The Dream of the Archive

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of Library" -- this quote from the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges once adorned a bookmark I got from the Brown Bookstore. And the man knew whereof he spoke, having spent much of his life in charge of the National Library of Argentina. There, Borges was free to indulge his ideas, and to imagine the kinds of strange, playful worlds that his fictions became known for.

In his quintessential story, "The Library of Babel," Borges masks a seemingly simple question: What if there were a library that contained every possible book? There are limits: each book has but 410 pages; each page 40 lines, each line 80 characters, randomly generated. Of course, 99.99999% of the books will be utter nonsense ... but of those that are not, every book one can desire, imagine, or write would already exist: the true story of your life, the unfinished tales of the Canterbury Tales, the true catalog of the library (and a nearly infinite number of false catalogs), you name it. Of course, most of the titles, as this site which generates them illustrates, will have less memorable titles, such as the puzzling "IJJRE TIORBQBRXYG RXBASM HNF GAJF QNHODP" or its no less baffling shelfmate "FFX BIPB MPMXLCO YQTYX XRO AOQ."

In Borges's world, the librarians themselves don't know what they're really seeking, or whether they will find it. In the end, many of them despair, committing suicide by jumping into one of the Library's stairwells. And yet here, with the stairs nearly infinite, they fall through space but never reach the bottom, slowly becoming mummified, and turned thence to a fine dust. A couple of years ago, I sent in a submission to NPR's "Three Minute Fiction" contest" -- the prompt was to begin a story with the sentence "She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door." I thought at once of Borges's library, and this story was the result; that it didn't win the contest I can attribute only to blatant favoritism.)

Fast forward to the present: The World Wide Web presently contains roughly 47 billion "pages," each of which contains, by one estimate, an average of about 6.5 printed pages of material -- which gives us a rough estimate of 305.5 billion pages. This is, of course, only a minuscule atom compared to Borges' library (which can be calculated at 25 to the power of 1,312,000), but it's nevertheless well past the capacity of any human reader to peruse. At the average rate of 300 words, roughly one page, per minute, it would take a single reader 1,394 years to read them all, assuming the reader never sleeps. And, as with Borges's collection, the number of variants of any single text is enormously high, and with it the potential quantity of inaccurate or completely false information. Of course this is only the "static" web -- a single dynamic site such as Twitter reports roughly 200 billion Tweets per year!

So we are the new librarians. And, if we want to avoid their despair, we must learn to sort and sift through the enormities of what's available if we want to discover useful, accurate, relevant information.

Collage and Cut-up

Collage is an old art, as old as the invention of paper in China, but it was not until the expansion of printed material -- particularly ephemera such as illustrated newspapers, fliers, handbills, magazines, and brochures -- that it gained enough raw material to really find its place. It was one of the favorite techniques of the Dada and surrealist movements, as it easily allowed strange juxtapositions of dissonant elements.

The translation of the concept of collage from the world of art to that of sound was propelled by the artist Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters, who worked in paper and then in wood, resculpting his homes with sweeping armatures and angled surfaces, began his sound collage work in 1922 with Ursonate, a "primeval sonata" performed in his own voice, which quoted and juxtaposed all manner of seemingly natural and unnatural sounds, scraps of melody and birdcalls, and twisted verbalizations. What we'll hear in class was only one small part of the whole, which can be heard in its entirety on Ubuweb.

The second movement came from concrete composers such as Walter Ruttmann, who was known for his sound collages of Berlin. For these artists, there was no point in scoring the human voice; nothing possessed the immediacy and immaculate truth of the "found sounds" of the metropolis itself (though it should be noted that Ruttmann's works were carefully edited and arranged -- they were far from random). A similar sort of surreal built from the real marked the music of Spike Jones, particularly his late works such as "Frantic Freeway."

The third movement came with William S. Burroughs and Brian Gyson (pictured), who transferred Burroughs's cut-up method from text to tape. Affordable home tape-recording machines were not available until the 1950's; when they arrived, they at once made possible at home what had, until then, been impossible outside of the studio. As with the print cut-ups, Burroughs and Gyson experimented with various ways to mix up the sound on a monaural tape, including randomly rewinding and 'dropping in' new bits, as well as actually cutting up the tape physically and re-splicing it. The results can be heard here and here -- and judge for yourself whether 'when you cut up the present, the future leaks out.'

The shift to video seems the most logical outgrowth of these experiments, but again the technology was slow in coming. The original industry standard of U-Matic tape required costly editing machines, and early VCR's had only a very limited capacity for editing of any kind. It really wasn't until the dawn of digital video that artists such as RISD's own EBN (Emergency Broadcast Network) could fully re-edit and recombine video elements. Check out their videos "Get Down," "We Will Rock You," and "Don't Back Down." They even did some of the earliest splitscreen and multiscreen videos -- all edited on a 1st-generation iMac -- such as "Hello." With a machine that featured a 233 MHz processor, 32 MB of RAM, and a 4 GB hard drive, they assembled videos that took weeks to edit and 2-3 days to render!

Today, of course, video mashups are as 'easy as pie' though potentially time-consuming.  We have the Internet Symphony, DJ Earworm's top-25 autotuned hits, and (one of my faves) the multi-framed "Chocolate Evolution."

