBC isn't just putting popular reruns online.

Unfortunately, BBC is deploying the iPlayer, which is a Microsoft product employing Microsoft's digital rights management technology, and many people are worried that this locks BBC into a proprietary development cycle and closes the BBC's vast assets to people who decline to use Windows. There's a demonstration about this tomorrow, in fact.

AT&T promoted English-only telephone use (1920)

2007-08-09T18:17:00.000-07:00

In a time of great xenophobia and nativism, AT&T took out this ad in Survey, a magazine for social workers and progressive activists, promoting monolingualism on the telephone. "But the telephone is no interpreter," said the ad. "If its far reaching wires are to be effective, those who use them must speak the same language. The telephone best serves those who have become one with us in speech."

Survey and its sister publication Survey Graphic have been digitized.

National Archives/Amazon agreement released

2007-08-08T14:46:00.000-07:00

In a rapid FOIA response, NARA has released the partnership agreement between them and Amazon's CustomFlix (now CreateSpace) subsidiary. It's downloadable here (I'm responsible for the poorly derived PDF). I'll be reading and analyzing it soon.

Universal Newsreels on DVD: a first impression

2007-08-06T17:45:00.000-07:00

I have just received one of the DVDs containing moving images from the National Archives (NARA) and published by CustomFlix (which has just changed its name to CreateSpace), a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Here are my first impressions.

The DVD, which arrived by mail on the 4th working day after my Amazon order, is a DVD-R bearing an orange printed National Archives/Universal Newsreel logo, thematically similar to the green cover DVD label insert. The disc contains Universal Newsreels from November and December 1960 (200 UN 33, 89-96) and runs exactly 61 minutes.

Neither the disc nor the packaging contain any restrictive wording or copyright notice, nor do they indicate that the material is in the public domain. The compilation of stories seems to follow the structure of NARA's reference videotapes, with which archival researchers will be familiar. This would indicate that no copyrightable authorship exists in the compilation and arrangement, and that the DVD is fair game for duplication and reuse.

The disc runs straight through from start to finish, with no menu or chapters. It begins with the characteristic NARA character-generated title indicating volume, release and story numbers for each issue. As with the NARA reference tapes, this contains just the newsreel stories themselves, lacking the main and end titles contained in the theatrically released newsreels. This is not a deficiency of the disc, but reflects newsreel company practice: individual stories (segments) were filed and cataloged as units, and complete newsreels were typically not kept.

This particular DVD appears to have been made from one of NARA's older (early 1980s?) film-to-videotape transfers. Though others may have more precise information, I'd speculate that the master tape matches the reference tapes that NARA holds in its motion picture research room. These tapes were made in an earlier era of telecine technology and resemble what NARA now calls "non-broadcast video copies." There is a visible flicker, and I saw perceptible dropouts in one story that resemble those caused by physical tape damage, such as when a videotape is ejected without being rewound. At least one story lacks sound, likely because Universal junked many of its tracks before donating the collection to NARA. The quality is certainly adequate for research, some teaching, and personal viewing (in fact, the reference tapes are very often used as a stock footage source for low-budget cable TV documentaries). It is, however, fair to say that this particular DVD will not put many stock footage companies out of business, nor will it delight Blu-Ray and Criterion DVD collectors.

In fairness, the image quality of the "intermediate" videotapes that NARA is furnishing CreateSpace do differ, and this particular tape just happens to reflect the lower end of the quality spectrum. I look forward to seeing DVDs of films transferred more recently, which I know will reflect the level of quality to which we have become accustomed in recent years.

$20 is a great deal for one hour of public domain material that's until now been unavailable through retail channels, and I expect that quite a number of individuals, educational media centers, stock footage companies and production units will begin to "collect 'em all." I also expect that these DVDs will very soon start to show up online.

I look forward to hearing further impressions from others on these products.

Barbara Quint wrote up the NARA/CreateSpace partnership this morning, here.

NARA proposes partnership with Genealogical Society of Utah, posts draft agreement for public comment

2007-08-03T08:17:00.000-07:00

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) proposes to partner with the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU) to digitize and provide public access to certain public records held by NARA.

In a welcome demonstration of transparency, NARA has placed the text of the proposed agreement online and is seeking public comment.

