evan meaney on glitches

8/22/2019 Evan Meaney on Glitches

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ON GLITCHESA DECONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS OF ARCHIVES AND EXPERIENCE

by

Evan J. Meaney

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillmentof the requirements of the Master of Fine Arts degreein Film and Video Production in the Graduate College

of The University of Iowa

May 2010

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Leighton Pierce


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Copyright by

EVAN MEANEY

2010

All Rights Reserved


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Graduate CollegeThe University of Iowa

Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

_______________________

MASTER'S THESIS

_______________

This is to certify that the Master's thesis of

Evan J. Meaney

has been approved by the Examining Committeefor the thesis requirement for the Master of Fine Artsdegree in Film and Video Production at the May 2010 graduation.

Thesis Committee: Leighton Pierce, Thesis Supervisor

Dee Morris

Sasha Waters Freyer


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank his thesis committee: Leighton Pierce,

Dee Morris, and Sasha Waters Freyer for their continual support. He would

also like to thank Lindsay Artis for her suggestions and patience.


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ABSTRACT

Many theorists have taken great care to delineate between personal

memory and externalized memory in the form of archival history. Using a

framework set forth by Henri Bergson and applying it to modern

technological incarnations of both memory and history, we find that the two

function, not divergently, but through a parallel process of collaboration and

representation. Pushing this idea further illuminates a mnemonic landscape

where individual memory serves as an open-source server, archival history is

bound to the creation of even the most private recollections, and where the

ruptures of both systems are, in fact, the very means by which we see them

joined.


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

MEMORY, EXTENDED 1

MEMORY, MODIFIED 14

MEMORY, REWRITTEN 21

BIBLOGRAPHY 28


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MEMORY, EXTENDED

Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories, and,inversely, a memory, as we shall show later, only becomes actual byborrowing the body of some perception into which it slips. These two

acts, perception and recollection, always interpenetrate one another,are always exchanging something of their substance

Henri Bergson 1

Let us begin, not with the latest understanding of cyborgian interfaces

or user-generated representations, but with Henri Bergson in the nineteenth

century. At the outset of his Matter and Memory, the French neuroscientist

and philosopher plots out the practical interface between memory and themoment we call the present in relation to the construction of experience. For

him, writing in the 1880s, the importance of, not only what we remember,

but how we remember was collapsing into the much larger question of who

we are as a society and as individuals. To that end, he put forward the notion

of a pure memory, functioning to marry the recall of the past to the

synthesized perception of the present. For Bergson, a pure memory is a sort

of exterior, usable recollection, applied to our current perceptions in the

production of our everyday experiences and subsequently, future memories. 2

In a small way, this paradigm predicts the current cyber-neurological cusp in

which modern memory finds itself by allowing us to see personal memory as

an exterior function. I will also suggest here that his text, and its

metaphysical implications, begin to approach the current conflation of

memory and history; where human beings function via a distributed agency,

integrating archival media histories in the personal construction of

1

Henri Bergson,Matter and Memory. (New York: Zone Books, 1988). 67.

2Ibid. 67-68.


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individual experiences. This ultimately combines the external (history) and

internal (recollection) in the creation of a synthetic memory. In short,

Bergsons notes on synthesized experience give us a classical framework with

which to prove ourselves, through shared media archives, as distributed

beings. I am, of course, desperate to define these terms further, but such

definitions may only come through the evolution of older paradigms. In this

spirit, we must return to Bergson in the hopes that he can give us perspective

into the act of constructing memory so we may then update his taxonomy for

a cybernetic application.

To begin to parse out the manner in which memory, history andpresent experience conflate, we must first examine two theories of memory

working in concert with one another; the first of which is Bergsons notions of

mnemonically linked perception and the second is the delineation between

memory and history as explained through Paul Ricoeurs study of the

Phaedrus. These two ideas find an interesting cohabitation as we begin to

think of memory, not as something we have invented, but as something we

have constructed from parts, both public and private. In Creative Evolution,

Bergson notes, In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically it

follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our

earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it 3

In terms of functionality, Bergson delivers a position of archivally linked

synthesis serving as a feedback loop between our present and our past. A

basic sketch of the loop operates as such: our memories function in

collaboration with perception to inform our present, creating an individuals

experiences, some aspects of which are memorable, thereby creating memory

3

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911). 5.


