The logistic ins and outs of executing my proposed activity will unfold in due course, but right now, disrupting temporal linearity in the same way digital video editing allows me to skip the endless running through film footage backwards and forwards to find the clip I want to splice next onto the growing ribbon of celluloid wound on the Steenbeck plate, I want to write my thoughts that came directly after a workshop at no.w.here lab.
Its a long train journey, Kings Cross to Hull, so I got time to reflect on how I was feeling after a day of having a Bolex camera in my hands again, and sitting in front of a Steenbeck watching the flickering image dragged past my eyes at twentyfour frames per second. It felt good. It felt exciting. It felt like being home after a long time away, having fun while you were there, wherever it was that wasn’t here, but being so so happy to be home. But it also felt sad. I felt sad at the possibility that that word, that concept ‘new’ that got recently tagged onto ‘technology’ had served to sever our relationship with so much that now could only be ‘old’. I decided the title of the blog post recounting these ideas would be Has technology killed technology? I also decided to google (now a verb and therefore sporting only a lower case ‘g’) that very question to see if other people have been asking it and framing their analysis of obsolescence within the development of tools in such a way. Strangely, nowhere on the vast playing field that is the internet, did Google find such a string of words, so instead it offered me lots of discussion on the topic Has technology killed creativity? For me, this was just as, if not more interesting to share than my thoughts on (new) technology killing (old) technology.
The last time I clutched the handle on the side of my Bolex and wound it fiercely before holding the camera up and squeezing the roll release, was in a steeply sloping field in southern Spain with a herd of multicoloured and multisized goats moving towards me in a multilegged wave. That was in April 2005. In December 2005 I didn’t take my Bolex to Argentina. I had spent my cash, hard-earned as Digital Co-ordinator at Peacock Visual Arts and Lead Digital Artist on the New Dynamics programme and Digital Animator for a project with Helix Arts, on a teeny tiny digital video camera that fitted in my pocket at a push, and in a neat little vanity case if I wanted to carry extra tapes and power supply at the same time. The Bolex, even with Switar zoom lens removed and packed alongside, required a metal flight case, plus a dark bag for tricky reloading in daylight situations, and cans of film that add up a weight, and cost quite a bit so every shot is so precious.
So how did I ever manage in the south of Spain six months earlier?