The proposed agreement is nonexclusive and specifies that NARA will get copies of all digitized records GSU creates. It appears that in most cases researchers will have free access to digitized materials on the FamilySearch.org website, though in some cases FamilySearch will have a five-year window to recover costs by charging access fees. During the five-year period, digitized materials will be provided free in NARA's research rooms around the country, and, "in many cases," free online. After five years all restrictions appear to dissolve.

NARA appears to be drafting partnership agreements with the public interest in mind. I urge all interested in the "good terms" issue to review this agreement and comment as you see fit.

National Archives partners with Amazon/CustomFlix

2007-07-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) today (July 30) announced a partnership with Amazon and its CustomFlix subsidiary to make key public domain films from its collection available on DVD. The DVDs are produced on demand by CustomFlix.

Here's the Washington Post's article, and here's a selection of discs already available. NARA's press release is here.

Unlike the infamous Smithsonian-Showtime deal, this agreement is nonexclusive, and the terms (which, unlike Smithsonian-Showtime, will be based on publicly released principles) have been more carefully crafted so as not to sacrifice public benefit to private gain. I've been told the agreement is publicly releasable, have submitted a FOIA request, and will post here when it's available.

NARA is probably the biggest repository of public domain film and video in the world, with hundreds of thousands of Federal government-produced items, almost all legally exempt from copyright. In addition to government works, it holds a large collection of donated materials, many of which have been placed in the public domain by their donors. These include the Universal Newsreel collection (1929-1967), the only one of six major U.S. newsreel collections that is unencumbered by copyright or contract, and outtakes from the March of Time (1935-1951), the "caviar" of American newsreels. You can watch these for free, but you need to visit NARA's research room in College Park, Md. You can also order broadcast-quality copies, but you can only do so through NARA's official contractors. Some companies sell copies of NARA's public domain material, often poor-quality dupes lacking program notes or contextualization. Others, such as FootageFarm, have invested much time and money creating detailed shotlists and other metadata. Google Video put 101 NARA films online in 2006, but this project doesn't seem to have progressed beyond the initial announcement.

The U.S. is alone among nations in making such a large collection of government-produced audiovisual material freely available. We hope that future partnerships will continue this tradition of public access, and hopefully bring reusable, high-quality digitized video material online so that emerging generations and communities can interpret American history and culture in their own ways.

First visit to the Warburg Library

2007-07-20T06:10:00.000-07:00

Start here for post and pictures.

Cardiff: Digitization and Doctor Who

2007-07-18T15:36:00.000-07:00

JISC is putting on its e-Content Policy and Strategy Symposium today, and Michelle Pauli is liveblogging it here.

And right out the window is the Wales Millennium Centre, the nexus of Dalek power in several episodes of Doctor Who.

Open Library surfaces

2007-07-16T13:27:00.000-07:00

The Open Library, a giant catalog of books/wiki/library discovery tool has gone public. Take a look at the demo. Very cool. This could be the open window on every librarian's desktop, and a significant win for openness and for our shared cultural infrastructure.

The future of moving image archives

2007-07-15T19:01:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate to be part of a conversation on a few key issues that custodians of moving images now face. Peter Brantley, my co-convenor (and gracious host of the meeting) undertakes a first summation here.

Off to London and Cardiff

2007-07-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

To the JISC digitization conference. More soon.

Donostia-San Sebastian

2007-07-07T00:52:00.000-07:00

Visit to Arteleku, an arts center with an amazing library and archives. In the evening, a talk and screening (and walk to the beach).

My Bilbao talk

2007-07-07T00:40:00.000-07:00

This is "Remix or Rollover," (the movie), with slides in Spanish, as translated by the very kind Juan Crego and shot/edited/processed by Gorka Palazio.

Panorama Ephemera in San Sebastian

2007-07-05T00:05:00.000-07:00

Friday, July 6. I'll be there. Tell your friends.

Bilbao.

2007-07-03T15:39:00.000-07:00

Talk tomorrow. Panorama screening Friday. Pictures here.

Twice a year

2007-06-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

Houses in our part of San Francisco are built very closely together — the walls between our house and our northern neighbor's are just one to two inches apart. This, by the way, is enough space for a colony of conversational bats. On June 14, the sun shone straight through the gap.