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images which may be applied to future experiences. It is a simple and

perpetual model of stimuli and archival response.

Through the framework of this logic, the present is only useful in that

it edits and encodes a usable past from which the future might derive

experience. Still, Bergson speaks of memory as an exterior function,

borrowing us, following us, and yet its effects make us imperatively

individual. This concept disrupts the traditional model of the brain being the

only center of recollection and remembrance, as it distributes the work of

memory beyond the barriers of the brain to some new extension, concurrently

of our mind and beyond. From this line of thought we might choose to viewour memories as something functioning through interface, having no

empirical or inert home within the individual. Instead, perception is a

workflow akin to a constantly circulating library, subconsciously and

perpetually visited; a place where users might go to interact with the past in

the acquisition of a more informed present. While Bergson promotes the idea

of an externalized memory, I feel that we can further this concept by using

his model to explore an individuals memory as part of a public or open source

databank from which information is borrowed, used and returned, perhaps

even, from more than one user.

The dichotomy between an individuals memory (traditionally internal)

and a public history (traditionally external) has typically been a staunch

binary. However, if we accept Bergsons allusions to memory as a function,

distributed beyond the body, then we might also explore how that exteriority

intermingles with another, more physical exteriority the archive. To

describe the tense permeability between these two means of recollection, we

might look to another French scholar, Paul Ricoeur, in his work with

traditional archival studies. In Memory, History and Forgetting, Ricoeur


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describes the issues at hand in the creation of the first archives through a

Platonic dialogue.4 In the Phaedrus, Plato asks if the externalization of

knowledge (for him this was the remediation of oralities into written texts) is

the remedy to the fallibility of human memory or the poison that undoes

humanity itself. Ricoeur responds to Plato, falling into line with Bergson,

a document in an archive is open to whomever knows how to read. It is not

just silent, it is an orphan.5 Much like Bergsons paradigm, what we adopt

through the externalization of our memories is not something inherently our

own, but is simply a memory-object to be interpreted, much like a book

existing on a shelf or a file in a directory viable only through use. Ricoeurdoes not answer Platos question of good and evil definitively, describing

instead the interface with the archive as a platform for interpretive

testimony. While this does not blur the line between the archive and an

individuals memory yet, it does prove a very important point that a

Bergsonian model of memory mirrors the interpretive model put forth by

Ricoeur in his archive. I propose that we may practically see memories and

archival documents as servants of the same interface, one of the syntheses of

both experience and subsequent recollection.

In his description of the French archive, the cultural theorist, Pierre

Nora also describes the race to externalize, marking the all too human desire

for permanence. The imperative of the age is not only to keep everything, to

preserve everything (even when we are not quite sure what it is we are

remembering), but also to fill the archives.6 I do not think it a secret that we

4

Paul Ricoeur,Memory, History, Forgetting. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,2004). 167.

5Ibid. 169.


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are creatures, perpetually linked to our past through both memory and media

archives, but it is important to see the trajectory of our use of, and

interactions with these catalogues. Through that analysis we might note how

the physical, social, and chronological gaps that separate archive from

memory continue to close. The French archive and certainly Noras

contribution to it, Les Lieux de Memoire, is a proper model of the classical

catalogue. A governance of rooms, books (which will henceforth be described

as media), a system of location and placement and spaces for people to

interact this, for a thousand years, was humanitys best chance to

publically remember and personally synthesize perception through theinterpretation of physical media objects. Moving beyond books, we might

examine other forms of media collection, notably the Eastman film archive,

Harvards music recording archive, the Louvre, the Museum of Natural

History. Despite the progressive differences between the collected media,

their storage, access and interpretative possibilities remain practically

unchanged from the first physical archive. These libraries are site specific,

time specific, and most of all; they promote the notion of stasis, structure and

taxonomy over all of the objects housed within. These sorts of repositories,

and the media they contain, are static systems of preservation. Despite this

seemingly perfect control over the past, without a user present to interpret,

there is nothing. Much like Bergsons external memory, they are nothing if

unadopted. As with memory and archives, the agency of construction always

exists in the user, even if the information does not.

