I’ve just come out of a presentation by Theo Jansen of his StrandBeest, huge creatures made out of electrical tubing, cable clips and other cheap materials. Jansen is an engineer/artist who has spent the last 15 years evolving the StrandBeest as wind-powered walking beasts that roam the sand of the beaches where he lives. They are beautiful creations, awe-inspiring in their complexity, and graceful in their movements.

Jansen has used evolution simulation to develop more efficient joints for the creatures legs, and has now developed techniques (using plastic bottles and netting) to store the wind that blows along the beach and use it as power for the StrandBeest. His current research is in developing systems of ‘liars’ – simple yes/no logic gates powered by air and tubing. He is developing these into networks that are either dynamic, and therefore can drive movement, or are static, and can store information. He believes that the StrandBeest will be able to count their steps, realise when they are approaching the sea, or even pass knowledge on to new generations of beasts.

The presentation was part of this year’s Ars Electronica festival, a series of exhibitions and symposia on the theme of ‘Hybrid’. I’ve been to a few of the talks, but much of the interpretation of the Hybrid theme has been far too esoteric and academic, and I don’t have the stomach for that kind of debate any more. I caught the end of Neil Gershefeld’s presentation via webcam of his FabLabs and Internet 0 projects, which were very inspiring, and perfectly addressed the Hybrid theme by taking digitisation into real production. David Weinberger followed with a very interesting thesis on how we are moving into a third mode of structuring knowledge, away from Aristotlean tree structures and taxonomies, and towards a cloud of dynamically structured (*not* unstructured!) links, tags and conversations.

But the highlight by a long way has been the StrandBeest. I don’t know whether it was Theo Jansen’s dry wit, the anthropmorphic delight his creatures create, or sheer awe at their technical complexity, but he enraptured the audience, and earned a standing ovation at the end. By taking engineering back to basics (his work is often compared to Da Vinci’s unbuilt prototypes), Jansen’s evolving working method somehow reminded me of current trends in bottom-up development in software and interaction design.

I didn’t expect to find that the most inspiring work at Arts Electronica wasn’t electronic at all. In contrast, much of the new media work being exhibited looks tired an old, and could have come from any festival in the last 10 years. The StrandBeest look like they could have come from any time in the last 1000 years, and somehow look more futuristic because of this. By taking engineering back to basics, Jansen’s work offers inspiration for new ways of thinking about software and interaction design. Most of the other work here looks like it has reached a dead end, playing out variations on interaction models (stand in front of a screen and wave at something, move things around a table to make music, etc, etc) that don’t seem to have moved on for a decade. The StrandBeest might look like fossils, but they’ve got more life in them than anything else here.

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[This essay is developed from a talk I gave at the launch of the Creative Archive License Group. My brief was to think about how Creative Archive Licenses will affect creativity in the future. The talk was very visual, so I’ve developed some of the ideas more in this essay, and dropped others. Ars Electronica have commissioned this piece for their festival catalogue this year. This essay represents my opinions, not those of the Creative Archive License Group or my employer.]

Let us grind them into dust!
The new aesthetics of digital archives

Archives are imagined as dusty places; serried rows of boxes, books or film canisters shrouded in a fine, grey-white cloak. Like a physical manifestation of forgetting, dust settles on the obsolete, and its removal is symbolic of re-use – the archivist pulls a dusty tome from the shelf, blows across the cover, and as the cloud of dust disperses, the obscure knowledge within is alive once more. Dust is a metaphor for rejection, for failure or dismissal – we ‘eat the dust’, ‘dust off’ unwanted attention and ultimately ‘bite the dust’ . Vast amounts of the knowledge and creative output of the last century is fated to turn to dust; forgotten, unwanted and unknown.

Projects like the BBC’s Creative Archive seek to liberate these archives through technology – to blow off the dust and digitize thousands of hours’ worth of audio and video content. Through digital networks, these things can be reanimated, made available again for new contexts and uses. By transforming dusty archives into clean databases, content can be reused and remixed, becoming the starting point for new stories instead of the final resting place for old ones.

But there is beauty in dust itself. The scientist and artist Hubert Duprat has placed Caddis worm larvae in vitrines lined with gold dust and tiny particles of jewels. The Caddis larvae normally live on river-beds, and make cocoons for themselves from bark, gravel and other river detritus. Placed within Duprat’s vitrines of precious metals, the larvae construct beautiful geometric jewelry with alternating bands of stones and gold. The Caddis larvae re-order dust into something intimate and organized, creating objects with purpose and formal beauty.