Museum of Film Archeology

2007-06-26T21:20:00.000-07:00

All 10 episodes here. This was the second season of my Japanese TV show (1999-2000), posted because the statute of limitations on awkwardness has finally run out.

Not really part of Oregon

2007-06-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

Portland, here for the Platform Animation Festival.

Invisible Dynamics

2007-06-21T10:57:00.000-07:00

An Exploratorium project, meeting today.

Cold War Ruins tour

2007-06-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

Nice tour last Sunday. More. Now this morning there's a fire on Treasure Island.

Prelinger mashed up

2007-06-10T17:16:00.000-07:00

The Internet Archive has made a new collection called Prelinger Mashups. Look forward to seeing more videos made with Prelinger's footage (there are 138 right now). They have designed a great logo.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

2007-06-10T17:12:00.000-07:00

Breakfast, lunch, new camera, meet new people, work on slides for Wednesday's talk in New Haven, soon dinner. Manhattan is one crowded outdoor mall.

AV Geeks HQ revealed for the first time

2007-06-10T17:11:00.001-07:00

Aurora Picture Show visits AV Geeks headquarters in Raleigh.

Arrived in New York

2007-06-09T20:44:00.000-07:00

Haight Street on the eve of the Summer of Love

2007-06-05T15:41:00.000-07:00

And here's a slice (click to enlarge) of the Haight in June 1966, from the San Francisco Street Address Telephone Directory (source: Prelinger Library). Note the pioneering Psychedelic Shop at 1535 Haight. Any of these businesses still around?

Valencia Street before the hipsters came

2007-06-05T15:08:00.000-07:00

Here's an extract (click to enlarge) from the San Francisco Street Address Telephone Directory, issued 1957 (source: Prelinger Library). On your next walk down the strip, try remapping the names and businesses to today's landscape.

Great ambient audio

2007-06-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

Air traffic control communications live (except for net latency). Right now listening to rush-hour traffic from SFO Tower, which is two mountains away and hence impossible to hear from the shallow gulch where I sit. But my favorite feed is Schiphol airport in the Netherlands, one of the crossroads of globalization, where English (always; it's the international standard for air traffic control) is spoken in many accents, and planes converge from and radiate out to all the world.

On the Virtues of Preexisting Material

2007-05-30T18:16:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago (on March 26, 2007) I did a talk at Moe's Books in Berkeley. The talk was built around an old manifesto that I dusted off, rewrote and added one point to. It's still a draft, and will likely undergo further change, but here goes:

I'll begin with my manifesto On the Virtues of Preexisting Material, which goes like this:

1 Why add to the population of orphaned works?
2 Don't presume that new work improves on old
3 Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
4 The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
5 Dregs are the sweetest drink
6 And leftovers were spared for a reason
7 Actors don't get a fair shake the first time around, let's give them another
8 The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
9 We approach the future by typically roundabout means
10 We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too
11 What's gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future
12 Access to what's already happened is cheaper than access to what's happening now
13 Archives are justified by use
14 Make a quilt not an advertisement

- - - - - - - - -

No one loves manifestos more than their writers, which means that they often require interpretation and maybe even translation into real-world language. So what I'm going to do is take my 14 points and expand them into ideas. Some of these might sound trendy, but I think they're actually traditional — they've been in and around the culture for a long time.

1 Why add to the population of orphaned works?

This is meant to provoke, of course. I might as well have asked, "why make new work while old work still exists?" That would be an argument for stasis, but I'm not seeking that — I'm seeking movement.

We live in a tremendously media-rich society. Every year Americans throw away more text, sound and image than most other nations create. We're the world capital of ephemera, and much of it has no active parent.

Orphaned works — which are works that are still owned by somebody, but a somebody that can't be found — testify to the absurdities that arise when products of the intellect are automatically born as property, which is the way our copyright law now reads. There are millions of orphaned works out there floating in limbo. You can reproduce them or work with them if you like, but if the derivative work you make rises above a certain horizon of obscurity, you run the risk of being sued. We are trying to come up with a better set of rules, but it's very difficult to change copyright law unless you run a studio or a record company. There are literally hundreds of thousands of great books we'd like to scan and put on the Net, but can't because of their orphan status.

