Chapter 4
Dropping the Frame
From Film to Database
“No, I don’t need your picture. I don’t have to know what you look like, we haven’t even said hello yet. You can look like anybody. I’ll take anybody. I’ll take anything I can get.” Vito Acconci whispers these lines in Theme Song (1973), a video artwork in which the artist wraps himself around a camcorder, delivering derivations on pop songs as pickup lines to an unknown viewer.1 Shot in black and white over thirty-three minutes of continuous footage, the video features a close-up of Acconci lying on the floor, staring directly into the camera lens: that is to say, directly into the eyes of an unknown viewer. Addressing video as a medium as much as it addresses the gallery spectator, Theme Song stands as a prime example of the video art that emerged at the intersection of performance and experimental cinema in the early 1970s. Nick Kaye notes that this work “at once reflects earlier theoretical analyses of media’s ‘extension’ of the body while articulating television and video’s spatial multiplications.”2 For Kaye, these multiplications are divided along the televisual communications circuit outlined by Samuel Weber in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media. In this collection of lectures and interviews, Weber updates Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura to argue that operations of production, transmission, and reception emblematize the confusion of time and space in an age defined by the dominance of broadcast media.3 Simultaneously playing with the mechanics of video production, the looping potential of electronic art, and the reception circuits of the gallery, Acconci’s work deftly navigates the media it inhabits by playing with the formal modalities of its technical affordances.
Figure 4.1. Rectilinear still from Vito Acconci’s Theme Song (1973). Copyright Vito Acconci and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Maria Acconci.
As if these confusions weren’t enough, playback within a digital milieu introduces further complexities to works of time-based media online. Watching Theme Song stream on the internet produces a wholly novel experience, uncannily prefigured by Acconci’s monologue, which seems to have always already anticipated a future viewer. The lines hold new relevance in the experience of streaming Theme Song through a browser:
I’ll be waiting for you, I know, I know I’m not close to you now. How can I be close? You’re in another world. It’s as if, it’s as if you’re an angel. . . . How long, how long do I have to wait for you? Oh, but I’ll wait. I’ll wait as long as I have to because, uh, because, I’ve always dreamed about you. You know, anyone I was ever with, I was really thinking about you, though I never even knew you, I don’t even know you now, but I had this vision of you, I had this real vision of somebody ideal, somebody special. I realize no one could live up to that dream, but that dream was really you. You, you could fulfill all the dreams, all the dreams I have.
Speaking to a mediated spectator from the perspective of an actor becoming flickering images on a monitor (“another world”), Acconci addresses the temporal lapse separating production and reception, embodying the dream of transmission to any-viewer-whatsoever. In a futile desire for the communication of angels, staring wide-eyed like a post-digital Angelus Novus watching the wreckage of history accrue, the digital object fulfills an unpredictable dream embedded in the work itself.
Figure 4.2. CRT video still from Vito Acconci’s Theme Song (1973). Copyright Vito Acconci and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Maria Acconci.
From the detached gallery viewing of its original screening, Theme Song slips into the intimacy of the personal computer. As internet commentators readily acknowledge, an online Theme Song eerily anticipates the intimate formats of electronic video diaries, social media confessions, and digital sex work.4 The video seductively promises to wait as long as it has to for the viewer—addressed in the second person—as an ideal “somebody” who could “fulfill all the dreams” latent in the work. How could he be close, Acconci asks from 1973? Of course, we are in another world. The potency of Theme Song lies in the fact that it lends itself to the momentary hallucination that it is, in actuality, speaking to “you” as the embedded video loads in your browser.
Figure 4.3. Flash Video still from Vito Acconci’s Theme Song (1973), streaming on UbuWeb. Copyright Vito Acconci and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Maria Acconci.
Zooming out from Acconci’s close-up, we might also consider Theme Song streaming on a little database called UbuWeb alongside thousands of corresponding digital objects, each radically transformed by the contingent effects of computation, preservation, and dispersion charted in previous chapters. Initiated in 1996, the same year that the HTTP/1 protocol was finalized, UbuWeb has long been the most visible shadow library distributing experimental film and video, sound poetry, conceptual writing, and related legacies of the avant-garde on the internet. Hosting works ranging from obscure audio records to foundational documents of the historical avant-gardes, UbuWeb plays a primary role in shaping contemporary artistic and literary practices while transcoding a selective genealogy of twentieth-century aesthetic artifacts. Like Acconci’s long-waiting monologue, UbuWeb was built around the latent dreams of its origins in collecting concrete poetry that seemed to anticipate formal features of minimal internet design and digital typography.
Lev Manovich pursues this line of thinking in The Language of New Media, which examines the ways “avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software.”5 Media-reflexivity, of course, pervades twentieth century art and literature from the historic avant-gardes through conceptual and minimal art, and into Language Poetry, structural film, and net art. In this lineage, the lens of media-reflexivity poses a particularly salient vantage onto unstable media undergoing variable processes of transcoding online. Just as the video file for Theme Song longs to respond to its new internet context, George Landow’s Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1965–1966) transforms from a self-referential preoccupation with filmic materiality to a glitchy meditation on RGB (red, green, blue) color values, vector-based graphics, Flash Video frame rates, and compression effects. Paul Sharit’s Fluxfilm Dots 1 & 2 (1965), once displaying a rapid flicker of white dots on a black cinematic background, becomes a blurry mess of squares in its internet version. The examples could multiply to cover the thousands of media-reflexive movies hosted by UbuWeb. This chapter asks the viewer to reject the indexical impulse. Rather than reroute the UbuWeb “film & video” section back to cinematic projection or VHS monitors, it seeks a moment of disbelief, as though brought about by the half-serious seductions of Acconci’s smooth intonations. Instead, this chapter attends to how historical media-specific works function in the digital milieux of the present, accidentally speaking to their conditions of digital transcoding. From this vantage, a vast array of contingent effects might be unearthed within each historical work.
Rather than attempting a comprehensive or schematic inventory of these effects, or attempting an accounting of the recently shuttered UbuWeb as a whole, this chapter aims to produce targeted engagements with two additional files hosted by the site.6 If the previous chapter worked through transmission narratives and site-based contexts to the exclusion of reading specific files, this chapter works in reverse: to read each file in order to illumine their contexts by relief. Aside from the formal symmetry of this design, this move sidesteps another unforeseen operator at Acconci’s anticipatory interface: a set of rhetorical and editorial confusions about the production, purpose, and direction of the site over time. The problem with writing about UbuWeb is that it’s difficult to disentangle the site from the polemical self-theorizations of its founder and editor Kenneth Goldsmith, whose perspectives on copyright, appropriation, and internet poetics have been widely covered.7 The sites examined throughout this book are generally understood to be the collaborative efforts of teams of editors over time. While UbuWeb, founded in 1996, was indeed primarily organized, designed, and managed by Kenneth Goldsmith, it is also the product of dozens of named and unnamed editors, presenting a panoply of editorial contributions, including my own, made at various points over the years. The site also encompasses “content” provided by individuals and initiatives including Bidoun Magazine, Continuo, Electra, GreyLodge, Roulette, and SoundEye, among others. In other instances, its content owes to untold and broadly uncredited individuals who originally digitized, contextualized, and dispersed its works on other sites that were subsequently scraped for hosting at UbuWeb. Given this context, the irony of Goldsmith’s most direct claim to site-wide authorship—which denies attribution to the site’s many uncredited editors and their labor—might best speak for itself:
Wait, I’ve just admitted something that I’ve never stated publicly. UbuWeb is entirely me. I’ve always wanted to remain faceless, letting the site speak for itself. There’s nothing worse than a vanity site, the kind of place some overriding ego, name, and agenda speaks louder than the work that’s presented. So instead of this being “Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb,” I’ve put forth the notion of faceless institution. From the austere way the site is designed, to the fact that I always speak about it in the first-person plural as “we,” to the massive amount of content that we host, I’ve always tried to throw the focus away from me. But in truth, with the exception of the occasional student or intern, it’s all me.8
While there might be plenty to unpack in this statement, alongside Goldsmith’s role in both the poetics discourse of the 2010s and online archiving more generally, these tracks move beyond my focus in this chapter. Unfortunately, with UbuWeb, the authorial claims of the editor remain both the most visible and least interesting aspects of the site, which features an exceptionally diverse array of otherwise inaccessible works in the global lineage of avant-garde experimentalism across the arts and letters.
