Analogue video processing (proposal for afternoon project)

Here follows a short proposal for my afternoon project at the 2017 edition of the Media Archaeology Summer School (in the context of my research).

I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. I hold a BA and an MA in Cinema Studies (Stockholm University). My research interests revolve around the relation between aesthetics, media technologies, and the theoretical discourses that emerge at their intersection. I am specifically interested in analogue video as an aesthetic media technology and an archaeological artefact. My PhD project Electronic Labyrinths: Tracking Intersections of Video and Film (2013-2018) draws on media archaeology in general, and the archaeology of imaginary media in particular, in order to study the images and imaginaries that emerge at the intersection of video and film. The purpose is to investigate the reciprocal conditioning of media technologies, aesthetic expressions, and conceptual contexts; in other words, the relation between actual apparatuses, their audiovisual output, and the imaginaries thus (re)produced. The study engages in the excavation of analogue video images from a range of cinematic works – from their time of emergence to their cultural remanence in the “age of retrospectacle” (Rozenkrantz), in which filmmakers themselves engage in the excavation of obsolete video technologies for meta-historiographic works. The case studies also function as starting points for a wider archaeology of the various social practices that video technology has given rise to.

The Media Archaeology Summer School will not only give me the much-desired opportunity to deepen and widen my knowledge of media archaeology, both as a field of study and a methodological approach, and in doing so provide me with the means for sharpening the tools with which I’m dissecting my empirical material. Just as importantly, the Residual Media Depot will offer me a one-time opportunity to remedy the most significant gap in my research, namely hands-on experience of the actual technologies that I have thus far only had the opportunity to study through written and audiovisual sources. My intended afternoon project will thus consist of experimenting with the analogue video equipment available at the Depot, be they synthesisers, colourisers, modulators, mixers, or other devices, in order to gain a more profound understanding of signal processing. More specifically, I will attempt to recreate effects that appear in my case studies, but of which I am missing source information, from the modification of colour to the disfiguration/figuration of the video image through the processing of its analogue signal.

Work cited

Rozenkrantz, Jonathan. “Analogue Video in the Age of Retrospectacle: Aesthetics, Technology, Subculture.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 12, Winter 2016, pp. 39-58.