There is a New Yorker cartoon showing two hipsters looking at a turntable captioned, “The two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience.” Indeed.

For all the vinyl fetishism these days – I blame you Wes Anderson – there is no getting around the problems with records as an electro mechanical audio playback medium. Beyond the classic analog issues of noise, distortion, and frequency response there is wow and flutter, mis tracking, groove damage, surface noise, crosstalk and a host of other problems begging for a better way.

But invest enough time, money, and effort to reduce these problems and the results can be magical. That’s because the dynamic range of vinyl exceeds 16-bit CDs, and the lack of sampling and quantizing has a purity that allows the emotion in the music to come through. Listening to records passes the “just one more track” at 3:00 AM test. By comparison, digital, especially compressed digital music like on Spotify, sounds good at first and then just gets fatiguing which makes one want to stop listening.

A great example: Listen to Talk Talk’s “Spirit of Eden” album on Vinyl and CD. Mark Hollis’ production technique required immense dynamic range because of the way he layered instruments together. On Vinyl the guitars come crashing through with massive intensity on the crescendos. On CD the guitars just get a bit louder and distorted.

The same can be said for shooting film. As electro optical mediums for capturing images go film is not exactly pristine. Dirt, scratches, gate jitter, emulsion damage, a limited exposure range and of course, not being able to see what has been captured until after development is archaic. Plus, the cost of shooting on film is astronomically more expensive than shooting digitally.

But like listening to records, there is a magic to the look of “analog” film. While it may have less dynamic range than digital the way film gently rolls off highlight and shadows, folding them back into themselves, is beautiful. By comparison, digital simply clips when it runs out of bits in the whites or blacks. And how one treats the highlights and darkest part of an image is the secret to making great pictures – ask any colorist.

There is a natural softness to film that is so flattering to shooting people. And grain! Real grain. Not the stuff being schemerred on top of digital these days, but real grain is beautiful. Film just naturally looks wonderful – digital is sharper and cleaner but needs to be made to look great. Which is why Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Past Lives and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar were all shot on film.

Retour à l’analogique !

 

Archiving digital images and sound is an underexplored challenge. We all assume that our digital files will simply be available now and forever. Unfortunately, that’s far from true. Without a concerted preservation effort, today’s files will not be readable or recoverable in as little as 20 or 30 years.

Properly stored, 35mm motion picture film from 100 years ago can be easily projected or scanned, and the information retrieved with astonishing clarity. So-called safety film, which replaced the explosive Nitrate film in the 1920s, is “software and operating system agnostic” – just shine a light through it to recover the images. All that’s required to archive it is some shelf space in a temperature and humidity controlled storage room.

This is very much not the case with digital files. Chances are that 20 years from now a digital file will have self-destructed and/or not be readable. Even if the physical file storage media can last for a couple of decades – a questionable assumption for hard drives and SSD drives — the ability to mount the file system and read the data will almost certainly be lost. Linear Tape Open (LTO) cartridges, often touted as an archival medium, will not do either. LTO cartridges may be physically robust, but the tape decks themselves are not backwards compatible. They can only playback the current generation or one previous generation of cartridges. As the LTO format gets updated about every 18 months an LTO cartridge created more than three years ago cannot be played back on a current LTO tape drive.

There is also no guarantee the operating systems under which digital files are stored will be viable decades from now. Anyone who thinks that a drive formatted under current OS X, Linux or Windows operating systems will be mountable in 30 years should try opening a file stored under Digital Equipment Corporation VMS, Silicon Graphics Irix or Bell Labs Inferno. Good luck.

Is there a solution? Well…

Studios and major media corporations such as DreamWorks and HBO hire archivists who are constantly migrating their assets to the latest medium under the latest file systems. But for the rest of us, that’s just not practical.

A reasonable interim solution is to follow the “WCI rule of threes:” always have three copies of every valuable file at all times. For long-term archiving that means keeping two physical copies, ideally in different physical locations and one copy in the cloud. The cloud copy can be on a file sharing platform like Dropbox, or for long-term deep storage in a data storage center like Amazon S3. This isn’t ideal as the two physical copies may physically degrade and as discussed, be unmountable in the future. The cloud copy is dependent on a third-party vendor staying around. But if the physical copies and cloud based copy are checked once a year it’s a decent compromise – at least for now.

