Feedback Loops

“If there is any chance of finding really extraordinary animals on earth, it will be in those very places where we have not looked—not exactly ‘lost worlds,’ but in those worlds almost all over the earth, which we have not yet found or not thouroughly searched,”
-Bernard Heuvelmanns, On The Track of Unknown Animals, 1955

As with most other videomakers, I stumbled across the fractal fantasies lurking in video feedback accidentally, early on in my audio-visual career. This mesmerizing technique was coupled with low-fi/high concept science fiction plots to signify time-travel, the paranormal or altered states of mind. Used in concert with deliberate mis-use of video switchers available through cable access facilities, these curious gestures of malfunction were gleefully appropriated in creating short narratives as a teenager. Ridiculous attempts to suspend disbelief functioned like Frankenstein’s monster…the stitches proudly shown, the project clunked forward and ultimately: self-destruction.

By the time I earned my BFA in Art Video in dawn of the 21st c., deck-to-deck editing was on it’s way out. My education (dramatically speaking) had been rendered obsolete. Video was the last new medium before computers conquered all and activated their own exclusive feedback loop. Like video, computers have been around since the 1960s. They’re hardly new media despite market ploys to position them as such. Jonathan Sterne relays these facts in his essay Out With The Trash, emphasizing the”weird, recursive way new media are ‘new’ primarily in reference to themselves.” (cited in Residual Media) Please stay on the line, this message repeats. In perpetual loop, digital media never gets old. Obsolescence is produced in tandem with the latest digital product, providing a sparkling tech-utopian tease shot through with a forecast, and fast-moving, descent into techno-trash.

Deck-to-deck editing employs the thrill of the hunt. Careening through a VHS, hi-8 or 3/4″ tape, punching in edits, tapes roll back. patience, patience, patience. Digital, non-linear editing is closer to vidsonic surgery. Diving in from above, clean cuts, loops and lack of degeneration. render, render, render. An efficient tool for database compilations and articulating research.

To a post-digital world of suspended disbelief, noise and novel trajectories! The call of the crypto-zoetropical, the blobsquatch and the metaphortean yonder beckons us from beyond and beneath the claims of obsolescence/extinction. Across wounded galaxies of almost broken electronics, video folklore and residual media. The products of obsolescence sitting on shelves are just resting, waiting for new life to come! Not exactly lost worlds, just tucked away and forgotten worlds. These worlds have not been thouroughly searched. There are whole ecologies of the extraordinary meandering in our midst.

Handful of Fantastic Zoology

“By treating the things of media–the artifacts, the technical apparatuses, the material texts as if they, like living things, have lives and therefore potential biographies, we can trace their paths as they pass across social classes and from newness to obsolescence.” (Michelle Henning, New Lamps for Old, Residual Media, 2007, p.50)

Sifting through schlock at the Picadilly flea market today, I found two portable CD players. I’d been eager to find some working devices so that I might embark on a laser guided derive along the lines of Michael Oster’s CD Trauma techniques. “The CD players work,” the man at the flea market told me, “twenty for the pair.” It’s been hard to find CD-players, as the iMperial pods flood the mainstream market. The CD players I found are transanimals, hybrid electronics that play CDs, CD-Rs and MP3 data discs. Transanimals are a nano-niche disappeared in the blink of an eye. Hybrid moments are ultimately futile strategies as “survival of the fittest” is out-done by the latest. It’s not about survival so much as being physically fitted for always-already planned obsolescence.

In the nooks and crannies of culture is where by-gone media resides. Transanimals frequent this terrain. I found my CD players at the flea market today, but no sign of audio cassette tapes. A stray AC/DC or Quiet Riot album, sure. A Tom Clancy book-on-tape, yes. But no more the menagerie of home-made obscurities, the box loads of miscellany on audiotape. Those marvelous creatures with hand-scrawled text. The mezmerizing strangeness of travelling through time via a tape player left on in a boring room, a vacation journal, answering machine, or an impromptu verse.

Tales become taller. I sense mythologies creeping in, as I recall my second-hand hunting through flea markets of yore. “Once I even found a…,” as my anecdotal story starts. There is cross-over here with the crypozoological pursuit, a deep personal conviction that the age of discovery still exists. The golden age of discovery is as convenient as eBay today, although such armchair adventuring begs the question “what now?” The thrill of the hunt, spirited haggling and chance discoveries become extinct. Even the typo-farming folklore has become business as usual. In regards to eBay’s impact, as John Richards notes “It is not a question these days of getting hold of something, but rather what to do with it” ( 32kg: Performance Systems for a Post-Digital Age ) Perhaps, off-world adventuring, a la circuit-bending, in an electronic elsewhere opened up within the abundance of residual media?

Cryptozoologists Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark recall the golden age of zoological pursuit “In the beginning, as explorers trekked to new lands and listened to local informants, they were led to remarkable new species…Cryptozoology keeps alive the tradition of discovery and recognition of new species of animals (cited in Dendle, Peter Cryptozoology in the medieval and modern worlds, 2006)