In the interlude following this chapter, I open new tabs on a wider array of these works from the collection. For now, at last, some close readings are in order. Where the first three chapters respectively explored the computation, preservation, and dispersion of digital files within little databases, this final chapter presents a close reading of two particular works to suggest methods for reading little databases through the digital objects they harbor. Rather than move from the collection to the file, these readings start with the file as a means to reconnect to the network. Each reading expands further from the work it studies, into the database systems that facilitate each in turn. The first work is a “film” from the 1960s that happens to have been digitized. The second work was made using digital tools as a means of reflecting on the intersection of film and computer culture in the 1960s.
In the first instance, I examine digital versions of Nam June Paik’s iconic work Zen for Film (1962–1964). The digital afterlife of Paik’s film has inspired a range of new artworks that take the digital version as a starting point and plug these concerns into new systems of meaning online. I discuss these works with the intention of highlighting just how radical a digital Zen for Film might be when seen as an artifact in its own right, with no further modifications performed beyond the digitization of the filmic work itself.
In the second instance, I explore edges radiating out from a central node in the digital compilation movie, We Edit Life (2002) by Vicki Bennett (People Like Us). Following We Edit Life, the reader is directed back into the database, a rich archive of found footage awaiting digital re-signification. As a coda to this chapter, returning to Theme Song, I highlight a little network of compellingly transcoded works in the UbuWeb collection through a Flash Video compilation essay made in collaboration with João Enxuto when Flash was still the dominant format for video streaming, accompanied by an inventory of transformations. In each of these instances, this chapter seeks to illumine the ways in which moving images are transformed by the signifying codes of digital technologies and network contexts, and what a user might do with these transformations.
Zen for Film and the Varieties of Use
In 2008, Tom Service posted a link on The Guardian to a YouTube video of Paik’s Zen for Film, with a peculiar endorsement: “The antidote to the internet is . . . composer and video artist Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1962–1964). Eight minutes of unadulterated, blissed-out, soundless, grainy Fluxus whiteness: worth anybody’s ascetic concentration, and a perfect corrective to our hyper-stimulated media lives.”9 An embedded link directed the reader to YouTube user chowkaideng’s upload of a completely soundless video recording of Zen for Film, a 360p streaming Flash-encoded movie that had, at the time I first encountered it in 2010, boasted 61,862 viewers.10 Anything but “ascetic,” YouTube’s hypermediated interface begs for the viewer’s attention in ALL CAPS, today just as much as in 2008. Varieties of social networking (“Share”), evaluation (190 thumbs up, 26 thumbs down), commentary (71 comments), and search options accompany the YouTube player. The right sidebar recommends further works by Nam June Paik on YouTube, works by artists like Hans Richter, John Cage, and Marcel Duchamp, alongside a variety of digitized Fluxus films and algorithmic recommendations based on my previous viewings, optimized for Google AdSense, bringing my viewing history onto the screen in relief of my data shadow.
Service’s Guardian post demonstrates the common conflation of streaming video on the internet with the celluloid films from which they derive. Further, Zen for Film has never been the soundless, unadulterated antidote that Service describes. Unlike the pixelated iteration streaming on YouTube, Zen for Film was scripted for projector, light, audience, and 16mm film. Attempting to view the internet video as an indexical representation of a projected film is internally inconsistent with the work. It is a remarkably noisy time-based artwork that foregrounds the imminent material modulations of its film stock. Noise and deterioration, in fact, ground its conceptual framework and system of meaning. Even if the film is a corrective to “our hyper-stimulated media lives”—or, as Heike Helfert of Media Art Net puts it, “the flood of images from outside”—a Zen for film only too obviously demands its proper media for measured reflection.11 The YouTube video is something else.
Figure 4.4. Still from user chowkaideng’s upload of Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1964) to YouTube, captured in 2010.
Concentrating on the digital object that stands for Paik’s Zen for Film, the reader is thus quickly assaulted by a dense knot of semantic confusions. Critical and technical discourses struggle to keep pace with the fast-changing terrain of the internet; since Geocities, methodologies of “new” media have always been “under construction.” To disentangle this web, we might begin by returning to the historical and conceptual functions of the filmic work. Importing these primary functions into the digital objects circulating online, Zen for Film presents a particularly focused window into the process of transcoding historical film. The attention to media-specificity built into the work’s internal logic allows for a deeper investigation of the formal, cultural, and technical protocols for the contemporary circulation of filmic work. After folding the historical film into the digital object, this study of Zen for Film concludes with the various ways in which artists and online archivists have deployed the work in recent years. Building on the program laid out by the history of Zen for Film and these various new uses, I examine several layers of transformation within the work, offering a revised understanding of a digital artifact otherwise obscured by its own historical effects. This may also serve as one metonym among many for the digital transcoding of filmic art at large, clarified, in this instance, by the crystalline structure of reflexivity in the work.
Like John Cage’s 4’33”, Paik’s original Zen for Film presents a remarkably minimal gesture that opens out onto a vast array of aesthetic, narratological, and technical issues. The concept seems simple enough: Zen for Film is a work consisting entirely of unexposed clear celluloid.12 Just as Cage ostensibly performs a certain length of “silence,” Paik films a variable length of “nothing.” However, as soon as the viewer starts to listen to Cage’s instrumentless composition or watch Paik’s imageless film, a world of incidental, technical, personal, and otherwise drowned-out actors emerge. Paik famously describes the work as “clear film, accumulating in time dust and scratches.”13 A film containing its own history of use, the work incorporates and showcases the continued material deterioration of the celluloid with each new performance. In Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music, Cage recollects the effects and “plot” of Paik’s film:
It’s an hour long and you see the dust on the film and on the camera and on the lens of the projector. That dust actually moves and creates different shapes. The specks of dust become, as you look at the film, extremely comic. They take on character and they take on a kind of plot—whether this speck of dust will meet that speck. And if they do, what happens? I remember being greatly entertained and preferring it really to any film I’ve ever seen before or after. It’s one of the great films, and it’s not often available to see.14
Bathed in the projector’s light, a captive audience must contemplate the film over the duration of an hour, with all the technical details of the cinema system growing ever more active in the shaping of its comedic “narrative.” New characters emerge over time as the film naturally thickens the “plot.” While the conceptual premise of Zen for Film is simple enough to summarize, the experience of viewing is quite rare, as willing venues for projection are scarce and prints of the work are in even shorter supply.
