[...] I am particularly enamored by the trend in some music videos to use transparently fake VHS filters, seemingly not in sincere attempts to resemble the grainy rot-texture of the decayed, time-worn physical media it imitates, but as a deliberately synthesized, artificial rendition of that aesthetic [...] (/watch?v=gCLwXyoB3XY) [...] Parallels can be seen in the use of autotune in the same musical scene; a tool designed for the correction of errors in pitch is instead used to de-tune and distort, and while conventional autotune usage goes hand-in-hand with its own concealment (making less than pitch-perfect pop stars voices into radio-ready material with as little attention drawn to the audio airbrushing applied as possible,) here the artifact of the technology, its presence itself, becomes the defining signature of this particular cloud rap style. Autotune becomes a co-singer. (Maybe remove this part) [...] Absolutely no one is fooled by the cheap VHS overlay, and I don’t think the intention is to fool anyway (although plenty of less media-savvy, more trend-hopping artists certainly do so - here I refer only to those who use it deliberately and are fully aware of its unconvincingness.) It’s a distinct phenomena from the lo-fi aesthetic/tendencies that preceded it, such as genuinely VHS-recorded videos or tape-recorded bedroom demos. It’s more akin to the addition of cassette clicks bookending a digitally-produced track or the usage of prepackaged vinyl crackle SFX (both tropes often seen in lo-fi hip hop,) blatantly ripped from YouTube or a sample pack. The track in question has nothing to do with that medium, it doesn’t otherwise carry its texture or connotations; these SFX serve as a kind of obligatory nod to a non-digital framework to simultaneously reap the benefit of the digital medium while carrying some semantic pointer to a non-digital medium as a kind of disarming gesture. You can thus interact with an MP3 or MP4 without having to deal with what it is [...] a kind of antithesis of net art, a deliberately anti-net art gesture, an attempted negation of it as internet art - an attempt at removing, in a lazy enough manner to reveal its slight-of-hand, the capacity for it to be taken within its digital context. [...] Pure faux-”nostalgic” cultural pointers that indicate not personal nostalgia but the hollow suggestion of a hollow suggestion of it, thirdhand simulacra for post-nostalgic generations born after the death of futurism in which the mere suggestion of any time or technology beyond the present is sufficient for their aesthetic purposes. 2000s camera compression, tape hiss, VHS filters, anything will do [...] As the cultural debris of previous generations, having permeated the digital landscape, obtain reanimated afterlives not as an accidental feature of no-budget media but as signifiers pointing to that kind of media, playing a kind of aesthetic dress up. The shitty VHS overlay acts as a curtain between clear footage of reality and the viewer, abstracting it as a self-aware recording as opposed to the pure reality it documents; a flashing neon light shouting “this is a memory,” shielding the video from the unforgiving clarity of HD footage [...] an attempt to attach the semantic/visual weight of years of media rot as soon as it comes into existence (or at least as soon as it is uploaded.) The same case could be made of more authentic efforts at positioning the video in a recorded past - genuine digitized camcorder footage, secondhand 2000s digital cameras, the usage of hardware and recording techniques that position the footage in a distinct era of the past - but the lazy usage of filters probably shows this concept at its most basic and minimal and in doing so reveals exactly why it is done; the self-awareness of digital media produced by post-internet denizens that actively doesn’t want the weight of its digital nature attached to it, or try to point back to the indefinite past as an escape of present aesthetic and cultural trappings. (This one's kinda shit, sorry. Wrote it all in one sitting.)
mm. the utility of this nostalgic aesthetic gesture can be interesting but i think difficult too to chart out (to build an analysis of). i've tried at times to come up with macro narratives for why people are using these fake vhs effects (and fake film grain too) in their music videos. my current thinking is that it is that people are sometimes ending up in the same place for different reasons.
ReplyDeletei think animated ways to come at it, though, can be stuff like, how are these technologies circulating? how are these ideas circulating? how are these images being produced (and reproduced)? it's about a way of seeing thru detritus as inheritence. what may be underexamined, in my opinion, is, what are the ideologies and functions of these initial conditions that here are trying to be (faux) salvaged and brandished as pastiche-scrap part? (e.g., of digital cameras; what was the political economy of that? to which this is where i think the answer is being, it depends place to place; which i would still maintain is true of in the net, as the net is still a place, in those data centers and all the rest)
i don't know how much you would get out of it, but i think some of your questions might relate to the Lebanese movie Do You Love Me from last year; which is having questions of some of these things in relation to issues of access to a national archive / a history of national image. i maybe still have some questions about this film in regard to its positional relation to empire vis-a-vis its being in international film festival circuits, but i thought aesthetically the film was advancing some theoretically compelling things.
also, i guess to self-promo somewhat, it's that i'd attempted to approach similar questions (but in a context of fabricated analog aesthetics in the context of web horror media) in a essay / post i had did last year - https://legitsalt.neocities.org/essays/post17
(the terms of play are not always all they're cracked up to be)