We have long had a similar desire to order our overflowing, ephemeral stream of media into something intimate and meaningful. The cheap printing presses of the 19th century created an overwhelming flood of newspapers, catalogues and magazines, and the new railway networks sent them to all corners of the developed world. Readers would capture knowledge from these cheap, ephemeral forms by making scrapbooks, often pasting clippings into other, unwanted, books . Newspaper articles, instead of decaying to pulp or dust, were instead memorialized if they caught the attention of the reader, valued over the more rarified knowledge contained in expensive books. Ellen Gruber Garvey reports the following exchange between a writer and a scrapbook maker in the 19th century:

‘“Why”, said I. “You are using up good printed books!”
“Good for what!” was the reply […]. “There is nothing in them that we want, and so we propose putting in something, rather than having them stand idle. Hubert’s, you see, is an old day-book, and we have one or two others. Some of them are old school-books, not much worn, but out of date. Almost every library has some useless books.”’

Garvey has likened this process to ‘gleaning’, where overabundance of goods provides a surplus that can be gathered and put to productive use: “The gleaner’s bounty depends on the planter’s willingness not to squeeze every possible bit of profit from the land; following the biblical injunction to leave food for the gleaners, the planter does not pursue every scrap of grain or produce but leaves some unclaimed”. Like the planter’s grain or publisher’s newspaper clippings, the overabundance of our media archives can now be clipped and gathered by a new generation of gleaners.

These vernacular forms of creative expression have long been overlooked in our accounts of media history. The histories of photography, film and now digital media have first sought to establish a canon, the list of stars whose contributions define a dominant aesthetic. But underneath these stars there are worlds of amateur productivity, creating informal alternative aesthetics from the detritus of mainstream culture. Sometimes, these vernacular forms are recognized for their influence on the mainstream aesthetic, and for the sheer wealth of their creativity. They are less visible because they are intimate, expressing the creator’s feelings about their immediate lives and emotions, not grand historical narratives. Like the Caddis larvae’s cocoon, they are tactile and close to the body, to be consumed by the hand as much as the eye:

“When we touch an album [of photographs] and turn its pages, we put the photograph in motion, literally in an arc through space and metaphorically in a sequential narrative. Albums are also prompts for speech, an excuse for friends and families to gather, for stories to be exchanged, incidents to be recalled, biographies to be invented. When we view albums in museums, we can only imagine the murmur of laughing voices that would have animated and shaped the experience of leafing through them”

Will we see similar forms of vernacular creativity with digital media? How can we encourage the creative decay that turned newspapers and libraries into cheap ephemera, available once again for reuse and remixing? How can intimacy be expressed in a medium that is so radically global and connected?

It is only within the last few years that internet use in developed countries has tipped over 50% of the population. This, combined with increased bandwith and processing power, has led to the ‘mass-amateurisation’ of digital image production, an activity that was previously limited by the cost of capture and editing equipment. Mobile phones, already very intimate devices, have changed the aesthetic of photography as much as the Box Brownie did for chemical photography. Web services like Flickr encourage people to collect and contextualize their images with friends and other communities. This combination has led to a huge abundance of images, available online to be recontextualised and remixed into new creative forms. Like the scrapbook or photo album, Flickr encourages users to add supplementary information, in the form of tags describing content, notes drawn directly on the image, or comments from other users. This accrual of written information creates a kind of intimacy around the photograph, capturing some of the ‘murmur of laughing voices’ that surrounded their creation.

Flickr users are constantly finding innovative new ways to exploit these features. Matt Haughey combined images taken from Google’s satellite imaging service with the notes function in Flickr to create ‘memory maps’ – annotated images of the university he studied at, or the town he grew up in. These notes are revealed as the cursor brushes over the photograph on the screen, creating a tactile interface that resembles the intimacy of a photo album. Geoffrey Batchen has described how photo albums used similar collage effects, combining photographs with ticket stubs, cigarette cards, writing and drawing to evoke more than just visual memories:

“[in photo albums] we are witness to the creative efforts of ordinary people who, by coordinating sound and smell as well as sight and by exploiting the possibilities of a touched and touchable photography, were able to express the intricacies of their social rituals, personal dreams, and project memories in tangible visual form.”

Could the moving image find a similarly intimate and tactile context? Film never quite reached the level of mass participation as photography in the last century. Although Super 8 cameras, and later cheap video cameras, have encouraged some amateur production, there is nothing like the wealth and variety of material as there is with photography. Where are the moving image equivalents of the Victorian photo lockets, with each lover framed in one half of chamber that seals them together when closed? How can film develop an equivalent vernacular aesthetic to the photo album or carte de visite?

