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What the digital world leaves behind: reiterated analogue traces in Mexican media art

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Abstract

How might experimental media art help theorise what falls by the wayside in the digital public sphere? Working in the years immediately following the launch of YouTube in 2005, some media artists centred their creative praxis towards the end of that decade upon rescuing, revalorising, and placing back into digital circulation audiovisual media formats and technologies that appeared aged or obsolete. Although there may be a degree of nostalgia behind such practices, these artworks articulate a cogent critique of the drive towards constant innovation that was responsible for the invention and global expansion of cinema, but in recent decades has been responsible for its decay—or, perhaps more accurately, for its perpetual transformation. The article explores this 'media-archaeology' sensibility as a way of thinking about AI more widely: an approach that sees histories of media not as a linear, chronological search for origins, but as a critical recovery of artefacts lodged discontinuously in multiple layers of the past. Although digital technologies form a central part of the creative process of the artists considered in this article, their works also act as a critical conscience about digital change, asking what the so-called digital revolution is leaving out, and leaving behind. In so doing, it illuminates some potential positive and negative impacts of digital technologies' mediation of new forms of public engagement, whether in art, archives, or on social media.

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Notes

  1. The project website can be found at https://artealameda.inba.gob.mx/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=232&Itemid=170 (consulted 26 January 2021).

  2. Duchamp’s idea of the readymade emerged during the 1910s to refer to the provocative conversion of everyday objects into artworks. As the Tate’s glossary of art terms explains, the French artist’s theory of the readymade rested on three key concepts: “first, that the choice of object is itself a creative act. Secondly, that by cancelling the ‘useful’ function of an object it becomes art. Thirdly, that the presentation and addition of a title to the object have given it ‘a new thought’, a new meaning”. “Art Term: Readymade”, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/r/readymade (consulted 26 January 2021).

  3. Critics of technological determinism include James Lastra (2000: 1–15) and Musser himself, who attempts to overcome its pitfalls through his notion of “screen practice”, which “has always had a technological component, a repertoire of representational strategies, and a socio-cultural function, all of which undergo constant, interrelated change” (Musser 1990: 16).

  4. Steyerl is clearly playing on postcolonial thinker Franz Fanon’s famous casting of the world’s colonised, dehumanised peoples as the “Wretched of the Earth” (Fanon 1967).

  5. Noelia, la otredad # 1 can be viewed at http://www.sobrelafotografia.com/2012/03/05/laboratorio-de-cine-experimental-cine-estenopeico/ (consulted 29 January 2021).

  6. Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (University Centre for Cinema Studies): the film school at UNAM, Mexico’s national university.

  7. Boletín Encuentro Nacional de Cámara Estenopeica, 18 June 2008, https://encuentroestenopeica.blogspot.com (consulted 12 October 2020).

  8. See http://www.sobrelafotografia.com/2012/03/05/laboratorio-de-cine-experimental-cine-estenopeico/ (consulted 29 January 2021).

  9. In this sense García Franco’s film resonates strongly with analogous projects elsewhere, such as the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Abandoned Theater” photographic series. The still photos in Sugimoto’s project—part of a wider, long-running “Theaters” series dating back to the 1970s—capture entire movies projected in empty, derelict cinemas, photographed in a single, ultra-long exposure. For a small selection of Sugimoto’s works see Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Abandoned Theater”, https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/abandoned-theater [consulted 2 March 2021]. See also the “Theatres” series by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, who began photographing abandoned cinemas in the US in 2005. According to Miriam de Rosa (2015), Marchand and Meffre’s work varies between “fetishising the objects and places of […] a cinematic past that ends up producing a nostalgic effect” (269) and suggesting a “restorative possibility” (273)” or a “repurposing strategy” that points up “the spectral, non-linear, multilayered nature of the theatres” (271).

  10. For some of these details and a low-resolution copy of Cines abandonados, see the director’s youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFSVg35C_is&t=66s (consulted 19 October 2020).

  11. For instance, the films with the biggest takings at the Mexican box-office in 2010, the year after the production of Cines abandonados, included the immersive cinematic spectacles Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (David Yates, USA, 2010), Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau, USA, 2010), and Avatar (James Cameron, USA, 2009).

  12. Cantonese is the main language of the area of San Francisco in which the Great Star and Sun Sing cinemas featured in Cines abandonados are located; personal correspondence with Andrés García Franco, August 2011.

  13. Barber paradoxically reads the preservation of these sites of flux and instability as a nostalgic act of cryogenics; for him this goes for the preservation of old film as well as old cinema spaces (2010: 45; 49). By contrast, here I read the existence and the contemporary representation of such spaces as disquieting presences that disrupt modernity’s conceit of progress.

  14. “The archons are first of all the documents’ guardians. They do not only endure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect speak the law” (Derrida 1995: 2).

  15. Exotic Nippon can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/24200101 (consulted 2 November 2020).

  16. The English-language version of Sans soleil (Sunless) renders these lines as follows: “Japanese poetry never modifies. There is way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum that includes them all.”.

  17. In the English-language version: “a world of appearances, fragile, fleeting, revocable, of trains that fly from planet to planet and samurais fighting in an immutable past. That’s called the impermanence of things.”.

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  1. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    David M. J. Wood

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Wood, D.M.J. What the digital world leaves behind: reiterated analogue traces in Mexican media art. AI & Soc 38, 2427–2436 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01177-1

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