Special | 7m 23s | Video has closed captioning.
We live in a digital world that gives us all the media we could possibly dream of at the click of a mouse, yet many people miss the old school physical formats from our past. The challenges these retro formats present to capturing and experiencing media actually enhance our appreciation for the sound or image, making the art we love a bit more intimate, and real.
Aired: 11/08/12
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[music playing] EILON PAZ: What makes vinyl unique and stand out is that it's just there.
It's physical.
It's tangible.
RYAN MARTIN: With an MP3, we can just discard it like it means nothing.
A tape, you have to want the music.
REBECCA CLEMAN: The VHS is this weird fetish object I think people really love because of its objectness.
ALBERT NIGRIN: Super 8 has a very specific look.
Nothing else looks like it.
DAVID BIAS: With respect to analog film, we want the photos to more closely match our memory.
[music playing] EILON PAZ: I wanted to start a photo project about a passion of mine, which is vinyl collecting.
When you play a vinyl record, it demands your attention.
And this is a way to connect to music.
Digital formats are really convenient, but they're easily forgotten as well.
I mean, if you ask anyone what was their first vinyl they bought, they'll probably remember that.
But I don't think a lot of people will remember what was their first MP3 download.
I think vinyl is more like an experience that you will experience more at home.
You have to take it out.
You have to put it on the turntable.
We have to put the needle on.
These are all, like, actions that demand attention from you.
And then you have to, like, keep your attention and wait until the side is done, and then you have to flip the record.
So it's definitely for people who are into music, into art, into details.
When CDs came out, it almost killed the vinyl industry.
But now with MP3s and iPods full of music that you don't even remember, I think this is actually causing vinyl to come back just because we lost touch with music.
It's an archival format.
It will stay with us forever.
[music playing] ALBERT NIGRIN: 8 mm came out as a response to 16 mm.
And Kodak came out with this format so middle-class people could afford to make movies.
It looks so different from digital in the sense that it gives it a dreamy quality because of the grain.
There's so much pixelation that goes on with Super 8 film that it really makes it look unique.
I think it's a purely aesthetic choice.
If you want to create an atmosphere that's oneiric or otherworldly, then Super 8 film might be the thing for you.
There's a ton of movies that incorporate Super 8.
Benjamin Hayden, he made a filed called "Pick."
And it's basically a woman in a kind of dreamy environment.
It was just so easy to look at.
And it was very compelling and like nothing else I had seen.
Richard Kern, he is another fellow that made Super 8 films that were very, very punky.
And he would scratch the film up on purpose.
Super 8 film will certainly make it even more gritty and interesting.
The look of the film is, I think, it's main selling point, versus the kind of hollow and empty feeling that digital can produce.
And I think that's what drew me to it.
[music playing] RYAN MARTIN: Cassettes-- a lot of people use the argument that there's a resurgence in popularity, but I think the format just moved somewhere else.
In the early '90s, hip hop culture really relished in tapes.
Dance music did.
Tapes were a way you got your demo out.
Now I would say a majority of where tapes go to are this very small, minute group of people within subgenres of noise music-- avant-garde folk music, really experimental stuff, a lot of drone things, kind of field recording music-- things where the audience is very niche.
So a cassette is a cheap way to get music to these 50 people that will really appreciate this.
If you're pressing on vinyl, you need at least a couple thousand people that are gonna care.
And it costs thousands of dollars-- the same with CDs.
With certain avant-garde listening, the format really lends itself to that style of music.
And then these pieces tend to be a bit longer.
So with cassettes, you can control the length.
Home recording has made massive advances.
Now I can make an album in the night sitting on my bed watching TV, dub it on a cassette, and voila, a release is born.
So cassettes are an easy way for them to get their music out inexpensively in a physical format to the people that are gonna care in a short amount of time.
[music playing] REBECCA CLEMAN: VHS constituted nothing short of a revolution and a sea change in how individuals related to television, I think for artists that are interested in the artifact that VHS has become.
In the '80s, VHS won the format wars against a superior format Betamax.
Mainly because of its low quality, it could actually boast a longer recording time.
I think partly because of this, it is enjoying a resurgence, especially within the horror genre.
Horror films, like "Paranormal Activity 3," really pick up on what happens when you let a camera run unattended for hours.
In terms of aesthetically about VHS, it's owing to VHS's very poor quality.
As an example, Harmony Korine's "Trash Humpers," he really drew out in that film glitchiness-- the bended image, the ghosting, the color fading, the static disruptions or the dropouts.
But I also think what comes through in "Trash Humpers," in particular, is this idea of recycling VHS, kind of collaging things that you recorded on top of the same tape.
So you'd have this really weird assemblage.
There's something really great and mysterious about VHS tapes, that like ominous black cassette tape and what it might hold.
DAVID BIAS: With [inaudible] instant film, we were really interested in this idea that analog instant film has a sort of bridging between the film world and the digital world.
Film and digital can exist simultaneously, and it gives you a choice.
Digital has a very specific look, and everybody has that look.
So any kind of photographer that was looking to set themselves apart from the mainstream went back to film or picked up film for the first time.
And it still has all the warmth and chemical chaos that digital still to this day lacks.
Analog film has all these crazy things that can happen to it that make it really beautiful.
[music playing] Some people might call them errors.
There would be cracks in the film.
There would be these little patches at the top where the paste didn't spread all the way because the rollers in the camera were a little bit loose.
And black and white films use an oxidation process which is like rust.
And so if you don't dry out the image in an appropriate amount of time, it continues to oxidize inside the frame and it starts to look kind of weird.
Some people love this weirdness, and they let their pictures purposely go that way.
This creates a situation where serendipity is frequent.
You almost have to rely on it for a really beautiful photo.
I like the choice of using digital or film.
And I don't think one is necessarily better or worse than the other.
I just want the choice.
[music playing] ALBERT NIGRIN: Film has withstood the test of time.
In fact, a lot of my students like to shoot on film because it makes their work stick out.
REBECCA CLEMAN: In terms of VHS now, part of the fascination is that there's nothing really anyone can do to keep it from becoming this obviously relic.
EILON PAZ: We're losing intimacy in music.
When you play a vinyl record, you get to enjoy it in a different sense.
RYAN MARTIN: Cassettes are really cheap and distributed pretty quickly.
All you need is an idea.
DAVID BIAS: We've made a medium.
And we've encouraged people to use the medium and to make it beautiful.
[music playing]
