ON GLITCHES A DECONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS OF ARCHIVES AND EXPERIENCE

by Evan J. Meaney

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Fine Arts degree in Film and Video Production in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa

May 2010

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Leighton Pierce

Copyright by EVAN MEANEY 2010 All Rights Reserved

Graduate College The University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL _______________________ MASTER'S THESIS _______________

This is to certify that the Master's thesis of

Evan J. Meaney

has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Master of Fine Arts degree in Film and Video Production at the May 2010 graduation.

Thesis Committee: Leighton Pierce, Thesis Supervisor Dee Morris Sasha Waters Freyer

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank his thesis committee: Leighton Pierce, Dee Morris, and Sasha Waters Freyer for their continual support. He would also like to thank Lindsay Artis for her suggestions and patience.

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 ABSTRACT

Many theorists have taken great care to delineate between personal memory and externalized memory in the form of archival history. Using a framework set forth by Henri Bergson and applying it to modern technological incarnations of both memory and history, we find that the two function, not divergently, but through a parallel process of collaboration and representation. Pushing this idea further illuminates a mnemonic landscape where individual memory serves as an open-source server, archival history is bound to the creation of even the most private recollections, and where the ruptures of both systems are, in fact, the very means by which we see them joined.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

MEMORY, EXTENDED MEMORY, MODIFIED MEMORY, REWRITTEN BIBLOGRAPHY

1 14 21 28

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 1 MEMORY, EXTENDED Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories, and, inversely, a memory, as we shall show later, only becomes actual by borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips. These two acts, perception and recollection, always interpenetrate one another, are always exchanging something of their substance Henri Bergson 1

Let us begin, not with the latest understanding of cyborgian interfaces or user-generated representations, but with Henri Bergson in the nineteenth century. At the outset of his Matter and Memory, the French neuroscientist and philosopher plots out the practical interface between memory and the moment we call the present in relation to the construction of experience. For him, writing in the 1880s, the importance of, not only what we remember, but how we remember was collapsing into the much larger question of who we are as a society and as individuals. To that end, he put forward the notion of a pure memory, functioning to marry the recall of the past to the synthesized perception of the present. For Bergson, a pure memory is a sort of exterior, usable recollection, applied to our current perceptions in the production of our everyday experiences and subsequently, future memories. 2 In a small way, this paradigm predicts the current cyber-neurological cusp in which modern memory finds itself by allowing us to see personal memory as an exterior function. I will also suggest here that his text, and its metaphysical implications, begin to approach the current conflation of memory and history; where human beings function via a distributed agency, integrating archival media histories in the personal construction of Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory. (New York: Zone Books, 1988). 67. Ibid. 67-68.

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 2 individual experiences. This ultimately combines the external (history) and internal (recollection) in the creation of a synthetic memory. In short, Bergsons notes on synthesized experience give us a classical framework with which to prove ourselves, through shared media archives, as distributed beings. I am, of course, desperate to define these terms further, but such definitions may only come through the evolution of older paradigms. In this spirit, we must return to Bergson in the hopes that he can give us perspective into the act of constructing memory so we may then update his taxonomy for a cybernetic application. To begin to parse out the manner in which memory, history and present experience conflate, we must first examine two theories of memory working in concert with one another; the first of which is Bergsons notions of mnemonically linked perception and the second is the delineation between memory and history as explained through Paul Ricoeurs study of the

Phaedrus. These two ideas find an interesting cohabitation as we begin to

think of memory, not as something we have invented, but as something we have constructed from parts, both public and private. In Creative Evolution, Bergson notes, In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it 3 In terms of functionality, Bergson delivers a position of archivally linked synthesis serving as a feedback loop between our present and our past. A basic sketch of the loop operates as such: our memories function in collaboration with perception to inform our present, creating an individuals experiences, some aspects of which are memorable, thereby creating memory 3 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911). 5.