Perhaps these completely new forms of vernacular media might be found through projects like the Creative Archive. By opening up the archives of the BBC’s film and television output, these projects could create new contexts and aesthetics for film outside of the formal narrative structure of Hollywood. But for this to happen two conditions must apply – we must build tools for intimate expression, not grand narrative; and we must aspire to turn media into dust – to make it as abundant and ephemeral as newspaper clippings and cigarette cards.

Intimacy
In commissioning new films intended for distribution on mobile phones, the curator Andrew Wilson created a novel brief for budding film-makers – “Think of making haircuts, not movies”. This might seem a bizarre request, but it recognizes that mobile phones are not just smaller versions of the movie screen, but are instead intimate expressions of their owner’s identity. This is why ringtones can be sold for exorbitant prices, whilst better quality MP3s have to be sold as less than half the price, if not given away free. A ringtone is like a badge or fashion item – it is chosen to say something about the personality of its owner.

Like badges, haircuts, stickers and jewelry, mobile phones are customized to help us explore and express our identity. Can moving images also be part of this secondary skin? Will they be collected and displayed, passed from hand to hand, and in turn adapted and remixed? Is this the kind of new creativity that the Creative Archive will make possible? At the moment, most digital media production tools use the metaphors of their ancestors. Video editing packages still have echoes of old Steenbecks and tape splicers. The tools are geared up for the epic, not the intimate. How could we create different kinds of tools to encourage different kinds of expression?

Dust
If we are to encourage new kinds of creative expression, we have to accept that this will only happen if we allow our content to degrade into dust. Remix culture requires flexibility – the ability to reduce content to the single atom that can then be reconstructed into a hook, a loop or a collage. Digital versions of the archive have this potential flexibility, but will it be in the owner’s best interest to realize it? Or will it be easier to preserve old content in its original form, in the hope that there might one day be some more small drops of commercial value to be squeezed out of it?

As the new economics of digital networks are discovered, the risk is that keeping content in a state of suspended animation will seem the safest bet. Unlike the planters willingly leaving the excesses of their overproduction for the gleaners to use, media owners are proposing digital rights management tools that put more control than ever before on the reuse and redistribution of material. If this scenario succeeds, there will be no dust in future digital archives – every piece of content will be locked up in its own clean, perfect cell.

Projects like the Creative Archive propose an alternative scenario, in which content is opened up to creative entropy. By providing clips rather than full programmes, the project encourages users to see the archive not as programmes, but as dust to be remixed and reassembled. We have to encourage more media owners to see the creative potential of this, and to support the development of new kinds of tools for a new generation of artists.

The fate of every new reproductive technology in the last two hundred years has been overproduction. Technological progress has provided the tools for easy manipulation of this excess of content – photography through the box brownie, text through photocopiers and desk top publishing, and music through cheap synthesizers, turntables and mixers. Each of these discovered a new aesthetic through the gradual decay of its high cultural forms. Photography became the snapshot and photo album; newspapers became fuel for fanzines, and the vinyl record became a tool for scratching and sampling.

Film and television now has the chance to embrace its own moment of creative entropy. Whilst the Hollywood studios try to sustain an artificial life for the reels and tapes in its archives, outside there are many projects that are trying to do the opposite. There is a race on to find a new aesthetics for the moving image, but the guardians of the last century’s cultural output are refusing to take part, trying to set limits on future creative expression.

It’s a doomed enterprise. After all, almost every library has its useless books. Far better to liberate them for new forms of creativity than to preserve their uselessness. For every voice saying that the archives must be kept pristine under lock and key, there will be thousands saying “No! – let us grind them into dust!”

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Sam Raimi, the director of the Spiderman movies (and the far more interesting Evil Dead) has said that he wants to set up cameras in US cities that will shoot a single frame at noon every day for the next 1000 years:

“It’s the same idea of all time-lapse photography, but over an outrageous amount of time,” Raimi told The Associated Press in an interview to promote “Spider-Man 2.” “So you could watch the city of Los Angeles rise, and maybe an earthquake might come in 300 years or a tidal wave.”

This reminds me of a Douglas Gordon proposal to show John Ford’s movie ‘The Searchers’ so that the projection time was as long as the narrative time in the movie – in this case 5 years.

Slow art like this is a very underappreciated concept in a society that fetishises speed. During the 60’s and 70’s, artists interested in, to use Lucy Lippard’s phrase, the dematerialization of the art object, used long durational periods to escape the inevitable commodification of art. On Kawara’s Today Series – a series of identical paintings made every day, showing only that day’s date – has been ongoing now since 1966. In a recent seven-day performance in London – Reading One Million Years – Kawara positioned two actors in a glass box in trafalgar square, reading alternately from a list of past years (998,031 BC to 1969 AD) and then the future (1980 AD to 1,001,980 AD).