 

“MEANDRES & MEDIA, L’CEUVRE DE JOHN SANBORN” was an exhibition in Paris (2106) and a book about the work of Video and Media artist John Sanborn curated by Stephen Sarrazin. These are my recollections of working with John in the 1980s, as published in the book.

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New York City in 1982 was a very different place than it is today. The City hadn’t fully recovered from almost going bankrupt in 1975. Things were still rough around the edges: subway cars were covered in graffiti, Times Square was most certainly not Disneyland and SoHo was more Scorsese’s “After Hours” than shopping mall.

Lower Manhattan “pioneers” were able to get large loft spaces for very little money. Musicians, writers, sculptors, painters, video artists and creative engineers lived and worked in spitting distance of each other. The arrival of MTV, MIDI, CDs, the explosion of cable TV and the club scene (remember Danceteria?) created an enormous demand for visual music. As a result, artists of all disciplines and generations were drawn together in a heady mix of creativity and community.  Also, the City was awash in blow. That was the year I met John.

I had spent my college years at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute getting artists and engineers to collaborate. We built hardware, created video art and generally tried not to kill each other — all with mixed success. Upon graduating I made a beeline for Manhattan and went to work for VCA Teletronics, the first independent post production facility.  My day job was designing machines to electronically edit video but my weekends were spent “testing”  the equipment with video artists on personal projects.  If memory serves, John approached me about working with him and Kit Fitzgerald on a piece they were creating for Adrian Belew called “Big Electric Cat.” That seemed like a logical extension from the work at RPI, and so our partnership began.

Unlike today, getting access to video equipment in the 1980s was a very big deal. If you’ve never known a world where you couldn’t edit cat videos on your iPhone you might have trouble picturing this, but video editing suites required thousands of square feet of floor space and cost millions of dollars to build and operate.  John was willing to spend his weekends working – we did have the keys to all the toys – and I was delighted to have a new collaborator.  Over the course of the next eight years we ended up working on numerous artistic and commercial projects together.

Three things made working with John special: 1) he didn’t struggle making creative decisions. That was especially important because we were layering images in linear editing suites which did not have an “undo” button; 2) although not an engineer he grasped technical concepts very quickly; 3) Most importantly, John understood that you could be serious about your work but still maintain a rollicking sense of humor while working.  I can’t overstate how important that was and still is.

The process we used to create images was based on “discovering” visuals. We would take what were then state-of-the-art post production tools, e.g., analog switchers and digital video effects devices (DVEs) and feed them back into themselves. This digital feedback in an analog signal path produced unpredictable results. When we discovered things we liked we recorded them onto videotape. These recorded images would then be layered on top of each other – often as much as fifty or sixty analog generations down. We created a more detailed explanation of this process for a segment called “The Video Artist” on “Night Flight,” a 1980s TV series on the USA cable network covering downtown Manhattan art and culture. You can view it by clicking the photo of us below.

Our process of improvising, capturing and layering imagery is analogous to jazz. By contrast, the rigid formalism of computer graphics imagery is more like classical music. And we liked jazz. That said, John and I were also fans of the avant garde which led us to our next piece, “ACT III” set to the music of Philip Glass. Glass’ music and John’s energy were a good combination. ACT III managed to transcend the barriers of abstract video art and find widespread acceptance.

I’ll always be grateful to John for our next moment of cosmic synergy. One of my musical heroes was composer Robert Ashley. Unbeknownst to me, a few years earlier John had directed the pilot for “Perfect Lives (Private Parts)” Ashley’s brilliant opera for television. When John asked me if there was any music I’d like to work with for our next project I immediately replied, “Robert Ashley.” “Funny you should say that…”said John. After languishing for several years Britain’s Channel Four had just approved the funding to create all seven episodes with John directing. “Would I like to work on it with him?” he asked. Trick question?? Of all the work we did together ACT III and Prefect Lives are my favorites. And Bob Ashley went from hero to my friend and mentor until he passed away on March 3, 2014. Eternal thanks to John for that.