The rarity of the film is generated procedurally: the film incorporates each screening as an ongoing set of inscription events. Kaye characterizes the cybernetic relay constituting the work as a “continuous recording of the physical degradation of the blank leader tape by the ‘real’ conditions of its projection. . . . Zen for Film poses the questions of what it means to be at the threshold of the medium, . . . effecting its own gradual destruction in exchanges between the film and its environment.”15 By rendering an art of gradual destruction, Paik enacts a degenerative system that finds meaning in the ongoing play of media and environment. In the process, he challenges the reader to adapt beyond the thresholds and limits of the work, as well as the ethics of display and curatorial intervention. In 2015, curator, conservator, and art historian Hana Hölling mounted a definitive exhibition and study of precisely this work to question the limits of conservation and display. Entitled Revisions—Zen for Film, the exhibition page opens by asking: “How do works of art endure over time in the face of aging materials and changing interpretations of their meaning? How do decay, technological obsolescence, and the blending of old and new media affect what an artwork is and can become? And how can changeable artworks encourage us to rethink our assumptions of a work of art as fixed and static?”16
One way to begin answering these questions might be to turn from a conversation with Cage’s silence and Paik’s light to Maurice Lemaître’s noisy concept of the “supertemporal” (supertemporelle). Formulated in collaboration with fellow Lettrist Isodore Isou in 1960, the supertemporal film presents a limit case for thinking through how an artwork changes over time.17 Of Lemaître’s many variations on the realization of the supertemporal, the film Toujours à l’avant-garde de l’avant-garde, jusqu’au paradis et au-delà! (Always at the avant-garde of the avant-garde, to paradise and beyond!) from 1970 offers what is perhaps the most radical model for ongoing transformations to an aesthetic object’s meaning.18 Lemaître’s film theorizes itself in an extended voice-over track running through unrelated footage from a German television report on the 1969 biennale. The found footage only incidentally features “five seconds” of a play by Lemaître and is, we’re told, otherwise entirely unrelated to the artwork.19 Instead, the footage stands in for any footage whatsoever. More important than the image is the ways in which the image is screened over time. The English subtitles note:
Ever the Avant-Garde of the Avant-Garde is a new kind of film, named supertemporal film. A supertemporal film is an open film, a framework film, into which the audience is invited. Each member of the audience is asked to join in and make her or his own contribution to the work, non-stop. Tonight, for example, you are in this theater willingly attending a showing of a supertemporal film authored by Maurice Lemaître and titled Ever the Avant-Garde of the Avant-Garde. From now on, everything you do, in whatever way, and even what you do not do, such as remaining silent or still, becomes an integral part of the work. . . . Each new scratch on the picture or the sound track will remain forever as part of the work, even if it gets overlaid by other scratches. In this way, our projectionist and the projector itself share in creating the supertemporal film.20
While the film is “authored” by Lemaître, both the audience and the technical apparatus make further “contributions” to the work over time. Even a “silent or still” spectator “becomes an integral part of the work,” Lemaître argues, by breathing over the soundtrack and occupying the social space of the screening. This is the social text in extremis. Even incidental inscriptions made by scratches as the film runs through a projector are brought under the rubric of an authoring agent. Both, the film declares, become an integral part of the work. In an earlier sequence, Lemaître demands that the film “must never more stop being created and screened.” Until heaven and after, new contributions to the work are made continuously with each screening: the viewer, the cinematic apparatus, and the manifold contingencies of use intertwined. Discussing Lemaître’s previous Lettrist project, Le film est déjà commence? (Has the film already started?; 1951), Kaira Marie Cabañas notes how, in these works, “film’s outside folds into its inside: the space of cinematic reception becomes coterminous with the production of meaning, . . . to use this composite medium in the service of nonalienated and critical reception.”21 Like Zen for Film, this contingent scenario of ongoing, multisited coproduction begs the question of digital versioning. Once transcoded, the film-as-movie-file gathers no new scratches and the communal setting of the cinema flattens along the illuminated screen of personal viewing on a public website, all watched over by unseen algorithms that similarly grow and evolve by tracking each user’s click. The supertemporal digital object is subject to endless iterations, even as its playback remains relatively constant.
The same ongoing process of transformation was written into Zen for Film, released after Lemaître’s cinematic interventions. In the film’s screening, supertemporal effects extend from “specks of dust” to scratches, projector quality, theatrical staging, and audience acoustics. While the read-write cycle of the cinematic apparatus carries out its chance operations, the aural aspects of the film call for further focus on the technical substrate of the work. Far from silent, the score is constituted instead by the incidental and technical character of a film screening’s social text. In the catalog essay “Unheard Music,” Craig Dworkin describes the sheer noise of “the incidental soundtrack to Paik’s film,” advising the reader: “If you get a chance, sit near the projectionist; even after only eight minutes you’ll never forget the nervous clack and twitter of the shutter, blinking like a blinded Cyclopes in the noonday sun.”22 These elements are not only highly scripted aspects of Zen for Film, but inscribe the meaning of the work itself. The damages to the print, the time-based system of repetition and change, and the incessant cinematic noise together forge the meaning-making system of the film.
Given this media-specific framework, it is not surprising that Zen for Film also plays a primary role in “Signal to Noise,” a concluding chapter to Dworkin’s study of seemingly “blank” works entitled No Medium.23 In the book, Dworkin argues that no medium can be thought in isolation. Instead, a close analysis of any medial iteration invokes the dynamic processes of a signifying chain that includes material substrates, social contexts, and thresholds of interpretation. Throughout Dworkin’s study, works that appear “blank” or “silent” offer compelling cases for the dynamic processes that render media legible to interpretation. As though to highlight the length of this signifying chain, “Signal to Noise” focuses on Ken Friedman’s Zen for Record, a conceptually related audio derivative of Paik’s Zen for Film, and concludes with speculations about a potential Zen for Compact Disc. Dworkin suggests that one “could argue that Friedman’s record and Paik’s film are simply two different editions of a single work. Or, if not two formats for one and the same work, then at least that each is closer to the other than to the respective versions that might appear on DVD and CD.”24 This “affinity” between the film and vinyl works reflecting on their own medial formations—against their own respective transmedia versions—crystalizes Dworkin’s account of media specificity. Typifying Rosalind Krauss’s arguments on the postmedium condition, Zen for Film requires an analysis that reads the “complex webs of overlapping technical support” that mediate “even the most abstract and cerebral works of conceptual art.”25 In the case of Zen for Film, these supports measure a durational length of cinematic time in a shared physical space. Once set to the beat of physiological responses (“the time between involuntary blinks or the spasms of the ciliary muscle”) and a breadth of cinematic effects (“slowly disintegrating the film with each screening”), the silent pixels and time-slider functionalities of YouTube work to both expunge the medial components scripted into the original work and direct our gaze instead to the new interfaces and media formations in which they reappear.26
I outline the conceptual and medial framework of the film here to emphasize the ways in which this work in particular functions with a special relationship to its material instantiation, mediated delivery, and contextual distribution. Standing in for a broad array of conceptual and media-specific films from the 1960s and 1970s, Zen for Film generates aesthetic interpretations that cannot avoid an analysis of the technical infrastructure and varied uses of the work, especially once removed from those infrastructures. While many artistic forms in image, print, and sound may retain the essential components of their significance when transcoded into digital networks, the resistance to new media formats that Zen for Film and other media-specific works evidence presents a compelling field for investigating the effects and processes of transformative mediation. The film’s structure of signification remains irrevocably bound not only to its material format, but also to contingent circuits of reception and circulation. Adding to Lemaître’s account of the time-based production of the supertemporal film and Dworkin’s reading of the thresholds of meaning in media, a communications circuit can be closed with a sketch of the transmission patterns of Zen for Film online. Skirting the legal discourses of fair use and intellectual property, on the one hand, and the amateur notes of shadowy dispersion networks comprised of pirates and peer-to-peer sharing, on the other, the file’s distribution presents another filter through which to understand the variability of the digital object.
