“In fact, the glitch aesthetics advocated by Cascone as ‘post-digital’ are precisely the same kind of digital trash dismissed by ‘post-digital’ vinyl listeners.”
“What is commonly called ‘analog’ cinema film is actually a digital-analog hybrid: the film emulsion is analog, since its particles are undifferentiated blobs ordered organically and chaotically, and thus not reliably countable in the way that pixels are. The combined frames of the film strip, however, are digital since they are discrete, chopped up and unambiguously countable.”
–Cramer
After reading Cramer’s thoughts on the “post-digital” I am interested in the paradoxes within contemporary art fascinations with glitch aesthetics and the rejection of both the high-fidelity cleanness and the digital low quality. This reminded me of our conversations in section regarding film preservation and the choice of many conservators to maintain analog copies of films, as the physicality of the copy makes it easier to retrieve content than the fast paced changing digital formats and their corresponding playback devices. Whether this is a sign of the post-digital or a sign of the logics of preservation, it points to the fact that digitizing does not equate necessarily to preserving. As the manager of MoMA’s preservation center states, “despite every new wonder of electronics or digital format that comes along, the best source material for older works is still the film itself.” Perhaps, the hybridity within the concept of film itself makes the case for a hybrid approach to preservation. Could we characterize this as a form of post-digital preservation?