Its no accident that these projects echo the rythymical industrial time signature of our post-industrial world. The click of the camera shutter or the repetition of diary dates demonstrate how our contemporary understanding of time is marked not by the pliable warp and weft of nature, but by the monotonous sussuration of machines.

On Kawara leaves only this repetition, making a statement about either the futility, or continuous renewal, at the core of our existence. Douglas Gordon is more poetic, showing us how film has compressed narrative time, and how by returning them to their correct duration we open up a completely new experience. When I saw his earlier piece, 24-Hour Psycho, at the Tramway in Glasgow, each frame of the film was viewable for a few seconds at a time. I watched an early section in which Janet Leigh drives away from her lover towards the Bates Motel. What fascinated me was the detail in the (rear-projected) street glimpsed behind her car – a film within a film that seemed alive with change and event, in contrast to the relative stillness of Leigh driving in the foreground.

Raimi’s proposal is primarily conceptual; it will produce just over a second of film a month, meaning that it will take over 4 years to produce a film as long as the Lumiere Brothers’ first shorts. The audience that would actually be able to watch Los Angeles rising and falling in these films will not be born until the next millenium.

There’s something poetically optimistic about projects with such a long time frame. They’re like a message in a bottle, cast with hope into the unknown oceans of time that stretch before us. There is something vertiginously sublime about contemplating timescales that are exponentially longer than our own lives. Having just had our first daughter, I’m even more curious about things that I know I will never be able to experience.

Is there a digital equivalent to this mechanical time? Phil Gyford’s Pepys Diary maps the narrative back on to real time, and has, like 24 Hour Psycho, opened up the text to new kinds of readings and discussion. The hit-and-run attention span of the blog has been turned to produce a definitive ongoing piece of research.

But the Pepys Diary project should still be completed within Gyford’s lifetime. My favourite piece of online art is John F. Simon’s Every Icon. It’s breathtakingly simple – a computer programme that started in 1997, from the top right hand corner of a grid of 32 X 32 squares, and is systematically describing every possible combination of black and white squares. In time, every possible picture within that grid will be described – arrows, boxes, faces, hearts, logos. It took 1.36 years to cycle through the possibilities of the first line of squares. The next line, at an average CPU rate of 100 icons per second, will be finished in 5.85 billion years. The whole project will likely take trillions of years to complete.

Thats longer than the known existence of the universe. Represented as a grid of 32 X 32 squares.

Raimi’s project, like Gordon’s, use the mechanical ‘click click click’ of the camera shutter to show how we take for granted the ability to re-present time in stretched and condensed versions. But both these projects are within the expanded memories of our technological societies. Every Icon shows us a completely alien notion of time – remorseless, logical and impervious to even the inevitable natural limits of the known universe. It is so far out of our understanding of time that we can’t possibly understand it, the mute white expanses of the grid standing as a metaphor for our impermanence – a blank memorial stone for the whole of civilisation.

I’ve decided that I want a gravestone that will have engraved on it the precise condition of Every Icon on the moment that I die. It will have nothing else, just the grid. Rather than defining my life within the boundaries of what I knew – from my birth date to death – my ‘Every Icon’ grid will show the unimaginable expanse of everything else.

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The Economist have published an interesting little opinion piece on “Why phones are replacing cars (and why this is a good thing)”. Mobile phones are now the primary way in which young people express their individualism, with clip-on covers, ringtones and the increasingly outrageous styling of phone/cam/game/PDA hybrids. The article makes a good point about how phone styling has made a transition from its utilitarian roots:

“The design of both cars and phones started off being defined by something that was no longer there. Cars were originally horseless carriages, and early models looked suitably carriage-like; only later did car designers realise that cars could be almost any shape they wanted to make them. Similarly, mobile phones used to look much like the push-button type of fixed-line phones, only without the wire. But now they come in a bewildering range of strange shapes and sizes.”

Just as cars were the first symbol of independence for previous generations of teenagers, mobile phones are now symbols of freedom, giving kids a private space to anchor their social lives and a mobility to discover and test boundaries. Customisation of these symbols of freedom – whether they are cars or phones – are all part of teenagers exploring and rehearsing different identities and social roles.

But there are major differences in the types of customisation going on. One of the most famous essays about youth culture’s fascination with customisation is Tom Wolfe’s ‘Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby’. Famously written as a stream of consciousness letter to his editor at Esquire in lieu of a ‘polished’ article, ‘Kandy…’ covered the underground car customisation culture of southern california, matching the breathless prose of his ‘new journalism’ to the beer-and-gasoline-fuelled aerodynamic aesthetics of souped up Fords and Chevys. But Wolfe also notices how rigidly enforced these styles were, how the aestetics of ‘cool’ were as defined and defended as the morals they were rebelling against:

“These kids are absolutely maniacal about form. They are practically religious about it. For example, the dancers: none of them ever smiled. They stared at each other’s legs and feet, concentrating […] And the bouffant kids all had form, wild form, but form with rigid standards, one gathers […] They were all wonderful slaves to form. They have created their own style of life, and they are much more authoritarian about enforcing it than are adults.”