 3 images which may be applied to future experiences. It is a simple and perpetual model of stimuli and archival response. Through the framework of this logic, the present is only useful in that it edits and encodes a usable past from which the future might derive experience. Still, Bergson speaks of memory as an exterior function, borrowing us, following us, and yet its effects make us imperatively individual. This concept disrupts the traditional model of the brain being the only center of recollection and remembrance, as it distributes the work of memory beyond the barriers of the brain to some new extension, concurrently of our mind and beyond. From this line of thought we might choose to view our memories as something functioning through interface, having no empirical or inert home within the individual. Instead, perception is a workflow akin to a constantly circulating library, subconsciously and perpetually visited; a place where users might go to interact with the past in the acquisition of a more informed present. While Bergson promotes the idea of an externalized memory, I feel that we can further this concept by using his model to explore an individuals memory as part of a public or open source databank from which information is borrowed, used and returned, perhaps even, from more than one user. The dichotomy between an individuals memory (traditionally internal) and a public history (traditionally external) has typically been a staunch binary. However, if we accept Bergsons allusions to memory as a function, distributed beyond the body, then we might also explore how that exteriority intermingles with another, more physical exteriority the archive. To describe the tense permeability between these two means of recollection, we might look to another French scholar, Paul Ricoeur, in his work with traditional archival studies. In Memory, History and Forgetting, Ricoeur

 4 describes the issues at hand in the creation of the first archives through a Platonic dialogue.4 In the Phaedrus, Plato asks if the externalization of knowledge (for him this was the remediation of oralities into written texts) is the remedy to the fallibility of human memory or the poison that undoes humanity itself. Ricoeur responds to Plato, falling into line with Bergson, a document in an archive is open to whomever knows how to read. It is not just silent, it is an orphan.5 Much like Bergsons paradigm, what we adopt through the externalization of our memories is not something inherently our own, but is simply a memory-object to be interpreted, much like a book existing on a shelf or a file in a directory viable only through use. Ricoeur does not answer Platos question of good and evil definitively, describing instead the interface with the archive as a platform for interpretive testimony. While this does not blur the line between the archive and an individuals memory yet, it does prove a very important point that a Bergsonian model of memory mirrors the interpretive model put forth by Ricoeur in his archive. I propose that we may practically see memories and archival documents as servants of the same interface, one of the syntheses of both experience and subsequent recollection. In his description of the French archive, the cultural theorist, Pierre Nora also describes the race to externalize, marking the all too human desire for permanence. The imperative of the age is not only to keep everything, to preserve everything (even when we are not quite sure what it is we are remembering), but also to fill the archives.6 I do not think it a secret that we Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004). 167. Ibid. 169.

 5 are creatures, perpetually linked to our past through both memory and media archives, but it is important to see the trajectory of our use of, and interactions with these catalogues. Through that analysis we might note how the physical, social, and chronological gaps that separate archive from memory continue to close. The French archive and certainly Noras contribution to it, Les Lieux de Memoire, is a proper model of the classical catalogue. A governance of rooms, books (which will henceforth be described as media), a system of location and placement and spaces for people to interact this, for a thousand years, was humanitys best chance to publically remember and personally synthesize perception through the interpretation of physical media objects. Moving beyond books, we might examine other forms of media collection, notably the Eastman film archive, Harvards music recording archive, the Louvre, the Museum of Natural History. Despite the progressive differences between the collected media, their storage, access and interpretative possibilities remain practically unchanged from the first physical archive. These libraries are site specific, time specific, and most of all; they promote the notion of stasis, structure and taxonomy over all of the objects housed within. These sorts of repositories, and the media they contain, are static systems of preservation. Despite this seemingly perfect control over the past, without a user present to interpret, there is nothing. Much like Bergsons external memory, they are nothing if unadopted. As with memory and archives, the agency of construction always exists in the user, even if the information does not. Before we move on to demonstrate that an individuals memory and the archive are not only similar but, in fact, permeable, let us pause for a
6 Pierre

Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions. (New York: Columbia U Press, 1996) 9.