Before we move on to demonstrate that an individuals memory and

the archive are not only similar but, in fact, permeable, let us pause for a

6Pierre Nora, ed.,Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1: Conflicts and

Divisions. (New York: Columbia U Press, 1996) 9.


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moment to consider Vannevar Bush, the engineer who first proposed a device

to which we now aspire, and in some ways, currently approximate. The

memex, first noted in a 1945 issue ofThe Atlantic Monthly7, was a device

where neurological memory could be literally externalized through a process

of encoding and download to a physical device. In short, it was a thumb drive

for your brain. Bush believed that this synaptic exteriority would allow for a

plug and play, modular memory, giving a physical manifestation to Bergsons

exterior memory objects. Bushs device provides a thought-provoking example

of the permeable barrier between archives and memory, as the memex is

both. In the same moment it is an archival apparatus as well as anexternalization of the memory of an individual. While his critics felt that he

peered too far into the future (and perhaps he did, as he died in 1974) in so

many ways, the spirit of memory extension for which he searched has been in

use since the first thought was put to paper. Even in that moment of first

exteriority, we were looking at the boundaries of memory extending beyond

our own synapses into the physical/archival realm. With every story

committed to text, we engaged with the future of a distributed recollection, a

future which we now enact every day even in the smallest, most abstract, of

ways. While the notion of a modular brain has not been realized to Bushs

specifications yet, and while our interactions with digital exteriority through

archival media isnt as perfect as a USB driven thought, it is difficult to say

where my individual knowledge, memories and experience end and my

computers hard drives begin.

Our ability to neurologically recollect, and recollect through interface

with exterior, archival technologies are not separate endeavors. I propose

7

Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, TheAtlantic Monthly, July, 1945.


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that, through recent developments in the tools of memory, we are able to see

the actions of personal recall on experience as collaboratively integrated with

archival materials. It is not enough to suggest that computer databases and

video feeds have informed our experiences, as they have intermingled with

our memory images, forever augmenting our perception. So, if memory is the

means by which we define and understand experience, and if our memory

functions in communication with all sorts of media archives on a real-time

basis, then it would stand to reason that our understanding of experience is

mediated through both networks in a parallel process.

Parallel processing is a broad term describing many applicationsunified through a single goal, specifically addressing an apparatuss ability to

process and respond to simultaneous, disparate stimuli. It should be of note

that both the neurological and computational communities share the same

definition when speaking about parallel processes in relation to the brain and

silicon processors, respectively. As both neural mapping and supercomputing

came about in the last half of the 20th century, it is little surprise that they

share a common vocabulary. In so may ways computing and digital archives

have borrowed from the form, function and organization of both the human

brain and its ability to recall and recognize. It is, however, when these two

apparatuses work collaboratively that we may reinforce their networked

contributions to our cyber-organized, synthesized memory and subsequent

experiences.

Imagine, if you will, watching a film. Your visual and auditory

responses are active and interpreting electrical signals sent to your brain

simultaneously. These are distributed to centers for recollection, language, et

cetera, and produce an experience of watching a film. That is, however, not

the whole workflow. Think of watching a film projected from a DVD. Imagine


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all of the parallel necessities required in that action. Not only are all of the

aforementioned biological processes (and many more) at work, but similarly

inverse digital processes are at work in the DVDs projection. A red laser

reads information and electronically transmits it to a graphics processor,

encoding those images into light to mirror the way they will be decoded by

your eyes and brain on the other end. This is not to mention the process of

the films inception, creation, and production, which took place before the

DVD could be produced. It would seem that the DVD, which serves as a

peripheral impetus for memory has put itself in line with a Bergsonian

memory object, both external and interfacing with individual experiences. Isubmit that archival media and individual memory function collaboratively

in an interactively permeable, cyborgian loop, combining the archival

exteriority of history and the internal semblance of experience through the

distribution of memory over a network. A network invested in both the

creation of individuals experiences and the archival perpetuation of

publically accessible media. In a short form, archival media and memory

objects function together, synthesized in the mind of the user, to comprehend

and evaluate present experience, which will, in turn, form new memories and

be externalized as new works of archival media.

