Unfinished essay scrap

[...] the real tangible texture of a vhs tape [conveys] the aesthetic of the decay of the medium, the conceptualisation of a rotting corpse embedded in the very way the corpse is struggling to communicate (@_C6507 (vivian raine))

The further back you go in time, the lower-quality the recordings tend to be. I can't help but think of it as a kind of underwater abyss, and it often gives me the same cold, sick feeling in my gut as being over deep water does. If I were on a boat above the Marianas Trench, it would likely evoke the same feeling as blurry, degraded photos from the earlier half of the 1800s, woodcuts by poorly documented artists, anonymous medieval marginalia, the outlines of lost information. As you go down, everything gets more and more fragmentary and waterlogged, until all you have is blurry scraps with the signal all but lost in noise, before all thats left is that noise itself, and all you can meaningfully say is that something was here once. Memories left unretrieved for years and sitting perched over oblivion, and the vague traces of memories that have long since made that plunge into irretrievability but that leave faint imprints where they used to be. (The same phenomena remains in modern contexts, possibly in an even more immediate and visceral sense; in blurry webcam stills and abandoned online presences, "presence" used in the same ghostly sense as "spectre" or "phantom”; digital cenotaphs that still seem to be haunted by something left behind.)

Digital recordings are haunted by compression - sift through older, forgotten YouTube videos and you'll soon find one that's rendered almost abstract and incomprehensible by a garbling haze of 144p artifacting, message (if there was one) lost in the failure of the medium itself. The anonymous nature of online accounts further facilitates this disconnected element: almost always there is no name, no context, and no information attached, and all you're left with in the vast majority of cases is simply an orphaned memory, recorded and made accessible without a past or a future, presuming anything at all content-wise is decipherable beyond the blur and MP4 artifacts. They're caught between memory and forgetting, partway decomposed into data loss. There's a sense of the unheimlich about these abandoned media fragments, both online and analog, a sense of the departed still speaking, of faint noises and words from behind the veil of forgetting whose meaning you can't quite make out out but can't fully ignore either. Maybe you can decipher a word here or there but it never seems to come into focus, you can just watch the blurry shadows on the other side of the fogged glass and wonder, or try to pretend they aren't there when you know they are.