The gods of this religion of ‘form’ are car customisers like George Barris, whose body shop – called ‘Kustom City’ – Wolfe compares to an artists’ studio, making comparisons between Barris’ swooping, curvilinear adaptations of the ‘bread box’ car design of the time and Brancusi’s high modernist sculpture.

So where is the contemporary George Barris? Where are the gods of the new religion of mobile phone form? A google search for ‘customising mobile phones’ throws up a series of commercial businesses marketing the manufacturer-endorsed customisation of covers, ringtones and wallpapers. Instead of demi-monde of hands-on manipulation of form, mobile phone ‘customisation’ is merely the act of choosing between a series of already existing options – a multiple choice quiz instead of a toolbox and workshop.

Perhaps customisation now only exists at the level of content, not form. The vernacular languages that have emerged around mobile culture are the shorthands of SMS abbreviations, or the slices of mobile life in photo-blogs like Hiptop Nation. But these vernacular stories are to mobile phones as road movies are to custom cars – they are the story of what the object *does* not what the object *is*.

This might partly be down to open architectures. The internal combustion engine reveals it secrets easily, and lends itself to modification, whereas the mobile phone is a sealed box of tricks in a barely ‘customisable’ shell. The true descendents of the custom car freaks are the PC Mod community, where each aspect of the PC is tuned, over-clocked, and built into aggressively styled new cases. The open architecture of PCs means that people can build functional devices that are still highly individualised expressions of their personality and tastes. Mobile phones, by comparison, are highly personal objects that only have a limited range of stylistic options.

There is obviously a gap in the market here. Mobile phone companies should be opening up the architecture of their devices, both at a software and a hardware level. Third-party innovation is not a threat, but an opportunity for your customers to tell you what they want. Having a mobile phone is a new right of passage – the moment when you start to stake out your individualism and experiment with new identities and forms. Previous generations have used cars to create wild adolescent aesthetics to symbolise this new found freedom. Mobile phones, on the other hand, are currently offering us a few paltry accessories – the equivalent of fluffy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror. If mobiles really are the new cars, manufacturers need to open up, and realise the difference between ‘customer’ and ‘customisation’.

The Economist have published an interesting little opinion piece on “Why phones are replacing cars (and why this is a good thing)”. Mobile phones are now the primary way in which young people express their individualism, with clip-on covers, ringtones and the increasingly outrageous styling of phone/cam/game/PDA hybrids. The article makes a good point about how phone styling has made a transition from its utilitarian roots:

“The design of both cars and phones started off being defined by something that was no longer there. Cars were originally horseless carriages, and early models looked suitably carriage-like; only later did car designers realise that cars could be almost any shape they wanted to make them. Similarly, mobile phones used to look much like the push-button type of fixed-line phones, only without the wire. But now they come in a bewildering range of strange shapes and sizes.”

Just as cars were the first symbol of independence for previous generations of teenagers, mobile phones are now symbols of freedom, giving kids a private space to anchor their social lives and a mobility to discover and test boundaries. Customisation of these symbols of freedom – whether they are cars or phones – are all part of teenagers exploring and rehearsing different identities and social roles.

But there are major differences in the types of customisation going on. One of the most famous essays about youth culture’s fascination with customisation is Tom Wolfe’s ‘Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby’. Famously written as a stream of consciousness letter to his editor at Esquire in lieu of a ‘polished’ article, ‘Kandy…’ covered the underground car customisation culture of southern california, matching the breathless prose of his ‘new journalism’ to the beer-and-gasoline-fuelled aerodynamic aesthetics of souped up Fords and Chevys. But Wolfe also notices how rigidly enforced these styles were, how the aestetics of ‘cool’ were as defined and defended as the morals they were rebelling against:

“These kids are absolutely maniacal about form. They are practically religious about it. For example, the dancers: none of them ever smiled. They stared at each other’s legs and feet, concentrating […] And the bouffant kids all had form, wild form, but form with rigid standards, one gathers […] They were all wonderful slaves to form. They have created their own style of life, and they are much more authoritarian about enforcing it than are adults.”

The gods of this religion of ‘form’ are car customisers like George Barris, whose body shop – called ‘Kustom City’ – Wolfe compares to an artists’ studio, making comparisons between Barris’ swooping, curvilinear adaptations of the ‘bread box’ car design of the time and Brancusi’s high modernist sculpture.

