Hauntology

Laurence Hortsman and Rob Gallagher talk memory and media

Do you have anything on derrida’s theory of hauntology that I would actually understand? its seems to be about communication and the spectral..

One key aspect of hauntology is nostalgia for futures that never were – A good example is Michael Robinson’s Victory Over the Sun, a film which shows footage of now derelict futuristic architecture from bygone World’s Fairs and is named after a Futurist opera performed at St. Petersburg in 1913.

Michael Robinson, Victory Over the Sun

One of the key hauntological questions (Derrida coined the term in a book on Marx) is whether we can recover the impetus and conviction that early C20th modernism and socialism seemed to have, whether we can learn we see the past as other than quaint and naff. As well as mourning futures that never were hauntology is also about nostalgia for memories that never happened or at least never happened to us (hauntological time is fucked up and nonlinear – Derrida quotes Hamlet, who’s, of course, haunted by his dad’s ghost: ‘the time is out of joint’ ).

Recording loss

Preservation’s actually at odds with ever playing anything, of course – just as cell degradation and replication’s perennial and eventually fatal. William Basinski’s ‘Disintegrtion Loops’ came about whenwas attempting to transfer some tapes and noticed them flaking, disintegrating. He decided to record them playing/decaying.  It so happened that this was 9/11/2001, so the tapes now are kind of a record of that event, though its not like you can hear the planes.

I am torrenting the Basinski loops right now. They sound phenomenal. What is strange is the process of listening to a digital (compressed…lossy format) representation of a decaying analogue tape process. Even with the digitising of the decay there is still room for it to ‘degrade’ (320 kbps vs FLAC vs 128kbps) etc. However this process is not linear like the tape (feet and inches… more hiss every time it is played) it is discontinuous… you could go back to the ’source’ and get an original version from Basinski.

How paranoid to you find yourself getting about archiving, backing things up, transferring? Libraries are pretty bamboozled right now about how we find enough space to keep everything, what digital formats we use, what we should keep and shouldn’t….

Maybe we can talk about EVP, plus whether you’ve ever fortuitously picked anything up on a field recording that’s been really useful?

First off the EVP thing has certainly happened to me. At least on one occasion. I was transferring some files from an MD to my ‘puter and I got what I have now sampled as a ‘reallyreallycoolsound’ which sounds kindof like a robot voice. we could use the sample and/or the track i dropped it into in the podcast…

Thanks for the memories

I have sent over an Advisory Circle track which is extremely beautiful and reminds me of this odd transplanted childhood I had of watching Doctor Who stories I was too young to see on TV the first time. If you want to see other amazing examples of this check out Steve Moore from progster Zombi. I could listen to that all day long.

Circs beyond my control meant I never got to see Moon (this, I guess = an instance of hauntological socialising) but  given the fact that 2009 was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing and we’ve pretty much given up on space travel that probs qualifies as hauntological sci fi.

As I say, will hopefully get some pdfs to you tomorrow. Meanwhile, just read a pretty interesting interview with Sarah Turner which becomes relevant from the line “Whereas in Perestroika there’s a more explicitly autobiographical trigger, isn’t there?”

That film looks amazing… is it showing in London?

Capture

I really like, but can’t quite put my finger on, the differences between movement through time from point of capture to the present. Like the photo is ‘fixed’ in the age it was taken, whilst the sound recording is captured; ready to be relived in new surroundings. What does this say about film? As it is essentially persistence of vision created through different individual images (or it used to be in the age of pre-interlaced digital video.. i’m not sure if the ‘frames per second’ thing still counts does it?) is film more ‘alive’ than just sound recordings as it has a representation of the event?