Rare, experimental, and avant-garde films trafficking online often originate on private torrent sites or peer-to-peer communities. “Ripped” or “torn” from official channels by enthusiasts and collectors, these files are rarely professionally captured and often unsanctioned. They inhabit shadow and offline libraries, built on protocols to guard against IP litigation or copyright complaints.27 When it comes to experimental film online, as Erica Balsom argues, “of greater importance are copy rites: those extralegal social and historical conventions that shape the possibilities and meanings of image reproduction.”28 For digital scholarship, unlike traditional film studies, the most useful archives of transmission are not housed in special collections or film archives. Rather, they dwell in a labyrinthine tangle of comment threads across an array of illicit platforms, private and public alike. Eventually, these works migrate to more popular forums like YouTube and UbuWeb where they find wider audiences. Matthew Kirschenbaum has argued for the importance of archival approaches to the traces left by digital systems of circulation. Indeed, in his work on cracked floppy discs and William Gibson’s infamous self-destructing poem “Agrippa,” Kirschenbaum has demonstrated how forensic approaches to digital objects might reconstitute forms of bibliographic version history in even the most ephemeral formats.29 More than incidental, these economies of use all leave meaningful marks on the works they put into circulation. Like the postage stamps that mark the traversals of mail art or the marginal annotations that locate the provenance of rare folios, these networks reinscribe the works they circulate with every transfer, rip, and torrent.
Drawn from file-sharing-post comments, one user points to the version history of Zen for Film online in a thread accompanying a torrent download for the full FluxFilm Anthology: “This was originally ripped by xxxxx almost two years ago for divxclasico.com and they found their way into UBU, where you can also grab them.”30 Posted in April of 2006, the original upload remains tracked and shared as released on “15 Abr, 2004 10:16 am” by xxxxx at divxclasico.com, an eMule peer-to-peer community based in Spain. In a clear violation of copyright as legislated by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) anticircumvention provision, xxxxx most likely ripped the Re:Voir DVD release of Zen for Film (itself a direct transfer of a low quality VHS capture of the films) into the easily transferable AVI (audio video interweave) format.31 Like so many works of digitized film and video, once the files are distributed to decentralized file-sharing communities, they soon begin to appear in more legitimate forms of use, typified by samples in remixes or short clips for educational use on popular platforms like YouTube and Blogger. The UbuWeb collection of “film & video” is primarily built on the work done by these distribution communities, including Zen for Film and a majority of works on the site.
The legal protocols for online distribution can often illuminate trickier questions of provenance and perception surrounding the use of files circulating online. Following the dispersion of these newly minted digital objects via peer-to-peer networks, in early 2006, UbuWeb popularly distributed the files for the full FluxFilm Anthology on its website, including the first in the set, Zen for Film. In the nebulous and conflicted realm of fair use on the internet, UbuWeb’s bottom-of-the-page disclaimer that the works are for “educational and non-commercial use only” is offered as dubious evidence that the works are sanctioned for streaming.32 However, neither the motion-picture-educational exemption to the DMCA nor UbuWeb’s status as a noncommercial distributor legally clears this activity. For instance, the FluxFilm Anthology includes a note at the top of the page declaring that Friedman, early practitioner, archivist, and scholar of Fluxus—whose work is included in the anthology—has granted UbuWeb permission to distribute the films online. In this instance, Friedman, who was appointed “director of Fluxus West” in 1966 by George Maciunas, retains the rights to grant reproduction of Fluxus materials, properly authorizing the work’s distribution through UbuWeb. Remarkably, the files are illegally ripped from a Re:Voir DVD that captures VHS footage of the film, and then move through a series of file-sharing networks onto UbuWeb, only to later receive proper permissions for distribution.33
Returning to the YouTube page for Zen for Film, uploaded by chowkaideng on December 6, 2006, we can plug these histories of pre- and postdigital distribution of the work back into its playback. When presented as a streaming video, the transcoded work furnishes a critical function commenting on the character of the original film, as well as on the internet context at large. Seen in this light, every signifying aspect of the original work (the accumulation of dust and time, the brilliance of the projector’s light, the meditative isolation of the work, the sound of the projector) has been transformed by the digital version, leaving only the flat image of the white square in its place. Looking closer, as the film’s concept demands, we see that this flat white space has been transformed into a work about the RGB color values of the Flash codec employed by YouTube at the moment of its upload. In the place of the shadow image of dust particles, we find blocky pixels attempting to capture the right “white” of the projected clear leader and its surrounding “black” frame bearing the flickering of the image. Against the durational character of the film, the YouTube video prominently displays a time slider, all but begging the user to skip around the film at the slightest discomfort with its lack of “action” or the mere curiosity to find out what “happens.” The sound of the projector has been lost, along with all its attendant effects, immediate and supertemporal. Indeed, the YouTube video is never scratched, nor would it likely deteriorate, even if it might pause while loading or, as it turns out, at some point simply disappear from the site. It loses the immediacy of performance and becomes a fixed archival recording of an unknown moment of screening. We might say that Zen for Film for YouTube becomes something other: a supertemporal video about the internet and its own real conditions of circulation, brought about by the contingencies of its networked situation. At least, I argue, this is one way to read the files derived from Paik’s film.
In the years after the 2006 release of Zen for Film on both YouTube and UbuWeb, a flurry of artistic activity emerged appropriating the material, conceptual, and philosophical aspects of the film to create new works in a postdigital context. In lieu of exhaustively enumerating the transformations marked by the digitized version and relating each back to the work’s historical iterations, I supplement and conclude this reading of Zen for Film with a brief inventory of several of these new works. While there have been many others in the years since 2006, returning to these works from 2007 and 2008 aims to dial into a particular moment in internet history. These responses index the reception of both Zen for Film’s first appearance online and the emergence of YouTube (founded in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006) and online video streaming as a whole. Curator and art historian Hannah Hölling anticipates this approach: “One could imagine that the activation of Paik’s video from the digital archive will allow creating new content based on the historical video and film and their remixes and fragments. The digitally enabled and algorithmically aided actualization will provide unexpected results—an archival serendipity of a different kind, based on human and machinic interaction.”34
Operating between human and machine, each work discussed in what follows expands on a localized transformation at the intersection of the historical film and the digital milieu of the internet’s recent past in a constellation of archival serendipities. As even this highly compressed set of artistic responses demonstrates, the media-reflexivity of Paik’s work inspires an endless set of possibilities for creative remix. When Tate Liverpool put together an educator’s pack for a Paik solo show in 2010, they included the following suggestion: “Discuss how you would create Zen for DVD, Zen for iPod, Zen for Mobile Phone.”35 Indeed, the artworks below can be seen as pedagogical devices conducting lessons in an imagined school led by Paik and hosted by UbuWeb. While the work had always begged for these iterations (indeed, Paik himself produced a range of variations on the theme), the particularities of the discussion yield unexpected results for an understanding of the digital object in circulation today. To conclude a reading of Zen for Film online, each of the following five remixed versions of the work offer further insights into the transformation at play between the work and its digital derivatives.