The real issue, of course, is that we need to convene and decide how deeply we want to connect culture and property. And when we've settled on a particular mix, we might think about whether it maximizes our freedom to speak, to learn and to inquire — in short, whether it leads to the kind of a world we'd want to live in. This will not be an easy conversation — it's hardly even begun. But one way we can move towards more open cultural distribution and exchange is to make our own works as accessible as possible. We can do this by limiting restrictions on reuse to the absolute minimum, by using permissive licenses, like the Creative Commons licenses, that say "use me this way, it's OK," and by using copyright homeopathically rather than as a weapon of shock and awe.

2 Don't presume that new work improves on old

The ephemera we produce tend to manifest ideas that fix themselves over and over again in different media. What this suggests to me is that we might be more open to letting old works speak, that our task might not be so much to make new works but to build new platforms for old works to speak from. This might mean that we weave using others' threads, that we take positions as arrangers rather than as sculptors.

Collage often does this. In recent years we have come to understand collage largely as an assembly of small units — as the equivalent of words, syllables or even phonemes. Collage has migrated from the arts and crafts we associate with folk culture into digital culture, speeding up and fragmenting along the way. Value-free, I want to propose that collage might also work in larger units, as sentences, paragraphs, chapters, even entire books. This kind of collage works slowly and in stealth, and will ultimately affect the way that we contrast new and old works.

3 Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom

Take this with a grain of salt. I'm not good at ancestor worship and don't know if I'd recognize wisdom when it’s in front of me.

But I'm going to argue here against eternalizing the present. Just because we're in the middle of a condition that we call X doesn't mean it's always been X. Who would have thought that glaciers would start breaking up? Who could have predicted that honeybee populations would shrink? Who foresaw the breakup of the Soviet Union? And who among us recognizes that the 50 United States will grow to more or shrink to less than 50 as time passes?

Recycling the so-called wisdom of the past can problematize the present and encourage people to ask harder questions. When we inject history into contemporary experience, we are making an historical intervention, which can have dramatic consequences — if we listen.

This is why we've put ephemeral films online and why we're now scanning books, most of which weren't written by famous authors.

4 The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful

Many others have said this better than I can. It’s folly to make too much of originality. So much of what we make rests on work that's come before. Let's admit this and revel in it. Though it might make some people nervous, it actually cushions us in a genetic continuity of expression, and what could be more reassuring?

Last month, I went to a great lecture by Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt from Matmos at the beautiful Hearst Mining Building. Drew laid out the history and promise of 1960s and 1970s conceptual art and talked about how it informed the work they do. One of the most provocative legacies of conceptual art was de-commodification — departing from object-oriented artmaking and from the tyranny of the art market. And yet it struck me that de-commodification had actually created its opposite. Conceptual works tended to exist primarily in their documentation, in physical traces of the work that had been created by someone so that the work would not disappear from consciousness. Documentation creates objects that are always someone's property. The value of art documentation rests in whose work it documents and in who made the documents. We are therefore almost back where we started.

When you attend a performance, a demonstration or a happening, count the cameras and recorders. What's the ratio of documentators to actors? Think of all the property that's being created on the back of an event that may be nobody's property, that may even be anti-property. Then think of identifying and unraveling those property rights forty years in the future.

5 Dregs are the sweetest drink

My partner Megan and I run a research library in San Francisco that we built around our personal book, periodical and ephemera collections. At some point it got a life of its own and started growing like mushrooms in Mendocino. Many of you know it because you're our honored shelvers. We joke about how it's a library full of bad ideas; I characterize it as 98% false consciousness. It's full of outdated information, extinct procedures, self-serving explanations, ideas that never passed the smell test, and lies. And yet that's where you find the truth. You can't judge the past at its best, you need to confront its imperfections. And of course that's true for the present as well.

I've been interested in labor history for a long time, used to collect books about it, many of them from the old Moe's. When I began to collect industrial films I was struck by how much of the history of working people was contained in films made by corporations. In order to extract it you've got to engage in selective appropriation, but it's there, often eloquently so. There's a 1936 film called Master Hands which you can download from the Internet Archive; it’s a tribute to mass production at Chevrolet. But what it really shows is how elemental, dangerous and mind-numbing the work at Flint was. It's a film no one else seems to have, and it's now on the National Film Registry, but it was dregs — on a cold day in 1983, I paid a man not to throw it away.