Let us take a moment to evaluate, as we have come a long way from

the 1880s. The materials of media archives and an individuals memory

intermingle in the creation of his or her experience, distributing the

interiority of perception over a network of externalized physical and digital

media, as well as the virtualized state of exterior memory as theorized by

both Bergson and Bush. How are we to recognize such activity if it occurs in

every moment of modern perception? How can we respond, artistically or

otherwise, to that which not only permeates every moment, but perpetuates


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it? In the coming sections, I will suggest that we might uncover and critique

this hegemony through an active deconstruction of archival technologies,

conventions and material, as that is the singular part of the equation to

which we have access. We do this in the hopes that our deconstruction, even

in a representative way, might echo throughout the network of perception,

proving linkages between memory and history, and studying the effects of a

nodal breakdown between these imperative collaborators. I speak here of the

glitch, the hauntological intercedence by which we might examine, explore,

and describe the distributed nature of the modern humans experience and

even existence. Firstly, let us briefly introduce the post-structural origins ofthe glitch rhetoric as to better locate its presence in the application of our

modern archive/memory network.

If we are to speak of the deconstructionist implications of a cybernetic

perception, we should begin with an example that might illuminate the

means by which the public (archival) and private (memory images) may go

beyond permeability, collapsing onto one another through the modern

explosion of media on society. Only by showing that media has not only

permeated memory but can modify it, can we fully appreciate the

application of any sort of glitch or hacktivist agenda to our new paradigm.

Perhaps the best example, certainly the most user-friendly, iss posed by Jean

Baudrillard. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard poses the third order

of simulation in which the simulacrum interfaces with the user before the

original has a chance to, and the distinction between reality and

representation breaks down.8 Written in the wake of the media saturated

Gulf War, this text theorizes that media objects, or simulations, may come to

8

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. (Michigan, University of Michigan Press,1995).


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permeate so deeply within a persons perception that the memory created

through that perception is mostly predicated on archival media and not an

original interaction. For our purposes, it is quite easy to see Baudrillards

real as the traditional notion of memory (personal, interior, sequential) and

his simulacrum as the aforementioned archivally-infused, cyborgian memory

(public, exterior, parallel). In this instance, the modern explosion of

ubiquitous media has hastened this conflation, pushing an interactive

permeability between two adjacent structures into one unified, read/write

network. While not specifically an archivally based version of Bushs memex,

we can see the evolution of archival processes and media technologies in theact of representation, developing along the same trajectories as human

perception. This symbiotic evolution gives further evidence of the

incorporated, and at times semiotically representative, dialogue between

media and memory.

In light of such a dialogue, I pose this concept; our memory is, in fact,

the product of a synthetic network. That we cannot engage in viable debates

when we delineate between memory and history, instead we must

deconstructively examine their function, informing and substantiating one

another through perception. Our physical archives, our memory images,

others and ourselves, are joined together in the synthesis of perception, and

through this process we are able to move a step further, together. If our

memory-based perception is augmented, then it follows that our experiences,

predicated on the interpretive power of that conflation, are also synthetic and

constructed from a public and private model of archive/memory. The

mathematician Brian Rotman describes this distribution of experience as


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living beside ourselves,9 but I feel this term does not accurately describe the

current state of affairs. His terminology is still centered on the individuals

experience, thereby not fully embracing the open ideology and publicly

accessible nature of distributed memory and experience. I would pose that a

synthetic memory allows us to live, not beside ourselves, but to live within

each other. To better grasp this concept, let us look to the theories of protocol,

for in this rhetoric we might examine how far our cybernetic memory may

extend and in what ways that it is proven through its own ruptures.