Luca (LUNK) Leggero, F L U X L I N E S: Line 01 (2007)
Working directly from the UbuWeb upload of the FluxFilm Anthology, LUNK’s F L U X L I N E S offer a subtle critique of online presentation while referencing a series of works by Paik. An artist’s statement tidily encapsulates the technical specifications of the work: “I modified the original code resizing it from 384×500 pixels to 550×1 pixels / changing not the short film but only the way it can be viewed.”36 Working within the HTML presentation of the video hosted by UbuWeb, every digitized film in the F L U X L I N E S series is reduced to a vertical stack of pixels, blinking in rhythm with the original, compressed to an absolute minimum of width. This radical resizing of the display echoes Paik’s Zen for TV (1963). In this piece, Paik similarly reduced the analog field of a cathode-ray-tube display to a single vertical line. LUNK brilliantly reworks this gesture in Line 01, which reduces the pixelated field of the web player to a single line. The wholesale appropriation of the UbuWeb presentation of Zen for Film thus transforms its display beyond recognition to the human viewer, while leaving the underlying digital object completely intact. Line 01 repurposes this uncritical remediation to reflect on the media-specificity of Flash Video and HTML protocol, mirroring the reflexivity of Zen for Film while incorporating its art historical intertext.
Figure 4.5. Website capture from Luca (LUNK) Leggero, F L U X L I N E S: Line 01 (2007).
Michael Kontopoulos, Zen for YouTube (2007)
If Line 01 interrogates the web player’s capacity for display, Zen for YouTube meditates on the durational experience of digital movies. Hosted on YouTube, this work simply places the endless loop of an animation for “loading,” which spins atop a single frozen image still from the Flash Video encoding of Zen for Film. In comments on the artwork page, Michael Kontopoulos writes, “Zen for YouTube picks up where Nam June Paik left off: an expansion of negative space for the Internet generation.”37 The animation replaces the revolving movement of the cinematic reel with the circular iconography of deferred transmission. If a film in which “nothing happens” might have been frustrating to viewers in 1964, a YouTube video that never loads must surely have been the most vexing experience for a viewer in 2007. Cleverly, the YouTube embed is recursively coded not to load, so the viewer is confronted with a clip that has been altered to refuse playback from the beginning of the Flash Video. After failing to find the start, the user discovers that the rest of the clip is more of the same, even though the status bar shows “progress” in time. Failure and deferral run in an infinite feedback loop. If Zen for Film was built for the slow destruction of celluloid over repeated passages through a projector, Zen for YouTube was coded to politely malfunction on every instance of playback.
Figure 4.6. Still from Michael Kontopoulos, Zen for YouTube (2007).
Cory Arcangel, Structural Film (2007)
Turning the digitization of Zen for Film on its head, Structural Film starts from the computer, using iMovie’s “aged film” setting to create a born-digital version of Zen for Film with artificial dust and scratches, which was then transferred to 16mm film. Glitches occur as compression artifacts in the transfer from MOV file to film print, resulting in colorful, pixelated debris. On his website, Cory Arcangel has stated that these glitches “weren’t actually part of the plan,” but that he retained them nonetheless.38 Like dust in the original, these encoding errors are the true actors in the film. They take on a kind of supertemporal authorship and trump the artificial simulations of scratches and dust inserted by consumer video editing software. Unlike the previous two works, Structural Film appropriates the concept, rather than the materials from the digitized version of Paik’s work. It succeeds by importing uncanny digital artifacts into analog media as a postdigital gesture projected back into cinematic space. The film is shown as an installation with 16mm film looping through a projector in the gallery in a mimetic return to screenings of Zen for Film. Completing this cycle, as the film loops through a projector in the gallery, digital glitches and artificial scratches produced by iMovie meet real scratches and dust produced in the screening process. Watching these layers interact in Structural Film, the spectator reconsiders the artifactual nature of digital objects within the old media glitches, scratches, whirring reels, and clacking soundtrack that once constituted Zen for Film.
Figure 4.7. Still from Cory Arcangel, Structural Film (2007). 16mm film. Photo by Cory Arcangel.
Mark Amerika, Zen for Mobile Phone Video (2007)
Referencing iconic images of Paik bathed in the light of Zen for Film during screenings, his shadow cast on the screen, artist and writer Mark Amerika records his own shadow within the projection of the film at the Centre Georges Pompidou with an extremely lo-fi mobile phone video camera. Like a bootleg concert recording or a durational art-selfie, the movie capture engages with vernacular practices of mobile media documentation and self-imaging on social media. Amerika attempts to reproduce the meaning of the original. In an extended blog post on the work, he asks: “How can this work be remixed into a so-called new media context and still retain its initial meaning? What was its initial meaning? Was it important to retain it? What does it mean when we can take our portable digital gadgets and selectively capture whatever data we feel we need in order to further improvise our own lives?”39 Mirroring several other bootleg videos of museum and cinema screenings of Zen for Film appearing online at the time, Zen for Mobile Phone Video amplifies the “pile of pixels” that the film has become in its silent and highly compressed digitization. By betraying any semblance of fidelity to the original and writing his own body into the documentation, Amerika questions the capacity for any reproduction whatsoever.
Figure 4.8. Still from Mark Amerika, Zen for Mobile Phone Video (2007).
Mungo Thomson, The Varieties of Experience (2008)
Using a particularly degraded print of Zen for Film, Mungo Thomson translates each frame of the film to its negative for the projection of its inverse in 16mm. Foregrounding high resolution and direct photochemical translation, The Varieties of Experience most directly engages the material formats of the original film. In an elegant conceptual gesture, the simple inversion of contrast yields a transformation of cosmic proportions. Thomson describes the work in a related artist book published in 2009 featuring high-resolution images of selected slides:
The film gathers dust from the spaces where it is exhibited. Dust is composed largely of exfoliated human cells, and human cells are composed of elemental matter from the Big Bang. The motes and specks of dust are captured and printed as imagery in The Varieties of Experience. The new film is an inversion of Paik’s, a black film with the dust printed white: a moving starscape, where the stars are made of dust rather than the other way around.40
Thomson literalizes the spectator’s role in Lemaître’s formulations: even humans who once exfoliated in the same space that Zen for Film may have occupied at any point become written into the film, put into relief by The Varieties of Experience. The use of obsolete technical processes renders Thomson’s intervention at once historically connected and resolutely contemporary. Playing on the anachronism of the projector while also collapsing the devotional film and cosmic imaginaries in its title, the film draws together William James and Carl Sagan. Bypassing the digital file altogether and responding to the previous remixes of Zen for Film, Thomson exploits the film’s archival circulation while playing on the anachronism of filmic and book-bound presentation in the present.
Figure 4.9. Still from Mungo Thomson, The Varieties of Experience (2008). Courtesy of the artist.
Dropping the Frame
If the transcoding of Zen for Film into a digital format might be argued to produce an ongoing supertemporal constellation of remixes that all draw from a single framework, the following section presents an inverse reading. By contrast, I begin with a single “born-digital” compilation movie in order to plug its historical samples back into the databases from which they were drawn. By pairing the contrasting tactics of these close readings, I aim to chart the distances and resonances between potential contingent reading practices in the little database. Finally, after winnowing the lens through each chapter—from the full-site wide-angle breadth of Textz, to the narrower optics of preservation at Eclipse, to the close-up on transmission narratives in the audio archive—we end with a laser focus on the close reading of a single work that, at its end, explodes back out into new trajectories through the database at scale.