Research is now indicating that kids who grow up on farms have fewer allergies later in life. The hypothesis is that exposure to manure immunizes them early on. City kids miss out. I hope you'll all come visit the library, get your own dose of bad ideas and build up your immune system.

6 And leftovers were spared for a reason

Leftovers exist for lots of reasons, but my favorite reason is that they're our raw material for performing operations on history. Whether it's an individual filtering their family's reality through a scrapbook or a marcher carrying a picture of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, people use what's left to us as leverage to document history or even change it.

7 Actors don't get a fair shake the first time around, let's give them another

I don't know much about actors, really, and I'm not going to take you through the "long tail" argument. But I think that reincarnation through reuse confers importance, greater recognition, and respect on works and those who make them. Does it bring the makers money? It often does, and there are all sorts of experimental models out there. We ourselves make more money selling stock footage since we put the same footage online for free downloading.

Ubiquity raises value. Culture is an infinitely renewable resource. Does the value of "Stairway to Heaven" suffer because somewhere in America, someone's playing it on the radio every thirty seconds?

Perhaps we'll never know whether models of plenty beat out models of scarcity, but we may learn something as we experiment along the way and give actors a fairer shake.

8 The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers

We add meaning to culture by remixing it. Putting something in a new context helps you see it with new eyes; it's like bringing your partner home to the parents for the first time, or letting a dog loose to run in the waves.

We also infuse culture with new pleasure. When the maker who calls him or herself Otto Nomous made the short video The Fellowship of the Ring of Free Trade, he or she sought to decode the hidden prophecies contained in The Lord of the Rings and prove that it was an anarchist parable relevant to the present day. This video reveals the decoded dialogues through witty subtitles set in an Elvish typestyle. It is delightful and you can easily find it online.

Remixing is estrangement in the way the classic writers like Viktor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht described it. And yet the raw material remains familiar and recognizable. It's at once a subversive and reassuring process. Some writers, like John Updike and not like Jonathan Lethem, fear the emerging mashed-up book. They hope their texts won't be scrambled or altered, that they'll always retain the same identity and continuity, and follow the same course. But rivers, like information, route themselves around obstacles, and the bends in rivers are where adventures happen. We'll find new ways to experience and value old works as a consequence of mixing them into newer ones.

9 We approach the future by typically roundabout means

It's said that storytelling is hardwired into our brains — that we respond most deeply and emotionally to storylines, characters and narrative arcs. You hear this from everyone, from folklorists to cable TV programming executives. You can't drive a project through the distribution system if it lacks certain compulsory elements. You can, of course, employ traditional elements in novel and dramatic ways: this may get you awards.

Though I agree that stories wield power, I think this power is arbitrary. We believe in storytelling because we've naturalized the consensus that causes us to believe in it. There is no reason for this consensus not to change as the world changes. Storytelling as we know it is not an absolute, and it may slow the courses of culture and history. We value storytelling for its ability to wrap new skins on old skeletons, but even bones don't last forever.

10 We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too

It may be vain to hope that our works survive into the future and will be seen and listened to, but still we hope so. If we want to encourage those not yet born to think historically, we need to begin by thinking historically ourselves. This inevitably pushes us into the territory of preexisting materials.

11 What's gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future

For 20 years I collected old educational and industrial films. They were made to instruct and socialize young people with the objective of turning them into dependable workers, good citizens and avid consumers. 1980s audiences became fascinated with these films and a cult following developed.

I was psyched to see this happen, but became disenchanted with what to me seemed like superficial and ahistorical reactions to the films. For many people, they triggered regressive nostalgic reactions. Others treated them as surreal documents, as bizarre oddities, as the stuff of long-gone conspiracies to manufacture consensus. All of these were true in a way, but something seemed to be missing.

The breakthrough for me was to realize that these films didn't just describe a lost past, but might also be tracing the contours of possible futures. In other words, we could see them not simply as antiquated, but as predictive. And this has in fact come true. Many of today's suburban children live the walled-in lives of their 1950s counterparts. Corporate and government interests are conflated. We fear those we call terrorists as we once feared those we called communists.

We can't go back to the world of the past, but sometimes the past overtakes us.