In addition to commercial projects we went on to collaborate on four more video art pieces: “Renaissance” (1984) for the Computer Museum in Boston, “Video Wallpaper” (1984) a 50 minute ambient background video for a distributor I’ve long since forgotten, “Luminaire” (1985) for Expo ’86 in Vancouver and “Infinite Escher” (1990) an early analog high definition work for Sony. We no longer had to steal weekend time to work on these, although we could only work the night shift. I have fond memories of watching John run around the facility shrieking jokes and doing shticks at 4:00 AM. And, fortunately, most everyone else there at that hour was amused as well.

Things are different today. John moved to Berkley. I’ve stayed in lower Manhattan and watched as artists got displaced by hedge fund kids. Sitting down at our respective Mac workstations we each have more computer power than filled all of Teletroncs (and then some). And I surely don’t miss the two hours I had to spend aligning all of the analog videotape machines and signal processors to get ready for an evening’s work. Much to be said for double clicking and having a project come up just as you left it. But there was an energy that came from working “in the studio” in general and with John specifically that I do miss. Skype just isn’t the same.

Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist who is rightly considered to be the father of modern video art. Nam June was a hero, mentor and friend who taught me many things. Perhaps the most important being that creating art and keeping a sense of humor about it go hand-in-hand. (A philosophy embraced by the composer Robert Ashley, who is also sorely missed.)

From 1981 – 1997 Nam June worked with video artist and social activist Paul Garin. Paul took a gig as Nam June’s assistant and ended up being one of his most important collaborators, producing hundreds of works together. We basically gave Nam June and Paul a key to Post Perfect to work on art projects — one of the charms of working the night shift was running into them. The picture below is of Nam June (left) and Paul (right) having a video jam session in Post Perfect’s linear edit suite number two.

Unfortunately, many of Nam June’s pieces are falling into disrepair. This is particularly true for the multi-monitor sculptures, or “robots” as he called them, as they were created with vintage analog consumer television gear. These are failing and must either be repaired (very hard) or replaced with digital displays that maintain the look of the originals (even harder). Paul presented a paper on this topic in Seoul last week — click on the picture below to read the text of it. Bottom line: time is running out to preserve these magnificent works. If you’d like to help the restoration effort please contact Paul at: pg(at)freethe.net

In 1969 SMPTE released standard 12M – a specification for applying a universal time code to video. Assigning a unique number to every video frame was critical to the development of electronic editing as it enabled a list of all the edits in a program to be compiled. Thus was born the Edit Decision List or EDL. CBS and Memorex formed a company called CMX Systems to build editing systems using time code and EDLs. If you’ve never known a world where you couldn’t edit cat videos on your iPhone your reaction might be “meh.” But this was some radical engineering at the time.

In 1971 CMX released their first product: the CMX-600 light pen random access editor. Wildly ahead of its time, it stored monochrome video in analog format on Memorex computer drives and used a DEC PDP-11 mini-computer to control the system via a light pen interface. The system only held 30 minutes of low quality video, the disk drives took up a few hundred square feet of floor space and it cost the equivalent of three million bucks in 2015 dollars. But this revolutionary machine was the forerunner of all modern non-linear editing systems.

Of the first five systems CMX sold three went to CBS, one to CFI in LA and one to Teletronics in NYC. I had the privilege of sharing an office with the CMX-600 disk farm at my first full time job as an engineer at Teletronics. Typing this post on my Mac workstation, with its 82 Terabytes of attached storage, I can’t say I miss the big multi-disk Memorex platters each of which held only 5 minutes of video. But I do have a fondness for the CMX-600 and a great appreciation of the monumental effort it took to create it. And there’s much to be said for a heavily air conditioned machine room.

Thanks to Robert Lund for the pictures below. Lundo left Bell Labs to join Teletronics as one of the first digital engineers in post production. He maintained the CMX-600, wrote custom software for it and had the temerity to hire me in 1981 to design and build hardware for him.

Joost Rekveld wrote a fascinating and detailed blog post about analog computing. Worth a look just for the vintage big-iron eye candy.  Click the image below to hop over to it (please do come back when you’re done).