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Pressed into the Service of Cinema: Issues in Preserving the Software of Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab

2012; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mov.2012.0024

1542-4235

Andy Uhrich,

Cinema and Media Studies

Pressed into the Service of Cinema:Issues in Preserving the Software of Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab Andy Uhrich (bio) The landscape of the epic attempt in art is of course dotted with ruins, and some of the ruins are as noble as completed work. In fact, some of them, of course, are things that one cherishes very much. —Hollis Frampton [End Page 18] From 1977 to 1984, filmmaker, photographer, and writer Hollis Frampton turned his creative attention to the aesthetic potential of the computer. Frampton is best known for his conceptually rigorous films and writings that investigated the origins of media forms with a focus on the relationship between language and image. Despite now being seen as a preeminent practitioner and theorist of the photochemical arts in works such as (nostalgia) (1971) and his 1965 essay "Some Propositions on Photography," Frampton expressed numerous reasons for incorporating the digital into his artistic and critical efforts. The computer in its very nature of operating algorithmically had clear resonances with his avant-garde practice based on analytical dissection and repetition. It represented the realization of his passion for bridging science and the arts. Furthermore, Frampton hoped to introduce a humanizing [End Page 19] contingency into the overregulating impulse of computer technology. Click for larger view View full resolution "UB Professor Hollis Frampton at computer console . . . making art with computers." Photograph from a Courier Express article on the Digital Arts Lab, dated October 24, 1980. E. H. Butler Library, Buffalo State College Archive. Frampton took advantage of the new accessibility to digital technology offered by the introduction of microcomputers such as MITS's Altair 8080 (1975) and Processor Technology's Sol-20 (1977). In 1977, he cofounded the Digital Arts Lab (DAL) with video artist Woody Vasulka, under the auspices of the University of Buffalo's Center for Media Study (CMS), where both were teaching at the time. Under the direction of Gerald O'Grady, the CMS provided students an education in experimental media practice that was technologically up to date, theoretically advanced, and media agnostic. Though the DAL added digital media to the CMS's pedagogical training in film and video, Frampton's interest in computer art should be contextualized within the intermedial explorations of both the CMS and the larger upstate New York electronic media arts community.1 Additionally, Frampton was by no means the only media artist exploring the computer at the time. Vasulka's efforts in digital art were perhaps more successful than Frampton's and are equally deserving of preservation and scholarly investigation, though such an effort lies outside of this article's focused ambit. At a time when personal computers came in kits requiring a great deal of technical skill to assemble, and there were few, if any, off-the-shelf programs to manipulate [End Page 20] sound and images, Frampton and his students constructed a functioning computer system that allowed artists control over digital media at their constitutive elements. With original DAL software such as DEMON (1979) and IMAGO (1981), audio and video could be acted on at the level of the sample or pixel. This accomplishment, advanced for the time but quotidian now, was made possible through the creation of one-of-a-kind hardware such as the DAL's frame buffer, GOLEM (1981-83).2 Owing to Frampton's untimely death in 1984 at the age of forty-eight, and outside advancements in computer technology overtaking the DAL's technical and aesthetic achievements, their software never attained widespread implementation. As such, this significant portion of Frampton's late career has remained underexamined in the invigorating critical reevaluation that his writings, photographs, and films have received over the last decade.3 This article's initial attempt to redress that oversight was engendered by the collection of Frampton's eight-inch floppy disks and printouts of computer code held at Anthology Film Archives (AFA) in New York City.4 A discussion of conserving those archival objects is inseparably linked to a consideration of Frampton's intentions toward computer technology. In that light, the work that follows crosses between the fields of archival science and film history. To replace the artist interview, which is an...