 6 moment to consider Vannevar Bush, the engineer who first proposed a device to which we now aspire, and in some ways, currently approximate. The memex, first noted in a 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly7, was a device where neurological memory could be literally externalized through a process of encoding and download to a physical device. In short, it was a thumb drive for your brain. Bush believed that this synaptic exteriority would allow for a plug and play, modular memory, giving a physical manifestation to Bergsons exterior memory objects. Bushs device provides a thought-provoking example of the permeable barrier between archives and memory, as the memex is both. In the same moment it is an archival apparatus as well as an externalization of the memory of an individual. While his critics felt that he peered too far into the future (and perhaps he did, as he died in 1974) in so many ways, the spirit of memory extension for which he searched has been in use since the first thought was put to paper. Even in that moment of first exteriority, we were looking at the boundaries of memory extending beyond our own synapses into the physical/archival realm. With every story committed to text, we engaged with the future of a distributed recollection, a future which we now enact every day even in the smallest, most abstract, of ways. While the notion of a modular brain has not been realized to Bushs specifications yet, and while our interactions with digital exteriority through archival media isnt as perfect as a USB driven thought, it is difficult to say where my individual knowledge, memories and experience end and my computers hard drives begin. Our ability to neurologically recollect, and recollect through interface with exterior, archival technologies are not separate endeavors. I propose Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945.

 7 that, through recent developments in the tools of memory, we are able to see the actions of personal recall on experience as collaboratively integrated with archival materials. It is not enough to suggest that computer databases and video feeds have informed our experiences, as they have intermingled with our memory images, forever augmenting our perception. So, if memory is the means by which we define and understand experience, and if our memory functions in communication with all sorts of media archives on a real-time basis, then it would stand to reason that our understanding of experience is mediated through both networks in a parallel process. Parallel processing is a broad term describing many applications unified through a single goal, specifically addressing an apparatuss ability to process and respond to simultaneous, disparate stimuli. It should be of note that both the neurological and computational communities share the same definition when speaking about parallel processes in relation to the brain and silicon processors, respectively. As both neural mapping and supercomputing came about in the last half of the 20th century, it is little surprise that they share a common vocabulary. In so may ways computing and digital archives have borrowed from the form, function and organization of both the human brain and its ability to recall and recognize. It is, however, when these two apparatuses work collaboratively that we may reinforce their networked contributions to our cyber-organized, synthesized memory and subsequent experiences. Imagine, if you will, watching a film. Your visual and auditory responses are active and interpreting electrical signals sent to your brain simultaneously. These are distributed to centers for recollection, language, et cetera, and produce an experience of watching a film. That is, however, not the whole workflow. Think of watching a film projected from a DVD. Imagine

 8 all of the parallel necessities required in that action. Not only are all of the aforementioned biological processes (and many more) at work, but similarly inverse digital processes are at work in the DVDs projection. A red laser reads information and electronically transmits it to a graphics processor, encoding those images into light to mirror the way they will be decoded by your eyes and brain on the other end. This is not to mention the process of the films inception, creation, and production, which took place before the DVD could be produced. It would seem that the DVD, which serves as a peripheral impetus for memory has put itself in line with a Bergsonian memory object, both external and interfacing with individual experiences. I submit that archival media and individual memory function collaboratively in an interactively permeable, cyborgian loop, combining the archival exteriority of history and the internal semblance of experience through the distribution of memory over a network. A network invested in both the creation of individuals experiences and the archival perpetuation of publically accessible media. In a short form, archival media and memory objects function together, synthesized in the mind of the user, to comprehend and evaluate present experience, which will, in turn, form new memories and be externalized as new works of archival media. Let us take a moment to evaluate, as we have come a long way from the 1880s. The materials of media archives and an individuals memory intermingle in the creation of his or her experience, distributing the interiority of perception over a network of externalized physical and digital media, as well as the virtualized state of exterior memory as theorized by both Bergson and Bush. How are we to recognize such activity if it occurs in every moment of modern perception? How can we respond, artistically or otherwise, to that which not only permeates every moment, but perpetuates

 9 it? In the coming sections, I will suggest that we might uncover and critique this hegemony through an active deconstruction of archival technologies, conventions and material, as that is the singular part of the equation to which we have access. We do this in the hopes that our deconstruction, even in a representative way, might echo throughout the network of perception, proving linkages between memory and history, and studying the effects of a nodal breakdown between these imperative collaborators. I speak here of the glitch, the hauntological intercedence by which we might examine, explore, and describe the distributed nature of the modern humans experience and even existence. Firstly, let us briefly introduce the post-structural origins of the glitch rhetoric as to better locate its presence in the application of our modern archive/memory network. If we are to speak of the deconstructionist implications of a cybernetic perception, we should begin with an example that might illuminate the means by which the public (archival) and private (memory images) may go beyond permeability, collapsing onto one another through the modern explosion of media on society. Only by showing that media has not only permeated memory but can modify it, can we fully appreciate the application of any sort of glitch or hacktivist agenda to our new paradigm. Perhaps the best example, certainly the most user-friendly, iss posed by Jean Baudrillard. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard poses the third order of simulation in which the simulacrum interfaces with the user before the original has a chance to, and the distinction between reality and representation breaks down.8 Written in the wake of the media saturated Gulf War, this text theorizes that media objects, or simulations, may come to 8 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. (Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 1995).

