Aftershocks: Found Footage Glitch

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Aftershock: Found Footage Glitch Project

Janis Palma

Old film is skin that never heals; a palimpsest of perpetual cicatrices. 1

N. Chare and L. Watkins

Introduction

     Neo-materialist theoretical currents during the twenty-first century have had profound impacts on every sphere of human endeavor, from political thought to artistic creations. Having removed humankind from its privileged position in Gaea,2 anthropocentrism yields to a new protagonism by the unthinkable, the end-of-world cataclysms or the imperiousness of nuclear waste. [2] The reconfiguration of found footage in this project is intended to bring to the foreground the ethical reverberations of a human-less techno-industrial social construct that tenders a carte blanche to those who commerce with the currency of power and control.

Time and Space

     Timothy Morton coined the term hyperobjects “to refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” [8] The concept embodies a new temporal and spatial relation to other entities that does not move or expand in lineal or geo-metric fashion. In Barad’s words, “Time is not a succession of evenly spaced individual moments. … Similarly, space is not a collection of preexisting points set out in a fixed geometry, a container, as it were, for matter to inhabit.” [1] This is the concept of time and space I have sought to incorporate into my project.

     The impingement of human activity on the planet centuries ago still lingers to a greater or lesser degree, and can reach any distance indiscriminately [3], beyond the confines of any normative chronometry or metrology. The distance between Dalton’s 1808 theory of atoms developed while he was somewhere in Manchester and Einstein’s 1905 theory of relativity developed while he was somewhere in Zurich can no longer be measured using maps and calendars. Ronald Walter Greene provides a perfect illustration of this phenomenon:

The so-called smart bomb records its target as it moves to destroy it—a bomb with a camera attached in front . . . relays that film back to a command control and that film is refilmed on television, effectively constituting the television screen and its viewer as the extended apparatus of the bomb itself. In this sense, by viewing we are bombing, identified with both bomber and bomb, flying through space, transported from the North American continent to Iraq, and yet securely wedged in the couch in one's own living room. [6]

Neo-materialism tracks movements across time and space that are pliable rather than unyielding, revealing agential relations that prior rhetorical theories had bypassed. “At the core of the material turn, is a concern with agential matter,” [2] a concern I also incorporate into my Found Footage Glitch project.

Vigilance versus Surveillance

     Space and time are also points of reference in the rhetorical exploration of urban and non-urban environments and their integration, segregation, isolation, and connectivity among humans and non-humans. However, Paul Virilio raises a new concern: “the advent of universal REAL TIME that has recently abolished the historical primacy of local time. [10] This now-widespread concept of real time is the offspring of reality television programming and the proliferation of security cameras in public spaces. An initial movement towards a heightened sense of urban connectivity became a breeding ground for a globalized deprivation of privacy. Every thing and every person is now exposed and vulnerable under the Orwellian Big Brother’s eye, omniscient and omnipresent. A proactive vigilance against the dangers posed by urban sprawl has now turned into an instrument for the government apparatus to exercise authoritarian control through real time surveillance, propelling an inexorable dissonance in the social and political discourse of 21st century neo-materialism.

Conclusion

     The Found Footage Glitch project is an exploration of a neo-materialist “ontology [that] involves not simply the abstract study of the nature of being but also the underlying beliefs about existence that shape our everyday relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world.” [4] It is an experiment in the technical distortion of images that echoes rhetorical devastation as “a kind of becoming in which the virtual is attenuated, depleted in some way, drained of its capacity to be constituent.” [5] My instruments were minimal: Microsoft ClipChamp to edit the video and NCH WavePad Sound Editor to edit the sound. Put together, the final product acknowledges the agency of human and non-human entities on a world-wide scale and their potential for mutual destruction, highlighting the many ways in which they are connected and isolated within this time/space ecosystem.

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References:

[1] Barad, Karen. (2007) “Agential Realism: How Material-Discursive Practices Matter.” In Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

[2] Bolt, Barbara. (2013) “Introduction. Toward a ‘new materialism’ through the arts. In Barrett, Estelle and Barbara Bolt, eds. Carnal Knowledge. Towards a 'New Materialism' through the Arts. London/New York: I.B. Tauris.

[3] Chare, Nicholas and Liz Watkins. (2013) “The matter of film: Decasia and Lyrical Nitrate.” In Barrett, Estelle and Barbara Bolt, eds. Carnal Knowledge. Towards a 'New Materialism' through the Arts. London/New York: I.B. Tauris.

[4] Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. (2010) New Materialisms. Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

[5] Fuller, Matthew and Olga Goriunova. (2019) “Devastation.” In Bleak Joys. Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.

[6] Greene, Ronald Walter. (1998) “Another materialist rhetoric.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 15:1, 21-40. Last accessed on 25 September 2024. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295039809367031.

[7] Lefebvre, Henry. (1996) Writings on Cities. Kofman, Eleonore and Elizabeth Lebas (trans. and eds.) Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

[8] Morton, Timothy. (2013) Hyperobject. Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.

[9] Smith, William, Ed. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology. Available at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0104%3Aalphabetic+letter%3DG%3Aentry+group%3D1%3Aentry%3Dgaea-bio-1.

[10] Virilio, Paul. (2002) “The Visual Crash”. In Levin, Thomas Y., Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, eds. CTRL[SPACE] Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Karlsruhe, Germany and Massachusetts Institute of Technology: ZKM/Center for Art and Media.

Endnotes:

1 Chare, Nicholas and Liz Watkins. (2013) “The matter of film: Decasia and Lyrical Nitrate.” In Barrett, Estelle and Barbara Bolt, eds. Carnal Knowledge. Towards a 'New Materialism' through the Arts. London/New York: I.B. Tauris.

2 At a lecture on June 2, 2016, given at The School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark, Bruno Latour defined Gaia as “not a globe … [but] a thin [layer] of slightly fragile and robust set of intertwined life forms.” See, Bruno Latour: Why Gaia is not the Globe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AGg-oHzPsM.