By following the digital object through its computation, preservation, and transmission, one might arrive at either end of this scalar spectrum. At this concluding side, I follow the components that make up a digital compilation movie back into a fraying cord of narrative potentials. These potentials cohere around a reading of early computer-generated movies at Bell Labs (and the documentaries that accompany them) through the contemporary cipher presented in We Edit Life (2002) by People Like Us (Vicki Bennett).41 Rather than bind We Edit Life with an interpretive knot or conclusive argument, this reading seeks to deploy the movie as a conduit to open productive passages back into the database. We Edit Life is uniquely poised to spell out the vexed relations among issues of transcoding and archival use. At one and the same time, the movie reflects on the origins of computer arts while providing a pioneering instance of the now-ubiquitous digital compilation movie. What follows is a close reading of We Edit Life, one that traces its myriad material sources; the mode and style of its composition; the networks of archival dispersion that screen the movie along with presenting its source material; and finally the broader art-historical and contemporary-cultural context within which the work embeds itself. Through this contingent reading, I aim to chart a passage back into these historical works operating at the birth of computer culture while refreshing their interpretation from our present vantage. The method of this concluding section, therefore, is waylaid by a heterogeneous and modular cluster of interpretive and descriptive strategies, applicable to the n-dimensional facets of digital objects in general and the historical conflux of found footage or compilation movies in particular.
Following People Like Us into the Database
Before exploring the digital compilation movie We Edit Life by People Like Us, we can outline the established methods for interpreting its immediate precursor, the found footage film.42 Roger Luckhurst most succinctly maps established reading tactics of filmic collage in an article on a series of found footage science-fictional films: “For the project of found footage, . . . [the] most significant discovery was that the coherence of spliced collages could be held together by the instant recognition of genre iconography and narrative formulae.”43 He goes on to clarify that the spectator (or critic) may “generate a sort of mega-text of potential narrative possibilities from their implicit familiarity with cinematic codes.”44 This potential megatext offers differential readings between genre and use. Luckhurst concludes, “any coherence the film musters is at what [Craig] Baldwin calls the ‘metacinematic’ level, where the spectator can recognize both the codes of each re-purposed fragment but also read the critique.”45 This metacinematic approach has long directed both the creation and the reading of found footage films: subversive montage enacting critique via generic dissonance remains the norm. This holds true for the critic as well as the filmmaker. This postmodern interpretive strategy remains pervasive, from avant-garde traditions to television or Hollywood films—to say nothing of the “grand nonnarratives” that shape the internet.46 So much so, that samples from educational, industrial, sci-fi, or ephemeral films are rarely deployed in remixed works without standing in for some particular object or genre of critique at a historical remove. This generalized demonstration of irony is then evaluated according to the critical intervention spelled out in the montage of the editor-author.
However, a model of creation and interpretation built exclusively on metacinematic recognition misses unique opportunities to unpack networked compilations. For example, via source-tracking, reverse-image searching, and other database-enabled operations, the compilation movie can guide its viewer through networks of reference back into meaningful conversations with its sources.47 The practices emerging from the use of filmic artifacts widely accessible via networked databases present a dense referential weave to be untangled. In particular, the collage essays of People Like Us resist these older models of critical interpretation. Over and against critique as a mode of composition, PLU directs our attention to happy accidents, unforeseen rhythms, and regimes of availability, exploring the database as a form rather than critiquing any particular object or genre within that database. Dense with clips that have been remediated (and hypermediated) from newsreels, industrial films, and popular science footage, these works are structured according to fluid principles of rhythm and digital compositing that erase the specificity of a pointed historical argument.48 Further critical complications arise as each new digital compilation movie activates an index of nostalgic pixels drawn from a variety of analog media. As pointed as the differences between found footage and digital compilation might be, filters for reading digital works often remain limited by traditional models of critical interpretation. Instead, this reading proposes an expanded set of descriptive tactics to trace forms of contextual and historical connection bound up with the contingent logics of the database.
By contrast, I contend that a rigorous accounting coordinated with an extensive retracing of sources used in sample-based media highlights the rich conversations a work enacts with, and within, its source material. In this way, my contingent reading of We Edit Life proposes a constructive remapping of the generative processes of selection, distribution, and editorial modulation at the heart of the work’s networked formation. This is not to discard a critical analysis, but to assert that detailed descriptions of the networks that host their constitutive digital objects may most fully inscribe the politics of the work within its digital environment.49 When everything is available (and previously ephemeral, archival, or rare “footage” is only a click away), attentive scholarship can begin tracing these robust trails of information radiating from any given object. These contingent readings connect specific digital objects to their situation within networked databases, and back. Not only is the production and significance of the contemporary compilation movie shaped by the same processes of this networked research, but, as I have argued throughout this book, the source materials themselves gather relevance in the growing intertext, accumulating through each new use and reuse. Thus, rather than relying on the imprecise recognitions of genre-based cultural critique, we might trace the material links extending both inward and outward from We Edit Life in the attempt to assemble an actor-network for demystification beyond critique.50
Movie Introduction and Online Reception
With these contingent reading tactics now loaded, we can turn our attention to We Edit Life. Commissioned by the arts organization Lovebytes, We Edit Life debuted as part of an international festival of digital art in Sheffield, England.51 Destabilized as a work from the beginning, People Like Us first presented the digital movie alongside an improvisatory remix performance entitled Recyclopaedia Britannica, which resampled many of the sources making up We Edit Life.52 The first in a series of digital collage works, We Edit Life was soon distributed in a variety of formats on Archive.org, YouTube, Vimeo, and UbuWeb.53 In a statement for the Lovebytes debut of the work, PLU emphasizes the use of samples from the Prelinger Archive.54 Still a project in development in 2002, the Prelinger Archive joined the Internet Archive in 1999. At the time, substantial uploads of digitized industrial, educational, and ephemeral films were only beginning to appear online. More than simply sampling an established collection, PLU’s selection of sources for We Edit Life helped generate Prelinger’s digital archive. Many samples that PLU requested had yet to be digitized, and were later uploaded to the Archive.org collection.55 Thus, in We Edit Life, the viewer sees the creation of the moving-picture archive along with an early example of a movie entirely derived from freely available internet content. Three years before YouTube, We Edit Life anticipated the widespread forms of remix culture to come. On YouTube today, DJ Rolling Paper’s remix of We Edit Life, set to a track by Crystal Castles, might stand in for wider current of use more generally.56 The distribution history and reception of We Edit Life can be tracked in comment threads on Comedy Central, via Vicki Bennett’s personal website, and through manifold other hits on a Google search for “we edit life” + “people like us.” While it would be quixotic, at best, to describe this network at large, it would be a greater mistake to begin without pointing to the wider regimes of production and distribution that enable the movie itself.
