When visualising the absence of timecode depicted on the LCD counter of Noah's video editor as an abstract jumble of non characters and glitches, The Ring signifies a crisis of language and a disruption of understanding. Within horror genre, this is another step away from any safe, quotidian, perception of reality. It evokes the supernaturally charged archaic runic symbols of M. R. James' Casting the Runes, the technological defiance of The Golem and the horror of the unutterable as described by Lovecraft.
This imagery is fortified by Noah's erroneous and anthropomorphic description of video timecode as being akin to a human finger print and the glitchy symbols denoting their absence. This posits the tape's contents not only as uncanny other but as a lying beyond the realm of identification or any normal sense of ontology, perhaps their lack of symbolic function locating them as glimpses of a horrific Real.
Similarly, the Macrovision signal, referred to in it's patent application as consisting of a random, pseudo-random and predetermined pattern distribution of pseudo-sync pulses, is a disruptive non-signal and as such cannot be read. Like the anomaly identified by Noah it is merely error generating; a recording from a unknowable source and of a technological ontology shrouded in no small amount of intrinsically intentional and commercially rooted mystery.
The task of these pseudo signals is to negatively effect and disrupt any copy made of the recording within which they are concealed; to corrupt and smear it to the point that it has become useless, abject or to use the intention stated in the patent application, the become unacceptable. This smearing is also present in the trope on Noah's timecode display. These broken decimal numerical signifiers whose integrity is so taken for granted, almost a priori, as to make them seem invulnerable has been dragged from their quotidian stability, they too have become unacceptable.
Noah later experiences distortion and becoming unacceptable when his own image is smeared on the screen of a grocery store's CCTV system. Like the corrupted timecode this highly economical special effect succeeds in evoking a sense of horror very well. The image on the screen, almost a mirror, presenting an opto-electric facsimile of Noah, suggests he has not copied well. Like sensitives, pets and spooky kids as employed in a multitude of horror movie tropes, technology serves to look beneath the surface and show the, occasionally horrible, truth. When mechanical reproducibility asserts it's own eerie aura it leaves little doubt that something has not worked out.¹
Despite Noah's authoritative AV credibility (Noah functions as a low emotion, logicist, expert. If Noah thinks something is awry, our genre savvy tells us we should take heed) not all video recordings contain timecode ² but when they do they can be located in the same area as Macrovision. The Vertical Blanking Interval's versatility as a payload provides a secure and hidden storage space for Vertical Interval Time Code (VITC) just as it does for for anti-copy protection. Despite Noah's misrepresentation genuine versions of 'Video Fingerprinting', which has nothing to do with timecode but concerns the assignment a unique hidden signature to a video recording for anti-piracy purposes, appear to have also utilised blanking intervals – albeit the Horizontal Blanking Interval further ³.
Also, VITC allocates a space for 32 bits 'User Bits' of user defined information or annotation, which can comprise of digits or letters. So in theory Noah's description of time code is not impossible, adding to what Nicholas Rombes refers to as 'uncanny associations'; here specifically between the anti-copy objectives of The Ring, as described by Caetlin Benson-Allott and the technology and UX qualities of the genuine anti-copy system, Macrovision.⁴
The proposal of video possessing a fingerprint, or in this case lacking one, suggests a video anthropomorphism or animism considered elsewhere by Caetlin Benson-Allott and Ina Blom⁵. It also brings to mind the fingerprint as one of the go-to models for the semiotic index if only to remind us that VHS may have been analogue but it's indexicality was and remains more theoretical than observable. A single field of VHS video, that is a screen filled with odd or even lines providing half of a full screen image, is recorded on to tape in a track around 9cm long and 0.049mm wide. Two of these tracks interlace to provide a full frame. As each frame will comprise of 250 lines we can see that any individual line occupies a piece of tape far smaller than a pin head. Analogue video is not indexical in the same sense that can be said of analogue photography, moving image film or even most sound recording media⁶. When stored on tape, the video signal, which is of course invisible to the eye, has been further encoded and obfuscated by Frequency Modulation for purposes achieving higher quality images. A VHS videotape recording, then, is thrice removed from a true and appreciable indexical relationship to it's subject; in it's dimensions, encoding and loss of visibility as magnetic recording on entirely uniform tape. The magnetic video tracks are so insubstantial, that dusting of the tape surface with powdered iron filings, a method for viewing magnetic recordings, reveals nothing. Only the relatively heavy percussion of the control track on the tapes edge is visible.
This could also be said of the CRT TVs and monitors seen in The Ring. Analogue screens of this type never truly depicted and image. If analogue film creates an illusion of moving images, analogue video took the subterfuge a stage further with an illusion of a the single images that an illusory moving image are then formed of. If analogue video is truly indexical of anything, it would be a single dot or beam of light. Just as mechanical television economically (if ultimately impractically) made use of a single light sensor tucked behind a spinning disc, the video tube camera and it's corresponding dipslay media, the CRT, collected and displayed images with a single fast moving electron beam moving in parallel lines. The entire moving image technology, therefore only views or displays, and is only indexical to, a single point of light at any given time.⁷
So in this sense Noah's observation on the ontology of Samaras tape serves as meta critique of a moribund format, it's lack or indexicality but moreover it's elusive status within semiotic classification – even when declared spent and obsolete.
Noah's proposition that every video recording contains a signature, a record of it's own origin may have it's own origins in a technology that was emerging in consumer markets at the time of The Ring's production. In the early 2000s digital still photography was fast becoming a desirable and affordable alternative to analogue film and with came new takes on the technological uncanny. EXIF metadata, encoded into every image file saved by the camera, contains information on the device itself as well as when and how it was used. VITC time code was a digital signal inserted into an analogue media and as The Ring was produced at a time of widespread A to D conversion, might Noah's fingerprint/signature also have betrayed anxiety about some of the, yet to be comprehended, emergent successors to analogue media? Moments of transition illicit anxiety and the The Ring's glitchy time code representing a weird digital lurking unseen within the analogue, would in horror genre systems, usually suggest the potential for imminent attack.
(1) Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of California Press p125
(2) ibid, p116 All analogue videotape recordings do contain a control track which is read by a separate head to regulate the speed of the tape as suggested by Caetlin Benson-Allot , though this does not effect the 'scan' rate as such – rather the rate at which the tape is passed across revolving/scanning drum head. The control track is not, as suggested, timecode. Though there was a system that embedded an SMPTE time code into the control track (CTL) this method was rarely employed.
(3) I was given information on this technology, seemingly something of an in-shop self build at a 90s VHS duplication facility, via an online forum. It's unverified and I haven't cleared permission to share with the provider/poster yet. More info on request!
(4)Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 2009 Columbia University Press, and Caetlin Benson-Allott, ibid.
(5) CBA, VCR Autopsy, journal of visual culture, 2007 and Ina Blom, Introduction to The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (2016), Sternberg Press, p19
(6) grooves on an LP, an undulating wave on an optical film track which match the Cymatic movements of speaker diaphragm or other physical bodies effected by sound
(7) As contemporary high speed imaging demonstrates clearer than ever before – visual demonstration here - The Slo Mo Guys - How a TV works in Slow Motion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJU2drrtCM
No comments:
Post a Comment