 10 permeate so deeply within a persons perception that the memory created through that perception is mostly predicated on archival media and not an original interaction. For our purposes, it is quite easy to see Baudrillards real as the traditional notion of memory (personal, interior, sequential) and his simulacrum as the aforementioned archivally-infused, cyborgian memory (public, exterior, parallel). In this instance, the modern explosion of ubiquitous media has hastened this conflation, pushing an interactive permeability between two adjacent structures into one unified, read/write network. While not specifically an archivally based version of Bushs memex, we can see the evolution of archival processes and media technologies in the act of representation, developing along the same trajectories as human perception. This symbiotic evolution gives further evidence of the incorporated, and at times semiotically representative, dialogue between media and memory. In light of such a dialogue, I pose this concept; our memory is, in fact, the product of a synthetic network. That we cannot engage in viable debates when we delineate between memory and history, instead we must deconstructively examine their function, informing and substantiating one another through perception. Our physical archives, our memory images, others and ourselves, are joined together in the synthesis of perception, and through this process we are able to move a step further, together. If our memory-based perception is augmented, then it follows that our experiences, predicated on the interpretive power of that conflation, are also synthetic and constructed from a public and private model of archive/memory. The mathematician Brian Rotman describes this distribution of experience as

 11 living beside ourselves,9 but I feel this term does not accurately describe the current state of affairs. His terminology is still centered on the individuals experience, thereby not fully embracing the open ideology and publicly accessible nature of distributed memory and experience. I would pose that a synthetic memory allows us to live, not beside ourselves, but to live within each other. To better grasp this concept, let us look to the theories of protocol, for in this rhetoric we might examine how far our cybernetic memory may extend and in what ways that it is proven through its own ruptures. Protocol, to borrow terminology from the network theorist Alexander Galloway,10 is the cybernetic discourse of modern existence. It addresses a world that combines biological entities and technological entities in a single, expansive networked state, operating through both sets of discursive boundaries in the creation of social experience. Discourse, it should be noted here, is borrowed from the Foucauldian understanding of the term describing the overarching structures at work in the creation of social order. So, protocologically speaking, when engaging with media and memory in terms of a constructed experience (which we all are), we play by both memory and medias rules, as they are combined in the cybernetic apparatus of experience. I recognize the possibility for confusion at this somewhat foreign concept. Let us address it in, perhaps, simpler terms. Protocol describes the rules, limitations and possibilities of experience when experience is produced through both an individuals memory and public, archival media working collaboratively in a network. These extended rules, as Galloway suggests, do Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being. (USA: Duke University Press, 2008). Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004).

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 12 not burden us. Instead, they connect us as we go, giving us more mnemonic and experiential agency as a connected entity than we could possibly have had alone. To quote Rotman, Their meditation is that of an external scaffold, a way of allowing these multiplicities to be recognized, to become choate, to crystallize into social practices, and cohere into experientially real, stable, and iterable forms of psychic activity.11 In thinking of experience as the product of a networked interaction, and not an individuals creation, we gain the freedom of an open source. As we borrow from publically accessible, media archives (open to all) in the cultivation of our experiences, then we should be able to see our individual experiences, and subsequent memorybased interactions, as connected to others through that shared, mediacomprised experience. In short, our synthetic experiences allow us to enmesh ourselves in a collaborative, public memory, a wiki-experience. Such a trajectory is not unprecedented. The move from music shops to Napster, from Blockbuster to RedEnvelope and Netflix, from the encyclopedia to Wikipedia; these are not signs of a coming open-source trend, these are expressions of a public evolution. As the theorists at Net Behaviour12 remind us, we are not so isolated as to be a DIY (Do It Yourself) culture; we are an integrated DIWO (Do It With Others) network. We exist with one another, it seems only right that we can experience and remember with one another too. Let us now, at last, turn our attention to the glitch itself. Our paradigm of synthetic memory and networked experience has been established and our poststructuralist protocol has been laid out. In the next Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being. ( USA: Duke University Press, 2008). 102. Net Behaviour. "Do It With Others" (2007). Available from: <http://www.netbehaviour.org/DIWO.htm>

