Finding Success in Failure

If I had to describe our class in a single word, it would be fast. Never before have I been involved in a class that moved so quickly and required me to be constantly working and creating. As Trisha reminded us time and time again, this class was all about learning a new language. Sometimes, these languages were easy for me to learn. Other times, I felt extremely lost in the attempted translation. And as much as this class stressed me out sometimes, I truly enjoyed it and I learned a lot.

Throughout my college career, I’ve always been in classes that I was comfortable with – classes that were easy for me to follow. This class challenged this trend, however. At times, I felt completely baffled by the new software we were learning to use. There were nights of troubleshooting. I spent hours figuring out how to navigate Adobe Premiere Pro before I could even consider making my actual video project. But these days of learning the new language of digital media provided me with a skill I hadn’t mastered before – the ability to accept and adapt to my own failure.

In this class, I learned how to move forward from failure and create something new. When generating new ideas for projects, my mind often came up with ideas that were too advanced for my own digital media skills. Unlike DJ Spooky, who said, “I can’t think of a sound I haven’t heard or that I couldn’t make,” I found that there were many things that I did not have the skills to create. For example, when I originally approached the video portrait project, I wanted to make my video look like a historical documentary. I sound found, however, that I didn’t have the media skills to achieve this. I had to remodel my project and settle on a concept that was a little bit different. Of course, practice makes perfect and I found that I was able to work faster and more effectively as time passed. For me, creating digital media was very much like learning a new language. Going forward in the creation of media and other aspects of my life, I will not be afraid to fail. Better to try, fail, and move forward than to do nothing at all.

Another important skill I learned in this class was how to archive effectively. This includes deciding what to archive and what to leave up to our own memories. When archiving moments this semester, I often found that I preferred my memories to the actually documented evidence. When I went home to take pictures of my dad for my photo essay, I remember the experience and feelings differently than the pictures look. I remember feeling very close to my dad at that time, but the photos don’t convey this feeling quite as well as my own memory. During our class discussions, we talked a lot about the importance of archiving and digital capabilities, but our discussions about leaving technology behind always struck me the most. Technology is important, but it is very important to remember that is can’t quite capture everything – at least not yet.

In my future with digital media, I want to continue to explore different methods of archiving and types of software. I’ve always relied on the written word to convey what I’m thinking or feeling. I’m not great at verbally articulating what I’m thinking and I’m not an artist (at least not in the traditional sense of the word). However, digital media has provided me with a new outlet for my thoughts and ideas. The images of a photo essay or video can be much more powerful than a traditional essay. I will definitely carry this idea with me as I move to my future classes and endeavors. I’m excited to take my new digital media skills beyond this class.

Composing Worthwhile Media

Composing Digital Media. Composing media that is digital? Moviemaker, maybe some Photoshop. That’s all it is right? WRONG. The amount of knowledge, tutorials, technological skill, communication ability, and open-mindedness that is needed for this course is infinite and although it is difficult to acquire an infinite amount of information within the span of about 15 weeks, this course has absolutely given me a great start.

Looking back to when we first started with the concept of archiving as well as deciding when to capture a moment and uncovering missing information I did not realize how much it set the tone for the entire class until now. All of the projects we have done from our websites, to the video portraits, to the performative sound pieces are all incredible forms of media that each archive in a unique way. Through each of them we have documented moments of history, significant parts of other’s lives, as well as the lives of those in our families. I have learned the importance of leaving bits of information out of a project as well as capturing aspects of people and moments of history that have not yet been recorded and that others may have never noticed before.

However, for the future I would want to focus even more on exactly what I am presenting through my projects. For example, one of the first projects we did was a video portrait on a classmate. Although I feel I captured a significant part of the person, I wish I had included bits and pieces of information about her that she may not even have realized about herself. By this I mean, I would want to utilize the media to its fullest extent if I were to create another video portrait. Using more b-role footage, trying out multiple different angles of a person while she is talking, and really taking advantage of the diverse editing tricks in Adobe Premiere Pro would be at the top of the list for what I could do more of. This way, the video becomes more intimate, and the subject is depicted in many different ways as opposed to how people see him or her everyday.