Protocol, to borrow terminology from the network theorist Alexander

Galloway,10 is the cybernetic discourse of modern existence. It addresses aworld that combines biological entities and technological entities in a single,

expansive networked state, operating through both sets of discursive

boundaries in the creation of social experience. Discourse, it should be noted

here, is borrowed from the Foucauldian understanding of the term describing

the overarching structures at work in the creation of social order. So,

protocologically speaking, when engaging with media and memory in terms of

a constructed experience (which we all are), we play by both memory and

medias rules, as they are combined in the cybernetic apparatus of

experience. I recognize the possibility for confusion at this somewhat foreign

concept. Let us address it in, perhaps, simpler terms. Protocol describes the

rules, limitations and possibilities of experience when experience is produced

through both an individuals memory and public, archival media working

collaboratively in a network. These extended rules, as Galloway suggests, do

9

Brian Rotman,Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and DistributedHuman Being. (USA: Duke University Press, 2008).

10Alexander Galloway,Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization.

(Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004).


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not burden us. Instead, they connect us as we go, giving us more mnemonic

and experiential agency as a connected entity than we could possibly have

had alone. To quote Rotman, Their meditation is that of an external scaffold,

a way of allowing these multiplicities to be recognized, to become choate, to

crystallize into social practices, and cohere into experientially real, stable,

and iterable forms of psychic activity.11 In thinking of experience as the

product of a networked interaction, and not an individuals creation, we gain

the freedom of an open source. As we borrow from publically accessible,

media archives (open to all) in the cultivation of our experiences, then we

should be able to see our individual experiences, and subsequent memory-based interactions, as connected to others through that shared, media-

comprised experience. In short, our synthetic experiences allow us to enmesh

ourselves in a collaborative, public memory, a wiki-experience. Such a

trajectory is not unprecedented. The move from music shops to Napster, from

Blockbuster to RedEnvelope and Netflix, from the encyclopedia to Wikipedia;

these are not signs of a coming open-source trend, these are expressions of a

public evolution. As the theorists at Net Behaviour12 remind us, we are not so

isolated as to be a DIY (Do It Yourself) culture; we are an integrated

DIWO (Do It With Others) network. We exist with one another, it seems

only right that we can experience and remember with one another too.

Let us now, at last, turn our attention to the glitch itself. Our

paradigm of synthetic memory and networked experience has been

established and our poststructuralist protocol has been laid out. In the next

11

Brian Rotman,Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and DistributedHuman Being. ( USA: Duke University Press, 2008). 102.

12Net Behaviour. "Do It With Others" (2007). Available from:


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section we will come to see that a glitch in the system is not something to be

lamented, but in fact celebrated. It is the ruptured means by which we might

appreciate our state of networked unity. Borrowing from Foucauldian

archaeology we shall see how the artistic and social practice of glitch-making

resonates in support of the networks of synthetic memory and distributed

experiences, while simultaneously calling into question the discrete nature of

hegemonic centralization which privileges outdated concepts of self, truth

and totality.


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MEMORY, MODIFIED

Without question, an irrevocable change is happening to the individualself: the thing thought to be fixed in definition of human identity isbecoming unmoored as the technological upheaval transforming thelandscape of Western culture makes itself felt deep within our heads,within our subjectivities, our personas, our psyches.

Brian Rotman 13

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault reminds readers that the

only way to explore or divine the nature of a hegemonic structure is to

examine its ruptures.14 By deconstructively analyzing the effects of those

incongruities on the whole, one can discern the organizational structure of

the overall apparatus through its responses. Eugene Thacker brings these

words into the digital era in his text, The Exploit, where he speaks of a

ruptured protocol, a glitch in the network of memory and archival systems.