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 13 section we will come to see that a glitch in the system is not something to be lamented, but in fact celebrated. It is the ruptured means by which we might appreciate our state of networked unity. Borrowing from Foucauldian archaeology we shall see how the artistic and social practice of glitch-making resonates in support of the networks of synthetic memory and distributed experiences, while simultaneously calling into question the discrete nature of hegemonic centralization which privileges outdated concepts of self, truth and totality.

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MEMORY, MODIFIED Without question, an irrevocable change is happening to the individual self: the thing thought to be fixed in definition of human identity is becoming unmoored as the technological upheaval transforming the landscape of Western culture makes itself felt deep within our heads, within our subjectivities, our personas, our psyches. Brian Rotman 13

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault reminds readers that the only way to explore or divine the nature of a hegemonic structure is to examine its ruptures.14 By deconstructively analyzing the effects of those incongruities on the whole, one can discern the organizational structure of the overall apparatus through its responses. Eugene Thacker brings these words into the digital era in his text, The Exploit, where he speaks of a ruptured protocol, a glitch in the network of memory and archival systems. For him, it follows syllogistically that if protocol is a sort of discourse, then these exploits, hacks, and glitches are neo-Foucauldian ruptures found within modern networks15. He likens exploits to computer viruses, citing that they do not infect, but rather use pre-existing architecture to propagate. Viruses, for Thacker, are life exploiting life.16 We have come to see our individual experiences as entities constructed from, and implicated in, a larger network 13 Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being. (USA: Duke University Press, 2008). 81.
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Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). 129. Eugene Thacker, The Exploit, A Theory of Networks. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Ibid. 84.

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 15 of external memory and archival media. If we wish to address the structures of our experience, perception, and by extension, knowledge and self, I propose that the most apt way to approach these concepts is through the study and production of exploitative hacks. I propose that we invent and curate these viruses to see how they move within a system, how they interact, and how they may prove the ever-expanding dimensions of modern experience. This tactic has, and will continue to prove itself in varying artistic expressions. From curated programming to home-brew gaming to locative, hacktivist media, modes of artistic production attempt to exploit ruptures on all ends of the communications spectrum, acting as proof of systemic life in art. This is an area rife for discussion, and I feel as though the study of this new and de-centralized media will provide the academy with much in the coming years. Instead of addressing the multitude of work already in place in a general capacity, I will use two specific projects as examples of how art may come to deconstructively interact with a synthetic memory and networked experience. Both of these projects are current, attempt rupture in different ways and are deployed in differing fashions. The first project of which I speak is my graduate thesis film, Centralia, and the second is a series of new media works on which I have been working since 2007, entitled The Ceibas Cycle.

Centralia is a documentary in so much as it documents. It is, perhaps,

redundant to make a case for everything having a documentary element to it. Others have and will continue to do so more eloquently than I could. Instead, I will relate a recent experience in the hope of illuminating how this distributed perspective relativizes notions of truth, accuracy, and certainty. A group of colleagues and I had the chance to meet Ken Burns last year. The filmmaker, much like an evangelical preacher, gave an inspiring show reminding us of the documentary genres ability to resurrect the dead. Many

 16 of the people in the audience asked him questions about truth during the session, asking him how he presents truth so accurately. I still have no idea what that phrase meant, and the answers given were unsatisfactory. Objective truth through media, for my generations sensibility, is something that should have gone out with the Gulf War and the advent of 4Chan. It should be rightly so as well; our complete interface with mediated exteriority in the production of present experience has left us with multiple, intermingling perspectives, no single one crowned as the authoritarian real. Truth, as all experience, is a synthesis of stimuli, built collaboratively from memory and archives does it, in fact, need to be true? Could a lie better serve our networked perception in its understanding of a situation? I am reminded of John Hodgeman putting it so perfectly in his most recent book, reality, while generally probable, is not always interesting. 17 Before we continue, I must quickly clarify a point of rhetoric. The notion of truth in documentary media is a complex issue, one which has been addressed by many in a variety of ways. For the sake of simplicity and brevity I will put forth the following as it pertains to my argument. Documentaries traditionally present themselves as archival representations of truth. Whether it be the subjective, personal documentaries of the modern era, or the overarching sociological affairs of Robert Flaherty, the term documentary carries with it the trappings of proof and testimony. To this end, I will suggest that this mediated proof is the hegemonic discourse which binds together the documentary genre as a whole. The study of this totalization through its breakages is the framework around which Centralia, as an archival hacktivist project, is constructed. John Hodgeman. More Information Than You Require, (USA: Penguin, 2008). Cover.

