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Chapter Six. Video Water, Video Life, Videosociality

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Chapter Six. Video Water, Video Life, Videosociality Chapter Six Video Water, Video Life, Videosociality Ina Blom For me it seems a time to understand limpets, barnacles and alaria rather than lawyers, circuits and marketing. – Paul Ryan1 In 1976, Avery Johnson, a neurophysiology researcher at MIT who was in close dialogue with the Radical Software circle of video pioneers, took a moment to write a personal letter of complaint to social philosopher William Irwin Thompson. The object of his annoyance was a critique of TV culture that Thompson had published in the 10 June 1976 issue of The New York Times.2 In this article, Thompson deplored a televisual paradigm that ‘can expand around the world spatially but that conflates everything with the present and the codes of ‘presentation’. The gist of the critique was that the televisual present destroys not just history but also a productive imagination of the future, which is guided by mythology. Johnson turned the very terms of this critique against Thompson himself, angrily attacking him for having written text that ‘intellectually reflects what you deplore in TV: making past and future meld into an instant world’. In his view, the article itself evoked a ‘specious present’ which obliterates memory. Yet the memory loss identified by Johnson was of a different order than Thompson’s concern for historical memory and the cultural archives of the past. Johnson was concerned with memory in the biological sense of the word: the physical preservation of the past in the present that is the very condition of the survival of genetic traits. Since the introduction of molecular biology, the capacity for memory has notably been established as that which defines life and that separates it from the non-living.3 It was this concept of memory that made Johnson state that the critical obsession with the televisual present does not recognize us – inhabitants of TV culture – as ‘biological organisms that can move and struggle’. His advice to Thompson was to stop ‘attacking institutions with elegant rapier jabs’ and instead engage in the work of the biologically oriented ‘1/2 inch porta-pack video freaks’ (sic).4 154 INA BLom Johnson’s anger turned on a crucial point in the reception of TV’s reality. The ability of live television to capture attention and format the world according to its logic of presentness was apparently not just something that afflicted the general public. It seemed to format most of the critical approaches to the social and political reality of television as well. Richard Dienst accurately sums up this tendency in his 1994 Still Life in Real Time. Right from television’s beginnings, ‘flow’ was put to work as a critical concept. Thinkers as different as Rudolf Arnheim and Dziga Vertov saw televisual liveness and simultaneity as a totalization of the social field that might provide the basis for new economic utopias ‒ capitalist for the one, socialist for the other. Jean-Paul Sartre, for his part, understood the same phenomenon in terms of suppression: the totalizing simultaneity of television attested to a power collusion between state, elite, and capital that served to disarticulate social groups and their differences thanks to TV’s emphasis on a form of pure presence where nothing is said and everyone is happy.5 Televisual presence and liveness was tantamount to ideology, a technopolitical configuration of reality whose social powers should be the object of scrutiny and intervention. If television’s flow relies at once on a specific technology and a cultural construct comprising a wholly new structure of visibility, one must, as Raymond Williams noted, not just read existing television through the mutual determinations of technology and cultural forms but also rescue both technology and culture from the embrace of present-day television.6 Television seems to survive precisely through flow, whose transmission washes away the particularity of messages along with the reception of them, draining perception of the resistant holding powers of memory.7 Countering the ideal of direct speech that underpins William’s argument, Dienst reframes the very centrality of the concept of ‘flow’ in television criticism. The term seems to have a strange kind of grip, as if it were an aesthetic fetish figure, a sublime object.8 Liveness and presence apparently have the capacity to stun and fascinate at all levels – which is why the critical emphasis on television’s live flow is perhaps not just an exercise in materialist analysis but also a symptom of unresolved metaphysical impulses in the theorization of television. If TV produces new abstractions covering up the contradictions of everyday life, it does so no less in the thinking of its major critics. Against this fixation on the televisual present, the association between video and a concept of televisual ‘life’ is of some consequence. In early video art, the question of life hinged less on a general obsession with the signal as an index of living presence than on more tersely formulated questions of memory and CHAPTER SIX 155 its physiological basis – memory as a feature of biological life. This perspec- tive contrasts with Williams’ rather traditional qualification of memory as that which in principle resists flow, the cultural particularities whose relative stability provide platforms from which critical distance may be exerted. In fact, video’s distancing of both television and the kind of critique it produced was an all-important factor in the emergence of an entirely new set of ac- tions and preoccupations. Avery Johnson’s diatribe against William Irwin Thompson is symptomatic of this reorientation. Focus on the totalizing TV presence too easily views the human body in equally totalizing terms, i.e. as passive relays in a global electronic network. But to Johnson, biological bodies are never passive relays but independent capacities for action. Hence television must be understood in terms of its specific ways of interacting with such centres of action. Here, ‘televisual liveness’ was not a key term in a relatively abstract theory of the new infrastructural organization of reality and politics but a concept that opened onto the analogies and complicities between the technical particularities of video systems and the dynamics of living systems. Once the agencies of video became part of new, unruly composites, freed from the strictures of broadcasting institutions that had initially adopted televisual technologies as a way of adding images to radio, video seemed to make people rethink the tenets of televisual life. For one, it enjoined them to test new camera-monitor relations. If distributing pre- formatted cultural content was no longer the key issue, why not just turn the camera to the monitor that displayed the real-time flow of images? If a journalistic or cinematographic representation of the world was not on the agenda, why not explore how video memory would function – what video memory would actually be ‒ if it were forced to relate to its own circuits only? In a 1984 article in Physica journal, James P. Crutchfield, a research physicist at the University of California with close connections to video art pioneers such as Steina and Woody Vasulka, affirmed the early intuitions about a connection between video and biological memory.9 In his article, video feedback was presented as a space-time simulator or, more precisely, a space-time analogue computer that made it possible to approach a number of problems in dynamical systems theory, such as iterative image processing, cellular automata, and biological morphogenesis.10 Video feedback could, in other words, function as a cheap and fast simulator of the type of complex behaviour that was at the time being introduced as a possible model for the very dynamics of life.11 It seemed, in other words, to model processes of emer- gence that second-order systems theory describe in terms of ‘operational closure’. The individuation of a technical system in its complex processing of matter operated on the same principles as natural systems. 156 INA BLom An autobiographical life form In the early 1970s, then, analogue video emerged as a quasi-biological entity, an instance of the memory at work in basic life processes. This was quite a step for a technology that had been designed in order to provide television with something that it seemed to lack: a proper memory, a cultural archive of its programming. The problem for early television was that ‘analog systems are so dumb they can’t store any information, so the stuff’s got to come out as fast as it goes in’.12 Nothing remained beyond the moment of transmis- sion. TV simply could not store its emissions within the framework of its own electronic circuits but had to resort to ‘outside’ technologies like the kinescope that would film TV images off the screen. Hence, in 1951, David Sarnoff, chairman of the board of RCA and founder of NBC, challenged his engineers to invent a ‘videograph’, a ‘television picture recorder’ that would make it possible to ‘reproduce TV programs from tape at any one time, in the home or elsewhere’. 13 Yet it was Ampex that came up with a solution that was sufficiently speedy and compact for realistic archival purposes: a nifty four-headed recording mechanism that used a transverse, tape-saving scanning principle for light and linear scanning for sound.14 This was in 1956: from this moment onward, television could store and retrieve ‘live’ moments cut out of the flow of time, according to a principle reminiscent of the film or photographic archive. What was perhaps not planned for was the ways in which analogue video – television’s modest supplement ‒ would problematize the very question of information storage: it would not so much hold on to as critically re-view the tenets of televisual time.
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