For him, it follows syllogistically that if protocol is a sort of discourse, then

these exploits, hacks, and glitches are neo-Foucauldian ruptures found within

modern networks15. He likens exploits to computer viruses, citing that they

do not infect, but rather use pre-existing architecture to propagate. Viruses,

for Thacker, are life exploiting life.16 We have come to see our individual

experiences as entities constructed from, and implicated in, a larger network

13

Brian Rotman,Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and DistributedHuman Being. (USA: Duke University Press, 2008). 81.

14 Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).129.

15Eugene Thacker, The Exploit, A Theory of Networks. (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2007).

16Ibid. 84.


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of external memory and archival media. If we wish to address the structures

of our experience, perception, and by extension, knowledge and self, I propose

that the most apt way to approach these concepts is through the study and

production of exploitative hacks. I propose that we invent and curate these

viruses to see how they move within a system, how they interact, and how

they may prove the ever-expanding dimensions of modern experience.

This tactic has, and will continue to prove itself in varying artistic

expressions. From curated programming to home-brew gaming to locative,

hacktivist media, modes of artistic production attempt to exploit ruptures on

all ends of the communications spectrum, acting as proof of systemic life inart. This is an area rife for discussion, and I feel as though the study of this

new and de-centralized media will provide the academy with much in the

coming years. Instead of addressing the multitude of work already in place in

a general capacity, I will use two specific projects as examples of how art may

come to deconstructively interact with a synthetic memory and networked

experience. Both of these projects are current, attempt rupture in different

ways and are deployed in differing fashions. The first project of which I speak

is my graduate thesis film, Centralia, and the second is a series of new media

works on which I have been working since 2007, entitled The Ceibas Cycle.

Centralia is a documentary in so much as it documents. It is, perhaps,

redundant to make a case for everything having a documentary element to it.

Others have and will continue to do so more eloquently than I could. Instead,

I will relate a recent experience in the hope of illuminating how this

distributed perspective relativizes notions of truth, accuracy, and certainty. A

group of colleagues and I had the chance to meet Ken Burns last year. The

filmmaker, much like an evangelical preacher, gave an inspiring show

reminding us of the documentary genres ability to resurrect the dead. Many


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of the people in the audience asked him questions about truth during the

session, asking him how he presents truth so accurately. I still have no idea

what that phrase meant, and the answers given were unsatisfactory.

Objective truth through media, for my generations sensibility, is something

that should have gone out with the Gulf War and the advent of 4Chan. It

should be rightly so as well; our complete interface with mediated exteriority

in the production of present experience has left us with multiple,

intermingling perspectives, no single one crowned as the authoritarian real.

Truth, as all experience, is a synthesis of stimuli, built collaboratively from

memory and archives does it, in fact, need to be true? Could a lie betterserve our networked perception in its understanding of a situation? I am

reminded of John Hodgeman putting it so perfectly in his most recent book,

reality, while generally probable, is not always interesting. 17

Before we continue, I must quickly clarify a point of rhetoric. The

notion of truth in documentary media is a complex issue, one which has been

addressed by many in a variety of ways. For the sake of simplicity and

brevity I will put forth the following as it pertains to my argument.

Documentaries traditionally present themselves as archival representations

of truth. Whether it be the subjective, personal documentaries of the modern

era, or the overarching sociological affairs of Robert Flaherty, the term

documentary carries with it the trappings of proof and testimony. To this

end, I will suggest that this mediated proof is the hegemonic discourse which

binds together the documentary genre as a whole. The study of this

totalization through its breakages is the framework around which Centralia,

as an archival hacktivist project, is constructed.

17

John Hodgeman.More Information Than You Require, (USA: Penguin, 2008). Cover.