Another project we worked on was the photo stories. What was especially unique about these was the fact that we were given the ability to portray something that was at once missing, and uncover it or try to unveil as much as possible through a series of images edited in Photoshop. Looking at other photo essays it was easy to see that each evoked some sort of emotion, another common theme for this course. Yet, the most difficult part that I would want to work on in the future is producing some sort of empathy towards a piece of work, whether it’s just a feeling of light-heartedness, comic relief, sympathy, or anger. I feel as if I have not reached that point yet where I truly made someone feel something and I think that’s what a lot of this course teaches you; how to use forms of digital media to evoke some sort of emotion out of an audience and show them a brand new side of something they may have seen or heard about a million times before.

Overall, one main thing I want to carry with me for the future whenever working with digital types of media is to make it personal. I feel most of my projects have been unintentionally objective, so much that they are missing a personal touch or, to be corny for a second, a little piece of me in them. It could be because I have not formed a particular style of my own yet because I have been trying to test out as many as possible but I think it would be ideal to eventually have my own that can be seen throughout all my future pieces.

Blog 5: Jaime the Arrogant

I chose an image from the photo essay “Where Children Sleep” by James Mollison. The image I chose was the photo of Jaime, age 9, from New York. This particular image caught my eye in a way I did not expect. It seems that as I clicked my way through the images of “Where Children Sleep,” I expected to feel very sad when I looked at photos of poor children, and relieved when I saw images of kids who had a decent place to sleep. Unfortunately, when I looked at this picture, I felt the distinct feelings of judgment and frustration. Now, I do not think my reaction was a result of the boy’s apparent wealth; I believe it was a result of the framing in the image.

First, our eye is drawn to the all-white furniture against the horrifying pattern of the carpet. My eyes actually felt strained when I looked at that carpet. Then the lines of the photo point us towards the boy’s desk. On this desk, there are a number of very neatly placed objects. Above the desk, on two perfectly mounted shelves, were a globe, what seem to be miniature versions of tourist spots (the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State building, the statue of liberty), and a surprising number of trophies, as well as medals dangling from the bottom shelf. The busyness of the carpet, the wallpaper which mismatches with the uniform all-white furniture, and the child’s belongings all seem so out of place, so I might consider that as a hook for this photo (rather than the whole essay). While everything in the room seems to have a place, something seems off – possibly a result of the angle of the picture, since I always thought pictures of a bedroom tend to be taken from a front or side view of the bed (with the bed as the focus point in the room). Instead, we get the whole essence of Jaime’s room.

The story conveyed seems to be the story of a boy in New York, who is heavily involved in sports (signified by the trophies, as well as the golf clubs in the corner) and music (the cello). We can also see that this boy is wealthy enough to have a decent-sized room in New York – which is impressive in itself. However, I think my frustration came from the juxtaposition of the picture of Jaime with the contents of his room. It seems that Jaime must be wealthy – given his belongings, his awful carpet, and the suit that he is wearing (seriously, that kid is 9) – and yet his facial expression indicates that he could not care less. He looks bored and that struck me, as I looked at this image in contrast with the rest of the photo essay. It was hard to take in a boy with nice things, who had such an unconcerned look on his face, as I tried to understand the hardships of young children who slept on dirty tires, or on a barren hill. My sadness for the poor children was juxtaposed awkwardly with the image of Jaime, which resulted in my overall angry response to the photo. While I wish I could say this picture makes me happy because Jaime has a place to sleep, the elements that James Mollison used in this picture just force my opinion of Jaime as an arrogant little boy who should be more grateful for what he has, when some people do not even have a bed to sleep on. It’s fascinating how quick we are to judge the characters in the images set before us. It makes me wonder if our digital age is making us more or less prone to assuming things about people we do not know. Has an image become the new “first impression”?

When is Archiving Too Much?

