Skeletons in the machine
The examples in this chapter either utilize or imitate the signs, errors and noise phenomena that are peculiar to the environment of that work. The goal may be to examine or question the nature of the machines used, thus revitalizing the machines (for example, by revealing the loading or compression principles behind a video file) rather than covering them as in traditional films. Usually, these signs are undesirable and can be compared to Freudian slips, originating from the machinic subconscious of film history, which we try to suppress but which haunts the images of popular culture and are disregarded as "error".
In the digital environment, we can encounter a playback buffering or an image pixelating. But at the same time, we are also increasingly seeing that digital film machines are actually imitating and integrating the flaws and noise phenomena of the analog environments. There are various connotations associated with the use of these effects, e.g. to signal authenticity, "old days" or familiarity, such as when the streaming service HBO Nordic's logo uses analog flicker to brand their "TV" series. Or the effects are used simply to imitate film gauge or video footage when the actual formats are not available. Finally, in more stylistic applications they contributes to creating "depth" in the graphic expression. An example is DR's documentary Skeletons in Skat (2016) whose arbitrary use of analog noise could provoke as much indignation among film format connoisseurs as the revelation of the political scandals did for the normal part of the population. The series combines, on the one hand, errors from the plastic-mechanical environment, such as scratches in the film strip, red glimpses of accidental exposures and framelines, and on the other hand, electronic glitch, such as TV flickering, "videotape" rupture and undulating scanlines, in a side by side format confusion. A few times even within the same clip! The style does not distinguish sharply between signs of different machinic origins, and it creates a discourse that, first of all, continues a simplified analogue/digital dichotomy (cf. introduction), and furthermore transpose the signs that were originally indexes into conventional symbols that simply signify any "non-digital noise".
In the film medium, too, a material turn must deal with "the increasingly disembodied nature of information and images in a digital age" (Anderson 2015: 6), as when digital practice detaches these signs from their original context. Another problem that points to the same issue is the show's consistent use of visible frameline to signify a transition from one scene to the next. Typically, the visible frameline is something that goes on for a long time and does not depend on the cuts of the film reel (as Duck Amuck demonstrates), but in Skeletons in SKAT it looks like the "projector-gate" is failing as a consequence of the changing scenes.
Finally, there is a noticeable omission of digital noise - as if one shouldn't think it was the state funded signal that was failing - and to complete the psychoanalytic reading on this point, this discourse enforce a polarizing ideology, where the non-digital and error-filled stands in exact contrasts to the digital and error-free.
In the conclusion, I will return to this case to discuss how it's practice may be a consequence of the digital editing program as a film machine. But for now, it shall only serve to illustrate that the mimicry of noise and error across environments has challenged the static sign as a way to detect material imprints. In response to this destabilization, over the next three chapters, I will develop the algorithm, as a possible model for a more dynamic concept of signs that both continues the characteristics of the environment but also traces the imprints of film machines in the way in which they create movements, transformations and unification of motifs.