12 Access to what's already happened is cheaper than access to what's happening now

Sidewalk sales, dumpsters, library discard carts, Craigslist, your grandmother's attic all contain masses of content just waiting to be cut up and reassembled. Every city has an outsider archivist who's rescued some important collection of something from landfill and may be looking for collaborators. The past lies ready to be remade.

Yes, you can remix the present and upload it to YouTube, but they can take it down and they will, if you use content that someone else owns. The emerging digital media use electronic locks to inhibit reuse, and what you download on Saturday may vanish from your hard disk on Monday. We are beginning to turn fair use into a legal right rather than a legal defense, but we haven’t yet won.

Don't shrink from remixing the present, but enjoy the freedom that comes with working with public domain material. The public domain is the coolest neighborhood on the frontier.

13 Archives are justified by use

This might seem obvious to you and me, but it doesn't really work that way in the archival world. Until recently (and I generalize), archives focused more on preserving records than on providing access to them. Though this has begun to change, archives have had a really difficult time reengineering themselves and their culture to meet the vastly increased demand for their holdings.

Which brings us again to YouTube. In addition to generating lawsuits and refocusing mass culture onto a shrunken, fuzzy screen, it's raised critical issues for archives. Media archives have tried to join the 21st century by putting little bits and pieces online. They face such opposition internally and from copyright holders that they’ve had to take baby steps. Now YouTube has raised public expectations, and it’s hard to see how any institution can meet them. In its first 12 months, YouTube built an easy-to-access online collection of some 7 million digital videos that I'd argue has become the world's default media archives. Everything anyone does to bring archives online is now going to be measured against YouTube's ambiguous legacy. It presents a massive collection of older and newer material, from video of Malcolm X's complete speeches to clips of the moose I saw wandering in front yards in Anchorage. It sticks to preview mode, presenting visually degraded Flash video, so it will still get sued, but most rightsholders will rightfully regard what it does as promotion. Best of all, it allows users to upload almost anything and annotate with relative freedom. It is not an archives, but it's outclassed archives at their own game.

In order for archives to survive while the YouTubes rule, they need to be used. And it is up to us to use the amazing things that they hold.

14 Make a quilt not an advertisement

Quilting is an early form of sampling. A patchwork quilt combines preexisting fabric from many sources. Quilting relies on what geeks call interoperability — the ability of elements to fit into a matrix and function together. That's what makes the Internet work — machines and networks can talk with one another and freely exchange bits.

Interoperability requires openness. But today openness is threatened in many ways. While some companies have built business models around openness, many others haven't. Right now, for instance, private companies are scanning books in publicly-owned and tax-exempt libraries around the world. Because the companies are paying for digitization, they control access to these new digital books, even though the books themselves may be in the public domain. Many online books let you see images of the pages, but don't permit access to the raw text. You cannot cut and paste the text or grab it so you can index it yourself. That isn't open, and these books don't interoperate. You can't weave a textual quilt using books from Project Gutenberg and books from Google. If we're to build networked books, to freely cite the work of others and merge past and present, we need to make sure that openness is at the core of all of our activities. Cultural material needs to be shared and distributed as freely as the law allows.

But above all quilting is folk art, not corporate expression. It's about turning leftovers into something that's both transcendent and useful. It doesn't have selling at its core.

Make a quilt, not an advertisement.

Eating a sea urchin

2007-05-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

Very nice shot.

Sighting

2007-05-27T15:02:00.001-07:00

Someone saw a black oystercatcher.

Responses to Mark Helprin

2007-05-27T14:55:00.000-07:00

Seven letters in today's NY Times responding to Helprin's op-ed asserting that intellectual "property" should have the same legal standing (i.e., permanently ownable) as real property. Every one disagrees.

New experimental works at Other Cinema

2007-05-27T00:19:00.000-07:00

Great show tonight. Especially memorable: Semiconductor's Brilliant Noise, Jeanne Liotta's Foucault's Pendulum, Matt McCormick's Fifty Years Later, Kerry Laitala's Hocus Pocus — Out of Thin Air, Lauren Woods's The Teenth of June, Martha Colburn's Destiny Manifesto.

Blackoystercatcher is here

2007-05-27T00:15:00.000-07:00

I've wanted a place for smaller, sometimes more provisional thoughts and ideas. Let's see if it works.