MonkeyKnifeFight

An analogue world

I spend almost all of my time in front of a computer of one sort or another. For work it’s in front of either a laptop if I’m doing the road-warrior thing or a desktop machine and for fun it’s an Xbox or Playstation. It wasn’t always like this though. Years before touchscreen technologies and haptic responses, wireless controllers and bluetooth headsets, a computer in every home, the internet, was the time of analogue.

You would recognise most of the technology in use, dinosaurs to our sleek miniaturised digital companions but obvious predecessors. Movie cameras were VHS or Betamax, running on battery or even earlier by clockwork and coiled spring. The only portable phones were military technology and later confined to cars and the business elite. Home games were still mostly still boards and dice. The digital age was yet to arrive.
I remember this era well. I remember the launch of CD, the death of recording magnetically to ferrous oxide tape. I remember buying vinyl 7″s in the shops, the pop, crackle and boom as the diamond tipped needle skipped it’s way down the grooves. I’m not sure it’s the technology itself I remember but the physical connection the media that you were handling. Renting videos and loading them into a monstrous silver machine under a large rounded glass screen.
I had a friend who used to work in a tiny town cinema as a projectionist, I used to visit him in his stuffy cubby hole above the screens and we’d drink beer and sneak a cheeky joint out the back. It was a flea pit of a cinema but a beautiful art deco building which sadly is not there anymore, just a pile of bricks in a walled off lot, no doubt awaiting rebirth as a luxury executive flat development. They used to get the blockbuster films about six months to a year after they’d been released and they were generally on their last legs. Once he let my hang around whilst he repaired a movie. With short controlled slices of just a shop bought razor blade he cut burned and scratched sections out of the reels, making something usable out of what was previously useless. Yes, of course there would be mistakes. I once sat through a film where the final scene was upside down and another where the thrilling denouement was cut halfway through due to a previous cinema carelessly burning through it, everything filtered through a fine haze of dust, scratches and hair that would dance merrily around the screen. We got our money back after that particular showing but the point that I’m trying to illustrate is that it was salvageable and it was repaired manually, not to 100% quality but enough to be usable again. It was great to see such a feat of manual dexterity and prowess.

In a digital age we take things like copies and backups for granted but in an analogue world you’re responsible for your actions, mistakes have a real world repercussion. There’s only one physical item like the one that you’re using. You may be able to replace it but it will involve cost and time. I think that’s the major difference between then and now that I personally notice. Patience.
Making mix-tapes of your favourite songs for your friends took time, effort and a great deal of patience getting it just so. It’s something I still enjoy doing as it reconnects me with my past in a way that few things can.
Even when I was at college, the memories of which appear as a through a fog, editing VHS footage on an offline editing desk was a manual task that required patience. There was very little risk involved in that process though as you were mixing down from two tapes to a third, an action which has no consequence if there are mistakes, only paid for by time. No save as, draft or undo, just action and consequence. I also loved the way that analogue technologies degrade with time and duplication. I often copied work much further than was necessary just to get different effects, playing the process to produce muffled audio effects or increasing the noise to signal ration so that human figures shambled around out of focus or beneath a curtain of scan-lines. There’s a certain element of play and experimentation that I would say is missing from digital film production, the joy of the process and journey to an undetermined end point. The act of creation rendered sterile by software.

Of course the digital world also has its caveats. Errors in duplication or catastrophic errors of a host disk will often result in entirely lost lives. This has happened to me a few times now and I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll never be able to look back on the last ten years when I’m in my dotage as I’ll have nothing to prove I was even here, just a digital timeline of encounters and disjointed conversations. I don’t think I’m alone in having very little to actually show for my time on this planet in the opening part of the digital age. At least when I split with my first girlfriend there was physical evidence of our encounter in the form of real photographs. OK, so I don’t have any of them, but I know they exist still in her home. Somewhere. My last relationship I leave no trace, the better part of a decade and I evaporate like mist exposed to the morning sun, present only in memory and spoken word to be forgotten soon as the pain of separation fades and life moves inexorably forward. A period of my life enjoyed but never recorded in any real sense, just an ephemeral shadow of my personality on the internet.

As a reaction to this impermanence I have decided to re-explore my roots as a child of analogue and re-learn those atrophied manual and mental skills with a series of works that are based solely in the space of the real. Perhaps then I may make an impression worthy of remembrance.