So where is the contemporary George Barris? Where are the gods of the new religion of mobile phone form? A google search for ‘customising mobile phones’ throws up a series of commercial businesses marketing the manufacturer-endorsed customisation of covers, ringtones and wallpapers. Instead of demi-monde of hands-on manipulation of form, mobile phone ‘customisation’ is merely the act of choosing between a series of already existing options – a multiple choice quiz instead of a toolbox and workshop.

Perhaps customisation now only exists at the level of content, not form. The vernacular languages that have emerged around mobile culture are the shorthands of SMS abbreviations, or the slices of mobile life in photo-blogs like Hiptop Nation. But these vernacular stories are to mobile phones as road movies are to custom cars – they are the story of what the object *does* not what the object *is*.

This might partly be down to open architectures. The internal combustion engine reveals it secrets easily, and lends itself to modification, whereas the mobile phone is a sealed box of tricks in a barely ‘customisable’ shell. The true descendents of the custom car freaks are the PC Mod community, where each aspect of the PC is tuned, over-clocked, and built into aggressively styled new cases. The open architecture of PCs means that people can build functional devices that are still highly individualised expressions of their personality and tastes. Mobile phones, by comparison, are highly personal objects that only have a limited range of stylistic options.

There is obviously a gap in the market here. Mobile phone companies should be opening up the architecture of their devices, both at a software and a hardware level. Third-party innovation is not a threat, but an opportunity for your customers to tell you what they want. Having a mobile phone is a new right of passage – the moment when you start to stake out your individualism and experiment with new identities and forms. Previous generations have used cars to create wild adolescent aesthetics to symbolise this new found freedom. Mobile phones, on the other hand, are currently offering us a few paltry accessories – the equivalent of fluffy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror. If mobiles really are the new cars, manufacturers need to open up, and realise the difference between ‘customer’ and ‘customisation’.

Continue reading →

First, a confession. I am a collector. Whilst most of my life has been gladly given up to digitisation, there are parts of it that have held out; little islands of analogue amidst the bitstreams. Like photography, for example – all of the images on this site were taken with a Mamiya C330, a camera with no electronic, or even electric, parts whatsoever. And music – I do not own an MP3 player, or even a CD player, outside of the one in this computer. The shelves in our lounge are 4-inch think planks, built to withstand piles of books, LPs and untidy folders of medium-format negatives and contact sheets. This is the sheer weight of analogue, the polar opposite of the unbearable lightness of iPods.

I’ve always thought this was a deliberate affectation, the result – in the case of photography – of six years of art school spent learning about reciprocity failure, platinum printing and other arcane chemistries. Then there’s always the geekier arguments about the quality difference in analogue and digital, but I was never that good a photographer to use that as a convincing excuse.

I realise now it’s about something else. Three things have happened in the last week that have clarified why digital isn’t enough somehow, and why the weight of analogue media is more than just dead matter.

One was a photograph. Its a polaroid of me, aged ten, carrying the FA Cup at the Spurs training ground during an open day in 1982. My brother found his version, carrying the charity shield, a while ago, and I’ve been searching for mine ever since. It turned up when my parents moved home for the first time in 30 years, so this image has been lying in a plastic bag in a kitchen drawer for at least 20 years.

This material serendipity is more than just nostalgia – it’s an essential part of what photography has come to mean as a medium over the last 150 years. Vernacular photographs are our histories, and without the material half-life of chemistry and paper the 20th century would be a much darker place for future historians. Will our current decade – with the ubiquity of digital photography – be a confusing shadow, a blank space where the images were turned off, one by one, as servers and backups gradually failed?

The second thing was an essay in Saturday’s Guardian Review by Umberto Eco. He describes having to prepare a lecture for a conference about Edgar de Bruyne, a Belgian scholar of medieval aesthetics. Having studied de Bruyne in his 20’s, Eco could go back to his original file cards and notebooks, and reconstruct the arguments that have affected his work ever since. For Eco, this provides a moral about the value of study and knowledge; he says, “a good thesis is like a pig. You don’t throw anything away, and even after decades you can still re-use it”. As well as being a typically Italian gastronomic metaphor, it summed up how I felt about photography. Apparently, 1 in 5 digital photographs are never printed: they are erased or kept in a virtual, digital state on memory cards and servers. This feels wasteful, like taking the best cuts from the pig and then discarding the rest, instead of laying it down as preserves or stock. How do you know you’re never going to want that image? That there will not be some moment of hunger in 20 years time? Digital photography feels like bacon in the fridge; good for a couple of weeks, but then only fit for the bin. An analogue photograph is a well-cured ham – you can forget about it for years, but it will stay there, gathering dust in a cupboard, until you bring it out, brush it off, and enjoy it all over again.