Larsen’s photo not taken fits in perfectly with Derrida’s theory: the “new dynamic” that both her and her subject’s paths take is in direct correlation with Derrida’s archive “producing as well as recording”. This also gels nicely with Wood’s idea of preserving all time for all time.

I’ve very much enjoyed reading these articles on archiving. My family this summer had several revelations about our genealogy, and almost all of them were because of the use of various archival records, be they books, maps, or the Internet. A “photo not taken” scenario figured in as well: There was a house built by our ancestors that was actually in the area, but no one in any book or map had taken a photo of the front or provided a detailed description or address of where it was located, and we eventually had to find it ourselves.

The mere fact that I am able to trace my lineage directly back to Charlemagne (I’m his 42nd great-grandson) shows me how useful and informative archives and records can be. However, take into account that it could also be dangerous to hold so much information for such a long period of time. Could Wood have been wrong about the lifespan of maps and archives? Every photo not taken, every map not drawn, and every archive not recorded could probably be said to be full of things we don’t know – and maybe that’s for the better sometimes.

On the one hand, it’s fascinating to have windows to the past, like the video that went viral a few years ago of an elderly man on the 50’s game show I’ve Got a Secret, being the last living person at the time to have seen the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. On the other, those windows hold immeasurable power and significance, as the US government found out when the Iraqi archives were destroyed. Where should the line be drawn?

Media Maker Mischief

We map out everything. It’s how we arrive somewhere or arrive to something. We map out we’re going for the day and what errands we need to run. We map out vacations and trips. We map out our possible plans for the future or we look at past maps and see where we took that wrong turn. So, using that logic, we create our reality. And as the creator of a document or story or piece of artwork, such as reality, I can decide what I want to include and what I want to omit. For example, the video we watched in class about Greg Packer. As we discussed in class, the video portrayed Greg as a very normal guy with a quirky hobby. This was due to dialogue used, angles and shots used, and the background music played in the video. The creator only included this certain aspects to influence our perceptions of Greg. In reality, Greg could’ve been really creepy or dark, but we would never know because we only saw what the creator wanted us to see. But because something isn’t included, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s probably archived somewhere, produced, recorded, and left. By doing this, creators can manipulate the way their audience feels about what is being read or seen. But being the creator of something, one is able to say, “include this, don’t put that in there. I want this emotion felt”. And that’s truly the beauty of creation.

 

The one thing I continually think about after reading those articles is how certain information is either including or excluding. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense. It’s done when stories are told to seem less boring or mundane, to make them more interesting. But I can’t help but to think about all the history lost about certain cultures and peoples and it’s really unfortunate. It leads our society today to have a biased view towards history and inclination to approve of certain people and mistreat others. Our feelings and perceptions are heavily influenced by the information we’re given and it’s important that it be correct and unbiased. In most recent events, the tragedy of Michael Brown and Ferguson. What information is missing there? Which media outlet is telling the unbiased version of this story? I won’t write a whole essay about this, because I can. But what aren’t we getting from the story?

 

This leads to me wonder: is it fair? Is it fair that certain information is omitted to manipulate the viewers’ sentiments towards a certain subject matter? If that’s done, are we truly living in reality or just subset of it?

Choosing our Memories

Within the three readings for this week, there was a distinct theme of discussing not only what is in archives but also what is absent from them. We often look at our written documents and our historical artifacts and can make deductions about its purpose and what it says about society at that period of time. But it becomes more challenging to discover what the things that are missing in our archives tell us.

            Marlene Manoff’s “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines” delves into the idea of the missing in archives. She makes a point to notice how archived documents are not a pure and unbiased account of history but are taken from a certain perspective and by extension are missing the perspective of another. As Derrida said in his work, archivization can produce events in the same way as it records them. By remembering events in a certain way, we in turn are turning them into something else for future generations, In her section on the transparency of the archive, she writes, “whatever the archive contains is already a reconstruction—a recording of history from a particular perspective; it thus cannot provide transparent access to the events themselves” (Manoff 14). Manoff sites women studies and the study of native peoples as two areas where archived information is severely lacking. She suggests that a course for women studies to take would be “to write women back into the historical record—to fill the gaps and correct the omissions in the archive” (Manoff 15).