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The intent ofCentralia is to create a simulated documentary, one that

implants a hack into the network of archives and documents, showing the

ruptures inherent in the blind interpretation of objectively truthful

experiences through media. My aim here is not to produce an untruth per se,

but to critique the means by which modern audiences, oftentimes

unquestioningly, absorb notions of experiential truth from archivally

simulated objects. Baudrillard gives great example of this trope with a

metaphor concerning simulation and the robbery of a bank. 18 While holding

up a bank, he states, is a crime against its employees and patrons, to

accurately simulate the same robbery is a far greater crime, as it also offendsthe sensibilities of social order and the apparatus governing the perception of

reality. For him, the illusion of the danger, of the stick-up, is superseded and

ultimately made irrelevant by the legal/social network already in place to

respond to it. It no longer matters that the guns were fake and the intent was

abstract, the representation of a robbery would still cause the same panic of a

real crime, and in that respect both the real and representational function in

the same way. By that same logic, I feel that a documentary project need only

give the appearance of being constructed from real documents to be effective.

In this way, Centralia may function on a binary level. Not only am I able to

express the narrative of the content through an audiences mediated

experience (the goal of most films to convey the story), but I am also able to

subtly approach the problematic, ruptured paradigms of documentary

hegemony. In presenting fabrications to the archival canon in the context of a

non-fiction document, it will, no doubt, be interpreted as such, creating a

misconstruction of experience one which functions just as fluidly and well

18

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. (Michigan, University of Michigan Press,1995). 19-21.


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as a construction based entirely on traditionally verifiable evidence. Perhaps

then, it is not a misconstruction at all. If the experience of watching a

documentary reaffirms the structures of truth, media and experience through

the network of synthetic perception, then this project, through a crisis of non-

fiction context and fictional content, suggests that the hegemonic structure of

truth, when explored through constructed experience, is an easy aesthetic to

appropriate and perhaps little more.

This viral trajectory is what separates Centralia from mockumentary

and its ilk. Mockumentaries do not present themselves as truth; they borrow

a style of production and exhibition, but not the intention to disrupt. WhileCentralia and a mockumentary like Best in Show(2000), both serve as

examples of a simulated experience (as all films attempt a static simulation

of an experience), they diverge in the expectation built into the production of

the piece. Best in Showis not concerned with Eugene Levy, but a character

he portrays. His celebrity precludes the pieces believability, as do the ending

credits. In producing Centralia, every choice was made to preserve a

believable aesthetic. The actors were all amateurs, everything was shot in a

single take and certain production errors were not omitted as they simulated

the authenticity which marks a piece of media as truthful. Most important

to the creation of a realistic falsehood, however is the belief that one is either

a) not making fiction, as every representation has enough truth to be

considered as a documentary effort, or b) making fiction, as every

representation has enough falsehood to be considered as a fictionalized effort.

The tension in this dichotomy describes my immediate goals with Centralia. I

wish it to spike the punch of the documentary genre, showing that what we

perceive as truth is simply an aesthetic choice and that its hegemonic power

in media, and thereby experience is little more than a formulaic


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expectation to be met. As Pierre Nora19 reminds us, we wish to perpetually

build the archive of experience; perhaps we no longer need separate sections

for fiction and fact. I hope that this piece will invite audiences to question

and therefore confront the manner in which they synthesize experiential

truth from media sources. I wish for them to see the fallibility of that

network, if only for a moment.

I recognize that this is, of course, not going to be the case. I know that

Centralia, if successful, will do such a good job masquerading as a truthful

endeavor that it will never be uncovered as a hidden rupture. There is a high

probability that it will be received as a somewhat interesting documentaryabout a Pennsylvania curiosity and a sad story concerned with the archival

transmission of traumatic events. This is what separates my work from that

of David Holzmans Diary(1967), as his trick is revealed when the cast of

characters is credited. My project is somewhat more deep-cover than that,

burrowing itself into the canon, perhaps to be discovered publicly, perhaps to

fester in solitude an un-detonated ordinance. It must be this way, as to

overtly fictionalize my effort would defeat my purpose, and to make a

traditional fact-obsessed documentary would only perpetuate the hegemony,

not underlining the ruptures at all. I wish to embed the inherent fissures of

documentary into the presentation of my work.