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 17 The intent of Centralia is to create a simulated documentary, one that implants a hack into the network of archives and documents, showing the ruptures inherent in the blind interpretation of objectively truthful experiences through media. My aim here is not to produce an untruth per se, but to critique the means by which modern audiences, oftentimes unquestioningly, absorb notions of experiential truth from archivally simulated objects. Baudrillard gives great example of this trope with a metaphor concerning simulation and the robbery of a bank. 18 While holding up a bank, he states, is a crime against its employees and patrons, to accurately simulate the same robbery is a far greater crime, as it also offends the sensibilities of social order and the apparatus governing the perception of reality. For him, the illusion of the danger, of the stick-up, is superseded and ultimately made irrelevant by the legal/social network already in place to respond to it. It no longer matters that the guns were fake and the intent was abstract, the representation of a robbery would still cause the same panic of a real crime, and in that respect both the real and representational function in the same way. By that same logic, I feel that a documentary project need only give the appearance of being constructed from real documents to be effective. In this way, Centralia may function on a binary level. Not only am I able to express the narrative of the content through an audiences mediated experience (the goal of most films to convey the story), but I am also able to subtly approach the problematic, ruptured paradigms of documentary hegemony. In presenting fabrications to the archival canon in the context of a non-fiction document, it will, no doubt, be interpreted as such, creating a misconstruction of experience one which functions just as fluidly and well 18 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. (Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 1995). 19-21.

 18 as a construction based entirely on traditionally verifiable evidence. Perhaps then, it is not a misconstruction at all. If the experience of watching a documentary reaffirms the structures of truth, media and experience through the network of synthetic perception, then this project, through a crisis of nonfiction context and fictional content, suggests that the hegemonic structure of truth, when explored through constructed experience, is an easy aesthetic to appropriate and perhaps little more. This viral trajectory is what separates Centralia from mockumentary and its ilk. Mockumentaries do not present themselves as truth; they borrow a style of production and exhibition, but not the intention to disrupt. While

Centralia and a mockumentary like Best in Show (2000), both serve as

examples of a simulated experience (as all films attempt a static simulation of an experience), they diverge in the expectation built into the production of the piece. Best in Show is not concerned with Eugene Levy, but a character he portrays. His celebrity precludes the pieces believability, as do the ending credits. In producing Centralia, every choice was made to preserve a believable aesthetic. The actors were all amateurs, everything was shot in a single take and certain production errors were not omitted as they simulated the authenticity which marks a piece of media as truthful. Most important to the creation of a realistic falsehood, however is the belief that one is either a) not making fiction, as every representation has enough truth to be considered as a documentary effort, or b) making fiction, as every representation has enough falsehood to be considered as a fictionalized effort. The tension in this dichotomy describes my immediate goals with Centralia. I wish it to spike the punch of the documentary genre, showing that what we perceive as truth is simply an aesthetic choice and that its hegemonic power in media, and thereby experience is little more than a formulaic

 19 expectation to be met. As Pierre Nora19 reminds us, we wish to perpetually build the archive of experience; perhaps we no longer need separate sections for fiction and fact. I hope that this piece will invite audiences to question and therefore confront the manner in which they synthesize experiential truth from media sources. I wish for them to see the fallibility of that network, if only for a moment. I recognize that this is, of course, not going to be the case. I know that