This leads to an interesting question when considering Erika Larsen’s article “Photograph Not Taken.” While she believes that her photographs that are not taken are ones that were not given and therefore not to be taken, is she possibly falling into the trap of creating an archive that does not capture a close approximation to the real event but rather her own perception of it. By omitting the events and people she photographs she is structuring her own personal archive in a certain way. However can omission of certain moments be necessary? Is it more important that some things stay solely in our own mind and memory and fit different situations when we need them to? Is it better to allow certain pieces of memory to not be archived and to die with us? Or is our choosing what to remember and what not to remember dangerous to future generations?

To Archive or Not to Archive: How Do We Know What to Document and What Not to Record?

      Reading about archiving in the words of Derrida was honestly quite confusing and difficult to understand, however, after reading “Photograph Not Taken,” “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines,” and Denis Wood’s writings I feel as if I have a slightly better grasp on what it truly means to archive and how different technologies affect it.

      After reading Erika Larsen’s “Photograph Not Taken” I realized that archiving by taking a photograph truly captures the moment we were in at the time. I use the word we because Erika Larsen describes how she felt just as connected, on the same page, and in the same moment as the people she has photographed; the moment was just as much hers and it was her subjects’. However, she continues to say how different her life becomes after each photograph she takes, sometimes even to the extent that the moment she experienced in the past, no longer relates to her in the present. I think this then connects to the article “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines” because it describes, not only, how archiving captures an event, but how so much is produced from and comes out of what we are archiving. We grow or develop so much from certain events and I think that is some of what Erika Larsen was trying to get across.

      Marlene Manoff continued to describe in her article how the way we transmit or record information alters the way we perceive and understand what was documented. She touches on how now a days it is extremely easy to erase or delete something we archived online, yet written documents are much more difficult to alter. It almost makes us question the legitimacy of archiving, how do we know what is accurate versus what is embellished or simplified?

      Denis Wood also discusses how certain archives are biased, or some cultural groups or certain events are not evenly represented, but that maps provide a certain reality to help us understand more. Altogether these works made me wonder just how accurate what has already been archived truly is. How much is left out? What happens to the missing information?

      It makes me think of the moments that I decided not to photograph something because of how I was feeling, whether it be because I was extremely proud, elated, or just saddened by the moment. No one else will ever understand or know about that moment in my life and it makes me wonder just how much of history is left out because someone was experiencing the same conflicting feeling as to whether or not to document it. The articles also made me think about historians, writers and other archivists, and how they decide what to archive and record and what to leave out? For example, just in this post there is so much more I could write about each article individually but yet I decided to only touch on specific topics, leading to the fact that now no one will know what else I had to say about it. Although it is a small-scale example, it is definitely a concept that takes quite a lot to think about.

Digital Producers

     As artists, we record our emotions and the emotions of others around us in a tangible form that the consumer can see, hear, and feel. We take moments of time that would have been forgotten and never felt, and transform them into a tangible medium that will withstand the sands of time in the archive. It is our choice and our choice only, and as artists it is our decision if we want these moments and feelings to become felt by everyone else. As Derrida was trying to say, once a piece of work is in the archive, it is produced into the world for everyone to see. In Erika Larsen’s ‘photo not taken‘ story, she chooses not to have her audience experience the moment she witnesses. She realized that the father crying in his deceased daughters room was his moment that belonged to him. That amount of emotional power that he possessed at the moment greatly surpassed a photograph to be shared in the archive and with the rest of the world forever.

   As digital media makers we must realize that we are just not saving our work into the archive, we are creating pieces that could have an impact on countless of people. With the Internet, we can touch the entire world in an instant. That is why it is such solemn duty for us to choose what to capture and what not to capture.  I also find this a little bit scary, because we are constantly exposed in the digital world we live in today. Every status, picture and video we post says something about us in that moment of time. Our emotions are left on the table for others to dissect, and sometimes we go down this road blindly and leave parts of us that we may not have wanted to been archived forever.