The third thing was to do with Google, and its announcement that it was launching an email service. Google have raised the bar amongst their webmail competitors by offering 1000Mb of storage. This could just braggado – anything Microsoft can do, Google can do bigger. But Google have made their reputation on the web by making things better, not bigger. Their homepage has mostly resisted the gradual accumulation of popups and banner ads, and their image is one of a lean, efficient company providing lean, efficient services.

So why have they suddenly gone for quantity rather than quality? The clue is in the second bullet point describing the benefits of their webmail service: “Don’t throw anything away”. Google realise that, as the web is increasingly the carrier of our social, vernacular histories, storage will become the most important factor. And not just storage, but lots of storage, the digital equivalents of lofts and cupboards, cardboard boxes and kitchen drawers. We need to be able to forget where we put things, and then have search engines find things when we half-remember them 20 years later. Digital media is limited as a source of future histories because it relies on constant remembering; we have to repeatedly backup, migrate and upload our data, lest the fragile bits perish. I now realise that Google’s mission is to do something about this, to restore the serendipity that comes from being able to forget. Like their indexing of the usenet archives, Google are trying to graft material histories onto our virtual present.

Eco finishes his essay by reflecting on the how knowledge relies on these serendipitous relationships:

“…the exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity and emotional attachments. […] It allows us to live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very beautiful.”
[my italics]

Digital media has, so far, had a spectacular impact on how we create relationships. But it is only just begining to appreciate the value of continuity. Google’s email service is perhaps an evolutionary step from the instant relationship of the web to the continuity of the forgotten photograph. Maybe, over time, this will in turn lead to emotional attachment, and the digital bitstreams will finally wash over the last few remaining analogue islands.

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[This essay was commissioned by Vodafone’s receiver online journal. It will appear on the site in January 2004. Thanks to Gabriele Dangel and Katja Hoffman for letting me reproduce it here]

LIGHT TOUCHES
Text messaging, intimacy and photography

BACK 2 BACK

Walking up our street
on a summer evening,
all the doors are open
straight onto living rooms;
people sitting out,
the smell of cooking,
sound of tv

Andrew Wilson – Text Messages

In his collection of SMS poetry, Andrew Wilson describes the text message poem as a ‘truthful moment’, or, borrowing from Ezra Pound, ‘the luminous detail’. His poems, all less than the 160 character limit of a text message, have the quality of haikus – small details noticed and framed by the limitation of their form.

Collected, the poems resemble a photo album, with short sequences that draw on the same experiences – a trip to Russia, working in a call centre – punctuated by random singular images. They are a collection of vernacular moments from an ordinary life, but, like photo albums, have a charge under their surface, a melancholy resonance generated by the accumulation of incidental details and observations. But this similarity is not just a product of Wilson’s writing style, as the vernacular practices of photography and text messaging share many aesthetic and social characteristics.

Henri Cartier Bresson once described photography as an attempt to capture ‘the decisive moment’, an echo of Pound’s description of poetry as the ‘luminous detail’. Roland Barthes identified the power of the photograph in the ‘punctum’ , the detail that transcends the photograph’s mechanical depiction of reality and ‘pricks’ us, arousing sympathy, curiosity or melancholy. For Barthes, the power of photography lay in the conflict between its indexing of reality and uncanny invocation of real, lived histories. The photograph is a finger pointing, saying ‘this happened, this was here’, but exists always in the past tense, knowing that as soon as the camera shutter clicks, the split-second is gone forever and only its chemical index remains.

This duality – the simultaneous absence and presence of the photograph – creates a desire to graft physicality back onto the image, perhaps expressing a wish that the light captured in the lens had carried with it more substance, more of a trace of the real life captured in the image. In the vernacular photography of family albums and portraits, images are sometimes accompanied by locks of hair, or annotated with ticket stubs, captions and other mementoes of the real. Geoffrey Batchen has remarked on these attempts to introduce tactility to the photograph, from the brushstrokes of hand-painted tintypes to dual portraits kept in lockets, the photographs touching like lovers when the locket is closed. For Batchen, this tactility is a deliberate function of the intimate scale of vernacular photography. These photographs are not records of the grand sweep of history, but of ephemeral lives and relationships. They ask to be touched, handled and worn, remembered by the hand as well as the eye.