ExistenZ

From his earliest days as a filmmaker, David Cronenberg has been fascinated with out of the body experiences of one kind or another. Whether in the tiny, sharp-toothed demon children of The Brood, his remake of the classic The Fly, or James Wood's bodily transmogrifications in Videodrome, he's kept the people who make prosthetics, masks, and armatures busy. Coming into the digital age, then, it's no surprise to see him taking up the theme of virtual reality in ExistenZ, complete with VR "pods" which bear an uncanny resemblance to a stomach connected to an umbilical cord, which are attached via a "port" at the base on one's spine. It's a new, fleshy twist on the virtual reality theme, which goes back at least as far a Tron, a movie made long before the technology which made such things possible had been invented.

Yet despite this, the overarching narrative questions which drive ExistenZ are largely of a non-material form. The structure of the film represents, I believe, an attempt to take some of the structure of classic noir films, exchanging a tightly-drawn plot for something more like the "scenario" of a video game: a set of rooms, a set of actions triggered on entry into these rooms, and a set of narratives-within-narratives. The difficulty here of course is that even the best video-game scenarios are exhaustible, and often lead to frustrating repetitions and narrative dead-ends (a situation parodied here with the store owner who stops moving and starts staring blankly until he finally gets his verbal cue). The idea of having the game's designer trapped within a scenario of her own design is another brilliant twist, as are the sudden edits within which a character "wakes up" somewhere else without the usual noir assist from a blackjack. Some, and I am among them, are disappointed by the film's ending, which seems to come at a point far before its full potential has been realized, but seen alongside such concepts as the "new flesh" of Videodrome, it makes a powerful and cogent contribution to the Cronenberg oevre, and offers perhaps the most disturbing iteration yet of the idea of cyborganic reality.

Blade Runner

Bladerunner stands, in the view of many, among the greatest science fiction films of all time, alongside such groundbreaking works as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), Alexander Korda's Things to Come (1936), Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the Wachowskis' The Matrix (1999). And yet, like them, it is sometimes accused of being more of an innovation of style than of substance, a visually gripping film encumbered with a cloudy, laborsome, noire-eque plot that never quite adds up.

But perhaps that's because, in this postmodern world, style is substance. A palette of darkly glimmering colors, a shift in movement from the horizontal to the vertical, and a constantly shifting agglomeration of retro-, punk, and pomo dress says something at the outset: the viewer is not so much ahead of time as outside of it, in a world where there is no longer any clear sense of progression. If this is a sort of substance, then it's largely the work of Syd Mead, who was hired early on as a designer for Bladerunner, and who created its overall visual feel:

The dominant strategy in designing Bladerunner's future was 'retrofitting,' which according to Mead, 'simply means upgrading old machinery or structures by slapping new add-ons to them.' The future, in other words. is a combination of the new and the very, very used, just like the present: the utopian fantasies of Things to Come, with its gleaming new Everytown, are no longer economically, ecologically, or politically supportable, even in dreams and fictions (Bukatman 21)

The comparison with Things to Come is telling; in that movie, "Everytown" (which is clearly London) is destroyed in a vast world war, and for a time its inhabitants are reduced to savage ways, under the thumb of a "boss" who goes around in Fred-Flintstone-like furs. They are saved from this fate by a man in a black, bubble-headed suit (memorably plated by Raymond Massey), who offers them a return to civilization; in the flash-forward to the next step of evolution, Massey's grandson (played by Massey) has graduated to the glittery toga-tunic, and heads a ray-gun republic studded with towers circled with saturnian rings. This is of course the world of "Progress," the world that Science Fiction once depended upon, the future as outlined in the "World of Tomorrow" at the 1939 World's Fair. The film ends, curiously, when the great rocket of progress is attacked by a sculptor and his band of futuristic Luddites, whose slogan is "An End to Progress Now!":

"What is this progress? What is the good of all this progress onward and onward? We demand a halt. We demand a rest ... an end to progress! Make an end to progress ! Make an end to this progress now! Let this be the last day of the scientific age!"

Bladerunner gives us a world in which, although technology clearly continues to make new inroads into the nature of biological life, "progress" -- at least for those at street-level in a postmodern Los Angeles where it never stops raining -- is an illusion, dashed to pieces in the glimmer of electronic signage, plastic clothes, and neon glow-stick umbrellas.

Interestingly, the main filming site for the film was Warner's venerable "New York" set, which had been in place in one form or another since 1928, and featured in many noir films. Yet again, this was adroitly supplemented with add-ons of the retrofitted kind, as with the creepy decayed version of LA's Bradbury Building. The exterior was modified with a pair of enormous spiral pillars, and the interior trashed out with leaking water and debris (amazingly, all these scenes were shot at night, and the set cleaned up so that by day it could continue to function as an office building). Through the doorway, you can even see the Million Dollar Theater across the street (though the writing on the marquee, interestingly, has varied from version to version). I've been to the Bradbury building -- a remarkable place, with its wrought-iron elevator (closed, alas, to non-tenants); here's a shot of me there with LA artist Sara Velas. It's a strange world where, even when you are "on location" there's a Titanic-sized gulf between the glitter you see, and the ruins you remember.

Ridley Scott was never totally happy with Bladerunner. According to Bukatman's book, it was at the insistence of the insurance bondholders that the Dashiell-Hammett-style voiceovers were added, cuing viewers into a plot that had left test audiences confused and disgruntled. As soon as he had the chance, he took them out, re-editing the entire film not only once but twice, the second time along with a full-scale digital restoration. The latest 5-disc version includes the European theatrical version, as well as the rough-cut print that had been thought lost.

So, as they say with cornflakes: taste them again, for the first time. Let's try that this week with Bladerunner.