Housing an Archive

I first heard of Derrida and his particular writing style years ago as I read Mark Z. Danielewski’s incredibly thought-provoking and wildly unconventional 2001 debut novel House of Leaves, a many-layered horror tale with the titular abode as the acorn at the center of its deep, dark, cavernous tree. Danielewski (hereafter called “MZD”) has often been compared to the likes of Derrida, Pynchon, and Nabokov, and reading Derrida’s certainly confusing take on the definition of “archive”, I can see what MZD’s readers meant – Derrida spends as much time on the definition and exploration of the word “archive” as MZD does at one point with the word “echo”.

It’s certainly not out of the question to say that MZD had Derrida’s theory of Freudian archives as well as the idea of the “photo not taken” in mind while writing his groundbreaking novel over a decade. The crux of the book is written (by a blind character) as a lengthy academic dissertation on a horrifying found-footage (or archival footage, if you will) film that may or may not exist even within the fictional confines of the book itself. The family at the heart of at all tries to learn more about the unexplained horror lurking in their never-ending halls, and some inch closer and closer to fulfilling the extreme and “destructive” death drive. Do you think the fact that MZD’s readers can struggle to comprehend its vastness and nothingness only through text and imagination, and not as the film it’s purporting to be, a sort of “film un-shot”, take away from the overall experience of the novel?

And even novels now are greatly read online, on tables, on cell phones – I ironically read Derrida’s words not on the paper that they’re copied from, but glowing from a computer screen. Now that we live in such a digital age, one wonders what Derrida would think were he still alive to see just how far we’ve come (or how low we’ve dug our hole), even in the 10 years since his death. In a time when teenagers can’t go for 7.35 minutes without checking their phone, where is Derrida’s timeless archive stored? In the cloud?

 

“There is no archive without outside,” writes Derrida. This is where the characters of House of Leaves are trying to escape to, to flee from their archive, and the destruction and chaos that can result from stumbling onto one that you maybe were never supposed to find.

The Art of Archiving

      Never had I before thought to think through the word “archive.” Every time it has been mentioned I usually would just assume someone was referring to old documents or public records hidden away in the depths of an ancient, giant library. However, after reading the beginning of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, I am slowly beginning to understand Derrida’s meaning of the term archive. To Derrida, archive is not just something historical, but rather a commencement in time where things have taken place as well as a thing that is ordered and has an authoritarian aspect to it. He also described an archive as a “place of shelter” which I am still curious exactly what that means. Could he mean that an archive is shielded away from the present?

      Derrida also touches on the death drive to archive; however, he describes the death drive as destructive, something we do in order to return to either the place in which we live or to return nature back to how it once was before we were born which then leads us to archive. I feel as though today the death drive we have to archive is not so much destructive but rather just an act of desperation to have something left of us for those that come, so that we could remain immortal in a sense. I believe this is one of the places where our discussion of the picture not taken fits in because it leads us to question, how do we decide what to archive and what not to archive? Should we document a moment to archive so that it is out there in the public forever, or should we put away our cameras and experience the moment, good or bad, so that the moment is simply a personal archive imprinted in our mind where it will die with us unless passed down to someone else?

      When Derrida began discussing the impact of technology on archives, I once again became slightly confused as to what exactly he was trying to get across but I assumed it had something to do with the fact that technology would indeed alter an archive. He brings up the archives of Freud and explains just how different they would be if he had used email. I am assuming he means that there will always be a new way to archive as more and more materials and technologies are introduced. I would guess that as our resources expand, our archives may become less formal then they once were when the only option was a piece of paper and pen. Derrida also mentioned how archives anticipate the future but does that mean that we build upon our older archives or that we destroy the old ones as Derrida mentioned when talking about the death drive so that we can start over simply using the new materials around us?