Centralia, if successful, will do such a good job masquerading as a truthful

endeavor that it will never be uncovered as a hidden rupture. There is a high probability that it will be received as a somewhat interesting documentary about a Pennsylvania curiosity and a sad story concerned with the archival transmission of traumatic events. This is what separates my work from that of David Holzmans Diary (1967), as his trick is revealed when the cast of characters is credited. My project is somewhat more deep-cover than that, burrowing itself into the canon, perhaps to be discovered publicly, perhaps to fester in solitude an un-detonated ordinance. It must be this way, as to overtly fictionalize my effort would defeat my purpose, and to make a traditional fact-obsessed documentary would only perpetuate the hegemony, not underlining the ruptures at all. I wish to embed the inherent fissures of documentary into the presentation of my work. Again, I should remind my readership that my intentions are not to discredit documentaries as forms of media. Rather, I wish to show them as pieces in a problematic synthesis. They are perceived as mediated truth, archivally perpetuated. Thus, when we interface with such media, audiences garner a sense of objective reality in the creation of their experience. In 19 Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions. (New York: Columbia U Press, 1996) 9.

 20 accordance with the Bergsonian workflow of synthetic experience, we can see that the formation of a verifiable reality from the combination of past, present and media archives produces a perspectival truth, one that is easily mistaken for objectivity. This forgoes all of the ruptures that documentary practices and media carry with them by definition: that of omission, perspective, and the fallibility of human storytelling. While documentaries may have cultivated aesthetic stimuli which produce truthful responses, they do so at the simulated fictionalization of their subjects, a simulation at work in all films. For is it not so that even the most accurate representation in media carries with it the trapping of fiction, as its subjects are only the simulacra of their recorded selves? Centralia, in mimicking this stimulus, acts to rupture that interaction. I wish to show that truths are absorbed into a mnemonic-archival synthesis of experience just as easily as untruths both producing equally valid experiences in the mind of the audience. If this is the case, and if we, as a culture of viewers, are able to merge the dichotomy of archival truth and falsehood in the same experience, then we have come one step closer to recognizing the distribution of our individual selves over a larger matrix of media-propagated perspective, knowledge and experiential relativism.

 21 MEMORY, REWRITTEN I was born during the Age of Machines. A machine was a thing made up of distinguishable 'parts' organized in the imitation of some function of the human body. Machines were said to 'work.' How a machine 'worked' was readily apparent to an adept, from inspection of the shape of its 'parts.' The physical principles by which machines 'worked' were intuitively verifiable. Hollis Frampton 20

Hollis Frampton, writing in the late 1970s, speaks to the place of rupture in representational media. As with his Age of Machines, his films functioned in a way that begged audiences to dismantle, explore and understand them through that deconstruction. While he would later note that the age of machines has ended, it would be wrong of us to assume that none of our new technologies of archival communication can be taken apart for deconstructive analysis in the hopes of divining their purpose, meaning and applicable relevance. The Ceibas Cycle is my way to address that sensibility in a digital age. I have no allegiance to film, but video, with its ease of use and massive proliferation, was a large part of my history and now, a major part of my experience. Naturally, as I wish to explore both my experience and my history through media, I would choose to discover how one might take apart video and re-purpose its use to prove not only its ubiquitous nature, but its archival prowess, and by extension, its interface with memory and the construction of my experiences.

The Ceibas Cycle is a multi-media endeavor begun in the spring of

2007 as an attempt to describe a mortal liminality through a technological one. Each installment in the series explores allegorical aspects of the Central
20

Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion. (New York: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983). 112.

 27 individualism and wholeness; by seeing glitches and liminalities as not detriments nor faults, but as instruments of life and eventuality, we shall come to navigate this modern landscape of memory, archive and experience together. We have no choice but to share the means by which we construct our perspectives, we may as well see it in one another and celebrate.

 28 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext (e), 1983. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Bush, Vannevar. As We May Think, The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945.

Centralia, DVD, directed by Evan Meaney. Iowa City, IA: The University of Iowa, 2010.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated from the French by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books,1972. Frampton, Hollis. Circles of Confusion. New York: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983. Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004. Hodgeman, John. More Information Than You Require, USA: Penguin, 2008. Net Behaviour. "Do It With Others" (2007), http://www.netbehaviour.org/DIWO.htm (accessed February 26. 2010). Nora, Pierre. ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions. New York: Columbia U Press, 1996. Ricur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting / Paul Ricoeur ; translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rotman, Brian. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being. USA: Duke University Press, 2008. Thacker, Eugene. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.