Text messages also carry a tactile quality. Like the photograph, the text message is a kind of pointing, saying ‘I am here’ or ‘look at this’. Texting is also an accumulation of light touches – presses on a keypad rather than the click of a camera shutter. Even more, text messages often arrive with a tactile sensation, a vibration that acts like a tap on the shoulder. Wilson invokes these qualities in the poems themselves – they often refer to tactile as well as visual experiences – but also by asking the reader to send these poems as text messages. In other projects, Wilson has asked people in Leeds to write poems about the city, and then encouraged people to download them when they are in the same physical location . By continually referring to the physical nature of these poems – their status as a series of keypresses rather than words – Wilson echoes the material transformation of vernacular photography. Instead of being captured in lockets, the poems are rooted to a real location in the city, the imagery called to your phone’s screen in through a keypress instead of the click of a camera shutter.

HEIRLOOM

An electric razor.
I clean the dust & gunk
of skin & bristles
with a soft brush, spirits.
Fit it to my neck
pull it up jaw, chin, lip.
& still use it

Andrew Wilson – Text Messages

Text messages carry their tactile experience with them. They are the product of touching, announce themselves with touches, are revealed by touches and erased with a further touch. We no longer carry photographs in lockets, trapped in jewelry worn next the skin, but remember those close to us through their words, transmitted in 160 characters or less from their hand to ours.

Technology often promises transcendence from real life (think of the long-delayed promises of VR) but it is eventually domesticated through its interaction with real bodies in real spaces. We find new relationships with technologies by rubbing our corporeal bodies up against them, not by crossing a threshold into their immaterial worlds. Carolyn Marvin has traced our physical relationship with technology to the early electrical infrastructures of the 19th Century, illustrated by this quote from a contemporary news article:

“The young ladies of Frankford … have recently discovered that by holding a piece of tin against the iron foot-rests driven into the wooden poles of the Southern Electric Light Company they receive a weak electric shock, and almost every evening a group gathers around the poles that are not situated on the main thoroughfares and enjoys the fun for hours… One pretty miss was heard to remark, after her first experience, “Oh, I thought I was squeezing a handful of pins” “yes,” said another, “it’s something like being kissed by a young man with a bristly moustache.”

Photography in turn has been domesticated by the body. Early chemicals were too slow to capture moving figures, so the body had to be made rigid in order to be captured. But the invention of faster and faster chemistries was driven partly by the desire to make photography work for the body, not the other way round. The formal Victorian portrait gave way to the informal snapshot, and now to the intimacy of the phonecam and picture message. Liberated from the physical limitations of chemistry, the digital photograph now zips around, becoming a node on wired and wireless social networks, a point in a map made of bodies. Photographs now come to us, into our pockets, directly from the cameras of friends. Like Victorian lockets, they are made to be carried close to the body, rather than framed and fixed to the wall. The journey from the wall to the pocket takes photography from one extreme – the formal, momentous space of history – to another – the intimate, ephemeral space of memory.

Wilson’s text message poems seem initially to be a step backwards from photo-messaging. If we can send an image, why bother to send text? How can a poem evoke a scene in a way that a photograph couldn’t? Why painstakingly tap out characters on a keypad when you can have one click of a camera shutter?

Wilson’s poems introduce the kind of intimacy that could not be captured in images. Like photography, texting acts as a mechanical record, a message saying ‘I am here’ or ‘look at this’. But texting also gives space to intimate, private languages that are impossible to capture on the public surface of the photograph. The vernacular grammar of text messaging developed partly as a response to its limitations, but also to its intimacy, mimicking the childish languages of lovers. The text message is a note slipped from hand to hand in a classroom, a secret rather than an announcement.

Matt Webb, referring to Transactional Analysis theory, defines the minimum unit of social recognition as the ‘stroke’. For him, this is an example of ‘empty’ communication, like Japanese children who send each other blank text messages to each other as a way of saying a quick “hello” . Would we ever take an empty photo? Reduced to its carrier, a photograph is an inert piece of paper. The text message, meanwhile, carries traces of its history – a name, a time and date, and the vibration that announces it – even without any other content.

So text messages are even more located in tactile, intimate experiences than photographs. Similarly, Wilson’s text poems carry references to tactile experiences on a number of levels. The imagery of the poems themselves often refer to touch; there is the explicit request for readers to retype and send the poems; and there is the tactile qualities of text messages as an intimate communication, a stroke or a glance between confidants.

This intimacy and materiality finds echoes in the vernacular photography described by Geoffrey Batchen, but text messages have even less chance of historical longevity. We will not gather albums of texts as we did photographs (Wilson’s anthologized and paper-bound collection being the exception). Photography’s light touch condemns it to a problematic relationship with the material world, something that it continually has to reclaim through fragments of the real – collages, lockets or albums. The text message is instead condemned to the specificity of its immediate physical moment – it is created, received and destroyed by a series of light touches – finger presses on a key pad, the vibration announcing its arrival, and the final press of the delete key.

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