Flash Artifacts

The close reading of any moving-image object hosted on UbuWeb catalyzes an unpredictably idiosyncratic set of transformations affected on the historical work. Each work transforms differently under the conditions of the digital collection. The third chapter followed the provenance and version history of a particular set of recordings by bill bissett, arguing that any set of files would have its own attendant stories to tell. In the same way, the previous chapter argues for the productive potentials of contingent readings of digital objects, marked by the conditions of how everything from the technical substrate to the social text might come to signify within the historical work’s digital situation. Put differently, every close reading of a digitized film concludes with frayed strands of signification that point toward the massively intertextual situation of the little database. Theme Song addresses the intersection of a video-art installation in the gallery with contemporary forms of vlog confessional formats on the internet. Zen for Film opens with questions of technical materiality and ends in an unforeseeable horizon for remix. We Edit Life redirects the attentive reader from the compression of compilation to the unzipping of a cultural archive. Each reading coheres only insofar as it redirects the reader to forces that inform the work’s connection to conditional layers of historical and situational meaning. Further, any given digitized film or video on UbuWeb signifies differently given the palimpsest of contingent effects heaped on iterations of the work over time. This is the challenge to any systematic reading of the little database. The transformations effected by digital formats cannot be generalized. Indeed, the only generalization we might make is that every file is transformed differently, and that we must therefore attend with care to those conditions of transformation.

In 2009, I collaborated with the artist João Enxuto to query this condition within the UbuWeb collection, coproducing a thirty-minute movie entitled Flash Artifacts. The work is hosted on UbuWeb and was screened at galleries in New York and Berlin. Our approach highlighted the most extreme examples of media-reflexive film and video that were then streaming on UbuWeb. The work attempted to surface “a hidden magic” in “the contextual economy of UbuWeb.”1 By “interweaving, juxtaposing, and re-editing dozens of films and videos from the UbuWeb archive,” we attempted to draw out the specificity of each localized transformation.2 Formally, the work mimics art-historical lecture projections, with a standardized display of two panels for comparative analysis. At certain moments in Flash Artifacts, this tidy relation breaks down as films stream through, above, and within each other. As in Zen for Film, the works featured in Flash Artifacts are particularly sensitive to the medial registers of use and playback. Samples are drawn from celluloid-intensive films, interventionist television advertisements, and born-digital animations alike. In dialogue with We Edit Life, the compilation is both a mode of reading the database and a guide for viewers to rediscover works already in circulation. This editorial poetics is augmented by a set of links to all works included in Flash Artifacts. The media poetics of the movie function to create a little database of its own, nested within UbuWeb.

The selection of works included and the title of this work function as anachronistic records of the site at a given moment in time. If the same work were made today, it would respond differently given the current set of files hosted by UbuWeb and attendant changes to the interface. For example, the entire collection has since been optimized for streaming on mobile phones and tablets, dropping the Flash format that transcoded these works altogether. Like ripped VHS cassettes that transcode historical film, these Flash artifacts leave traces that only become more pronounced over time. The shifting technical affordances of format invoke new readings of the works that have been streaming on the site all along. In this regard, Flash Artifacts marks a particular moment in UbuWeb’s position within the continuously shifting terrain of online viewership. However, it has also undergone multiple changes over the past six years, not least in relation to this project. Tracking changes to the site over time via the Internet Archive reveals a dramatic set of alterations to the site design, paratextual information, editorial involvements, and server hosts, in addition to the inventory of works hosted.

As with “Also this: no title” and EXE TXT, the media poetics of Flash Artifacts aim to allow the assembled works to articulate a constellation in a register that this chapter cannot attempt on paper, in PDF, or through image stills. Writing this interlude, I initially set out to briefly summarize the effects on each clip as it played out in Flash Artifacts. This exercise quickly proved futile. The dynamics of the opening sequence, drawn from George Brecht’s Entrance to Exit (1966) illustrate the problem. Entrance to Exit was itself a kind of riff on Paik’s Zen for Film—also featured in the FluxFilm Anthology—with a blank screen bracketed by “Entrance” and “Exit” signs respectively. It thus bears the same close scrutiny presented in the first case study of this chapter. Questions on blankness are compounded by movement cues, existential quandaries, and imagined space. In Flash Artifacts, the clips have been rearranged so that the left screen features the opening titles while the right screen plays backward from the “Exit” at the conclusion to the movie. The clips fade just as they near meeting in the shared black screen that makes up the bulk of the film. Already, space and time are confused by the geospatial particularities of digital networks (does one enter at the console, wherever that is, or the changing server hosts of UbuWeb, through the code or the representation that the code generates?) and modular playback (the linearity of entering and exiting a shared space has been reversed and doubled). The authorial function of Flash Artifacts is complicated by the opening titles—which read: “FLUX FILM 1966 by George Brecht”—and in turn question the authorship of Brecht in relation to Paik, the filmic apparatus, the group setting of a screening, and the layers of transcoding that rework the film as a digital object. This, at least, would be a highly compressed reading of the first thirty seconds of Flash Artifacts, which features only one work rather than the manifold and variable comparative setups that carry throughout the work. What’s certain is that the movie codec does compression better. The reader is here directed to play Flash Artifacts as another way to drop the frame from film to database.

See: Flash Artifacts (2009).