Photography & Video

A helpful commenter on my recent VHS generational loss experiment post alerted me [Thanks, W P Tunes!] to composer Alvin Lucier’s 1969 recording I Am Sitting in a Room (Wikipedia), which is one of the earliest and most significant artistic works based on generational data loss on repeated copying of electronic media. Lucier spoke a short text in a room, recorded it in that room, then played the recording back in the same room and recorded that. And did that over and over again. The quality of the piece would change depending on the acoustic properties of the room in which it was performed/recorded. You can hear a copy of the original recording here.

Now, YouTuber canzona has repeated Lucier’s experiment/work by uploading a video of himself speaking Lucier’s original text, ripping that video from YouTube, reuploading it, and repeating that process 1,000 times. His original recording is embedded uppermost, and the 1,000th generation below that. All the intervening generations are available in canzona’s channel. [via Boing Boing]

James over at Cinemassacre undertook to find out how many times you could copy VHS footage before it became completely unwatchable. It’s not exactly a well-controlled experiment: He doesn’t report the equipment he used to do the copying or the kind of tape involved and, somewhat annoyingly, he does not actually report the number of clips he spliced together to make his 3-minute video. Determining at what point the noisy footage is “unwatchable” is also sort of arbitrary. Still, interesting to watch. I personally counted 63 generations before the footage decayed into meaningless audiovisual noise. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]