Opening Frames and Film Leader
A pastel colorized leader streams in the browser window, reproducing the grainy filmic attributes of a transcoded digital object.57 The soundtrack, a recording of amplified projector pickups, similarly directs the user to an uncanny moment of filmic projection. We see scratches from the leader’s repeated trips through the projector, along with specks of dust and strands of hair, chemical imperfections in the celluloid, misplaced splices, and frame edges. In all these regards, despite its digital production, We Edit Life shares with Zen for Film a conspicuous invocation of filmic mediation. Though we are viewing in a browser, We Edit Life playfully codes itself as a work of film, confusing the opening moments as the “play” icon and other features of the streaming movie player of the viewer’s choice fades into the movie. The uncanny shift from digital activation to remediated film is made more uncomfortable by the double introduction of the traditional film leader. Indeed, while the anachronistic deployment of these cinematic artifacts is common to a computing environment that offers “aged film” filters for nearly every commercial application, the digitized leader and projector soundtrack opening We Edit Life points more strongly to the medial transcoding before the browser.58 As William C. Wees outlines in his classic manifesto, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films, these works “cannot avoid calling attention to the ‘mediascape’ from which they come, especially when they also share the media’s formal and rhetorical strategies of montage.”59 While We Edit Life extends far beyond traditional montage, its samples nevertheless consistently index a digital reflection of a distinctly filmic mediascape.
Timing and Synchronization
One step further, we may observe how these opening frames draw the filmic source material into a ludic engagement with digital composition. Immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with analog film editing are the puncture holes used for timing and synchronization between film reels. What first registers as a skip or glitch, common to film projection still grappling with sprocket alignment, reveals itself to be the repeated sequence of frames including the puncture hole. The exactitude of digital repetition is craftily embedded into this archaic representation of leader. The tightly controlled timing of an Adobe editing suite renders imprecise analog techniques inoperative. Such digital precision continues into animation as the pastel blue title “We Edit Life” slowly fades in and out over the fluctuating filmic background. As the leader projects an ambient background for the title, these superfluous punctures serve the dual purpose of calling attention to the media historicity of the film as a material object while introducing the seamless techniques of digital editing employed throughout the feature. This database aesthetic returns the viewer, as Stephen Mamber has persuasively argued, to a generalized field of analysis more akin to the precinematic work of Étienne-Jules Marey. Operating as an analytic medium, Mamber argues that the digital movie “displaces a dependence upon real-time linear presentation and the chemically-based realism of cinema . . . in its exposing (even reveling in) its own constructions.”60
Film Editor and Adobe Premiere
Skipping to the first “cut,” we encounter a similarly degraded shot of a filmmaker in profile, closely examining a strip of 35mm film. Looking frame-by-frame, with the celluloid in one hand and a pencil in the other, he is both writer and filmmaker—an editor in both senses. Meanwhile, the leader continues to roll out a countdown in a background layer as PLU keys the film editor up to the first layer in the foreground. Indeed, the meticulous editing of PLU demands a frame-by-frame modulation closer to animation than montage. As we consider the editor with film in hand, we can analyze the composition of this frame of We Edit Life. Toward the conclusion of the piece, we discover a mirroring of the film editor’s work desk: PLU’s screen displaying panel arrays of Adobe After Effects 5.0 and Pro Tools Free, both released in 2001.61 The foreground features an After Effects layer trimmed to the editor’s outline, while the background continues streaming the leader sample into a countdown. More akin to multitrack audio mixing, We Edit Life retains the decidedly DIY aesthetic of digital collage while streaming an increasingly elaborate composite of layered samples throughout the movie. If traditional found footage films require close scrutiny of montage-based juxtapositions, the digital compilation movie requires a detailed accounting of a variety of layered editorial decisions along with the fluid interactions between sampled works. If an understanding of this mode of composition may continue to stream in a background track to this reading, we may begin to explore the samples comprising the layered frame.
Stan VanDerBeek and Kenneth Knowlton
“How much trouble is it to get that changed to some other color?,” the filmmaker asks, looking up from the celluloid to a technical advisor speaking off-screen. An answer follows: “Just find the right place in the program, make the appropriate change, and we’ll run the whole thing again.” Though, at the mention of the program, the filmmaker returns his uncomprehending gaze to the materials at hand. The collaboration at play follows the art-and-technology combination of artist and engineer prevalent in the technological excitement of mid-1960s neo-avant-garde art. The filmmaker shown in profile throughout the scene is Stan VanDerBeek, a prominent underground filmmaker best known for his animated collage films. In 1967, at the time the original footage was shot, VanDerBeek was working as an artist-in-residence at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. His technical interlocutor is Ken Knowlton, an engineer specializing in computer graphics and motion pictures at Bell Labs. The footage VanDerBeek holds is toward creating one of a series of “poemfields,” a set of experimental short films begun in 1965 that deploy Knowlton’s innovative BEFLIX computer graphics program, a pioneering mode of generating images via a mosaic of Unicode characters.62 Quite literally, to alter the film, VanDerBeek must inscribe changes to the character mosaic via a card that is fed into an IBM 7094 mainframe that rewrites the entire sequence onto electronic tape that is later fed through a Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder and finally converted to film.63
With characteristic wonder, in “Re: Look: Computerized Graphics ‘Light Brings Us News of the Universe,’” VanDerBeek notes: “The writing of pictures that will make pictures in motion, in coded text form, means a new notation system to store images by. . . . In other words, motion pictures can be written, stored indefinitely (in punched paper form or tape form) and brought ‘to life’ later. Motion pictures can be conceived (written) in airplanes.”64 Watching VanDerBeek marvel at having Knowlton’s program “run the whole thing again,” we might consider We Edit Life alongside the popular emergence of real-time graphic interfaces capable of writing a full range of digital media formats for the first time in 2002.65 James Hodge reads this scene as emblematic of the “experiential opacity of digital media,” where “what goes into the black box becomes inevitably, unaccountably transformed when it comes back out.”66 These shared points of wonderment and black-box confusion are driven home while rewatching these clips in the 2020s, as generative models become increasingly adept at producing convincing image-based media from text prompts, indeed, even “conceived (written) in airplanes.”
Incredible Machine and Bell Labs
Lingering for a moment on this short opening clip, we might return to the provenance of the sequence featuring VanDerBeek and Knowlton. The sample is pulled from Incredible Machine (directed by Paul Cohen for AT&T in 1968), a fifteen-minute sponsored film covering recent Bell Labs breakthroughs, as Rick Prelinger highlights, in “computer graphics, computer-synthesized speech, and computer-generated movies and music.”67 The scene in We Edit Life modifies a sequence entering Incredible Machine at 3:35, rearranging the conversation and remixing the audio track. Overlays of circuit diagrams and the flashing text “DATA INCOMPLETE” in the background of this scene in We Edit Life are both sampled from an earlier segment of Incredible Machine. The chalkboard becomes another simulated screen, introducing a variety of clips that will feature prominently in the latter half of the movie: children performing a group experiment in electricity, flowing graphics representing sound waves, stock footage of a home, and a layer matrix of hands operating dials.
With voice-over narration and samples from Incredible Machine peppered throughout We Edit Life, the communications research film serves as the core around which the samples deployed by PLU constellate and eventually spin out of control. Even on a cursory viewing, without supplemental information describing the samples, still, the genre format, ideological thrust, and intended audience of Incredible Machine are easily recognized by the casual internet spectator: this is a commercial-industrial-promotional computer-science and technology film, bright-eyed with a starry utopian vision of progress, narrated by a familiar paternal voice educating a general populace. Rather than perform a critical turn on this content, however, PLU plays within in its network of association, activating a concerted set of associated materials and concerns, by turns incisive, doomer, and celebratory. In this way, PLU enacts a mode of “network ambivalence,” described by Patrick Jagoda at the conclusion of Network Aesthetics as a critical orientation toward pervasive, always-on networks.68 For Jagoda, ambivalence is “a crucial critical position from which to think within an uncertain present that is also ongoing, . . . a process of slowing down and learning to inhabit a compromised environment with the discomfort, contradiction, and misalignment it entails.”69 Within the aesthetic refrains and whimsical loops of We Edit Life, the viewer inhabits the same uncomfortable ambivalence through which we cope with the endless complications of life online.