Again, I should remind my readership that my intentions are not to

discredit documentaries as forms of media. Rather, I wish to show them as

pieces in a problematic synthesis. They are perceived as mediated truth,

archivally perpetuated. Thus, when we interface with such media, audiences

garner a sense of objective reality in the creation of their experience. In

19

Pierre Nora, ed.,Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1: Conflicts andDivisions. (New York: Columbia U Press, 1996) 9.


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accordance with the Bergsonian workflow of synthetic experience, we can see

that the formation of a verifiable reality from the combination of past,

present and media archives produces a perspectival truth, one that is easily

mistaken for objectivity. This forgoes all of the ruptures that documentary

practices and media carry with them by definition: that of omission,

perspective, and the fallibility of human storytelling. While documentaries

may have cultivated aesthetic stimuli which produce truthful responses,

they do so at the simulated fictionalization of their subjects, a simulation at

work in all films. For is it not so that even the most accurate representation

in media carries with it the trapping of fiction, as its subjects are only thesimulacra of their recorded selves? Centralia, in mimicking this stimulus,

acts to rupture that interaction. I wish to show that truths are absorbed into

a mnemonic-archival synthesis of experience just as easily as untruths both

producing equally valid experiences in the mind of the audience. If this is the

case, and if we, as a culture of viewers, are able to merge the dichotomy of

archival truth and falsehood in the same experience, then we have come one

step closer to recognizing the distribution of our individual selves over a

larger matrix of media-propagated perspective, knowledge and experiential

relativism.


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MEMORY, REWRITTEN

I was born during the Age of Machines. A machine was a thing madeup of distinguishable 'parts' organized in the imitation of some function

of the human body. Machines were said to 'work.' How a machine'worked' was readily apparent to an adept, from inspection of the shapeof its 'parts.' The physical principles by which machines 'worked' wereintuitively verifiable.

Hollis Frampton 20

Hollis Frampton, writing in the late 1970s, speaks to the place of

rupture in representational media. As with his Age of Machines, his films

functioned in a way that begged audiences to dismantle, explore andunderstand them through that deconstruction. While he would later note that

the age of machines has ended, it would be wrong of us to assume that none

of our new technologies of archival communication can be taken apart for

deconstructive analysis in the hopes of divining their purpose, meaning and

applicable relevance. The Ceibas Cycleis my way to address that sensibility

in a digital age. I have no allegiance to film, but video, with its ease of use

and massive proliferation, was a large part of my history and now, a major

part of my experience. Naturally, as I wish to explore both my experience and

my history through media, I would choose to discover how one might take

apart video and re-purpose its use to prove not only its ubiquitous nature, but

its archival prowess, and by extension, its interface with memory and the

construction of my experiences.

The Ceibas Cycleis a multi-media endeavor begun in the spring of

2007 as an attempt to describe a mortal liminality through a technological

one. Each installment in the series explores allegorical aspects of the Central

20

Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion. (New York: Visual Studies Workshop Press,1983). 112.


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individualism and wholeness; by seeing glitches and liminalities as not

detriments nor faults, but as instruments of life and eventuality, we shall

come to navigate this modern landscape of memory, archive and experience

together. We have no choice but to share the means by which we construct

our perspectives, we may as well see it in one another and celebrate.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, andPhilip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext (e), 1983.

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 1988.

Bush, Vannevar. As We May Think, The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945.

Centralia, DVD, directed by Evan Meaney. Iowa City, IA: The University ofIowa, 2010.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated from theFrench by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books,1972.

Frampton, Hollis. Circles of Confusion. New York: Visual Studies WorkshopPress, 1983.

Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization.Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Hodgeman, John. More Information Than You Require, USA: Penguin, 2008.

Net Behaviour. "Do It With Others" (2007),http://www.netbehaviour.org/DIWO.htm (accessed February 26. 2010).

Nora, Pierre. ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1:Conflicts and Divisions. New York: Columbia U Press, 1996.

Ricur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting/ Paul Ricoeur ; translated byKathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago : University of ChicagoPress, 2004.

Rotman, Brian. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts andDistributed Human Being. USA: Duke University Press, 2008.

Thacker, Eugene. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

evan meaney on glitches

Documents