“Daisy Bell” and Elektro, the Westinghouse Moto-Man
Continuing this track, our attention to the details of source materials like Incredible Machine opens robust networks of signification in the rhythmic composition of We Edit Life. The structural and semantic importance of Incredible Machine grows increasingly telling as We Edit Life moves from a focus on computer-generated film to computer-generated music. The score for Incredible Machine, as the narrator reveals, “was entirely composed by a computer.” This would be no small feat just a few years after “Daisy Bell” debuted at Murray Hill. The team behind this first computer to sing—comprised of John Kelly, Carol Lockbaum, and Max Mathews—are all featured in Incredible Machine. Mathews, the grandfather of electronic music, provides the score for the film. Sampling Mathews’s pioneering audio track along with visual layers from Incredible Machine, PLU’s aural attention might best locate We Edit Life in a digital music-video genre, where both image and sound are driven more by rhythm and fluid spatial montage than cutting. If there is a narrative to draw out from the movie, we might argue for a story of artificial life, as the various dials and diagrams, engineers and conductors orchestrate the creation of a singing robot. Here, Elektro, the Westinghouse Moto-Man, sampled from a newsreel of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, may stand in for the titular “life” edited by PLU’s computer.70 As We Edit Life becomes increasingly disjointed toward the conclusion, Elektro joins with a circuit made of children to sing an ominous remix of “Music Alone Shall Live.” Far from generically sampled, the source material behind Elektro’s threatening ballad in We Edit Life invokes a dense mesh of insightful references, beginning with HAL’s death-rattle rendition of “Daisy Bell” in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), which naturally brings us back to Murray Hill and the birth of synthesized speech, covered in detail by Incredible Machine. The ambivalent temporality of We Edit Life imports the technological thrill of these 1960s innovations into a premonitory mix with the melodic anxieties of a database that will, as Elektro tells us, outlive us all.
Poemfield No. 2 and Man and His World
Reeling back from this expanding intertext, we might go deeper into the diegesis, returning to the footage VanDerBeek holds at the opening of We Edit Life. The footage under consideration is most likely Poemfield No. 2 (ca. 1966), one of the ten short poetic films VanDerBeek and Knowlton made in collaboration over a four-year span from 1965 to 1969. It might also be Man and His World (1967), a one-minute short film after the title of Expo ’67 that translates the phrase “man and his world” into a variety of the world’s languages.71 Literally composing a mosaic of international textual detritus and small symbolic characters, the poemfields explore the representational capacities and inherent variability of language within computational environments. While VanDerBeek’s background is in image-based collage films like Science Friction, the lexical construction of BEFLIX films inspired a literary form in which each word-image necessarily contains thousands of letters as pixels. Reading the text for Poemfield No. 2 alongside We Edit Life, certain resonant themes emerge:
LIFE / LIFE LIKE / POEMFIELD NO. 2 / SIMILAR / LIKE / TO / CLOCK / TICK / WE PICK / LIFE / OUT / OR APART / SEEMING / TO SEE / SEPARATE / THINGS / TOGETHER / SO / YOU / SAY / IT / WOULD / SEEM / LIFE . . LIKE . . . / THIS / LIVING / BUT . . . / WE / ALWAYS / SUSPECT / . . IT . . . / THE END72
Seeming to see separate things together, PLU reanimates Elektro to a singing life-likeness and more generally deploys disparate archival sources in a variety of repurposed narrative configurations. On this digital translation, we might say We Edit Life, alongside the poemfields, “passes as a punctualized actor,” concealing an intricate network that holds them together.73 The suspicious ease of a cohesive collage is central both to VanDerBeek’s previous films and to PLU’s audio remixes, where dead media and inert matter are everywhere lifelike. Toward these ends, We Edit Life channels the Incredible Machine soundtrack over a man whittling miniature wooden elk over footage of “real live” elk, stating: “Experimenters in visual perception are using computers to create weird, random patterns that never occur in real life. . . . The art of computer graphics is only in its infancy yet it is already stimulating creative thought in far out areas where research is likely to get complex and unwieldy.” Anticipating developments in “life-like” futures of computational movies—from Google DeepDream’s kaleidoscopic patterns in 2015, to the cursed origins of text-to-video in Modelscope’s Will Smith pasta video of 2023, to the hallucinatory realities generated by SoraAI in 2024—We Edit Life’s “complex and unwieldy” approach to the rhythms of computational movie-making keeps a finger to the pulse of the fundamental weirdness at the simulated heart of digital cinema.
Gathering Sources and Concluding Links
While this extended descriptive performance draws out signification patterns from Incredible Machine and associated materials, we can conclude by anthologizing a number of the films sampled by PLU, all of which might offer interpretive feedback between We Edit Life and the database from which it stems. More than a supplement, this collection performs a potential inherent to reading works operating within a database. Each source returns to We Edit Life while simultaneously pointing the user into an n-dimensional system of signification radiating out from each new citation. Rather than limit the reading of We Edit Life to a pointed critical position, this project seeks to deploy the movie as a conduit that might direct its user to unimagined passages beyond this particular constellation. In other words, as one screen among many, this reading can conclude only with new directions. Thus, what follows are a select few strands among the many worth tracing, given the contingent interests of the reader:
Panels and operators are taken from IBM’s The Thinking Machines (1968), an educational short following a robotic cartoon that concludes with a clip from the previously outlined Man and His World. At 4:30, the radio director from CBS’s On the Air (1937) pops up over a diagram for the chemical formula of celluloid culled from The Alchemist in Hollywood (1940). A voiceover from The News Magazine of the Screen (vol. 7, no. 3 [1956]) describes footage taken from Fashions on the Ice and Snow (1940) and Switzerland: The Land and the People (1963), confusing time through place.74 Sound waves, computer panels, and musicians are sampled from Discovering Electronic Music (1983), further integrating the parallel history of early computer film and music within We Edit Life. Numerous samples from a variety of orchestral recordings, musical education films, and soundies, including Conducting Good Music (1956), Instruments of the Orchestra (1947), Sound Recording for Motion Pictures (1960), and Looking at Sound (1950), all import melodies and archival narratives to the mix. Indirect samples may also be found: the kitschy “Happy Valley Ranch” sign above the rolling credits calls up the “Lazy-X Ranch” in The World at Your Call (1950), a Jam Handy / AT&T telephonic communications film. Similarly, the title We Edit Life can be heard as an echo of the industrial short We Use Power (1956), referenced in PLU’s Prelinger inventory. More distantly, Man and Computer (1965) originates the filmic metaphor of the conductor as computer operator in a related hypermediated format. Finally, “IBM Corporation, Military Products Division” presents On Guard! The Story of SAGE (1956), wherein panel operators at the IBM mainframe bring innovations in computer technology to a familial Cold War context, and the military-industrial complex more generally.
Unlike the collections that house these works, a linear format like the academic monograph might afford only this brief list of samples. The argument for network tracing and the archival activation of We Edit Life can nevertheless be concluded by pointing to the editorial remix of texts, images, and movies that supplement this chapter in the interlude, along with the outward links to expanded potential significations. Here, as in We Edit Life, the user is directed back into the database, where each sample contains a new network for exploration. Each thread, in all directions, presents an interconnected web of contingencies awaiting meanings delivered, or discovered, or invented, by their reader.