Cracking Ray Tubes: Reanimating Analog Video in a Digital Context

Abstract

This paper investigates the aesthetic potentials of analog and digital hybridized systems to generate genuinely new sonic and visual experiences. The authors discuss their use of the cathode ray tube as a technological and cultural platform for real-time performance in the context of digital screen culture and the digital glitch.

Supplemental materials such as video files related to this article are available at <vimeo.com/86286587> and <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ0WjXUvVzw>

In the age of the digital copy and ultra portable, well-designed technological devices capable of capturing, receiving, generating and disseminating high-quality audio and video content at the click of a button, the cathode ray tube (CRT) exists as an obsolete, inefficient and utterly archaic piece of hardware. Having been out of production as consumer devices in the American market for years, and no longer accepted as donations at most thrift stores, the CRT monitor exists as a symbol of our rapid consumption/disposal-based society, an icon of technological obsolescence that can be found abandoned in warehouses, basements, alleyways, landfills and—occasionally—recycling centers.

Liberated from the bulky hardware of the CRT, the screen has come to permeate our daily lives in the form of smart-phones, tablets, laptops, liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors, flat screen televisions—the list could go on—that offer clean and efficient platforms for consumption and production, labor and leisure, access to networked information and communication platforms for both uploading and downloading. Whether we are watching a television show, editing a video, navigating a road trip or posting a photo, our lives are mediated by networked screen culture. As efficiently and beautifully designed objects, these screens exist as hard/software systems within interfaces embedded with latent commercial and political structures enforcing functionality, immediacy, automation and cleanliness. With emphasis on the perpetually new, the tech industry has fabricated a sociocultural dependency on obtaining the most recent technological “innovation.” Although these devices suggest or even promise the availability for new creative potential—e.g. smartphone applications for consumer audio and video creation—every new generation often introduces reformatted or even increased restrictions through imposed interface functionality and, as Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka describe, “black-boxing” [1] of internal circuitry/source code by preventing user serviceability or alteration, ensuring that users are unable to fully comprehend a device’s functionality.

Within these devices of seemingly flawless functionality, errors, blips, distortions and glitches—moments in which the seemingly invisible interface fractures to reveal a latent code or pixel-based materiality—become particularly powerful. When a user witnesses a glitch within seemingly flawless user interfaces, he is transferred from a state of passive consumption to one of active revelation and potential participation as the technology exposes its inner workings in material form. Glitch artists, through appropriation and activation of these errors and the purposeful misuse of devices, exploit inherent miscalculations of technology and expose not only the unexpected aesthetic materiality of digital malfunction, but also the social and political implications of modern digital technology.

In the context of supposed digital immateriality and the proliferation of screen-based consumption, the materiality of obsolete analog devices acquires a renewed power and potency, comparable to the digital glitch, that is capable of being aesthetically reappropriated to challenge technological, aesthetic, social and economic assumptions of the present. As new media and sound artists, we investigate the cathode ray tube not as a dead object of the past, but rather as a culturally valuable, emblematic product of our current material culture of obsolescence: a device that is capable of being revived and hybridized with advanced digital tools to generate genuinely new aesthetic experiences of latent musicality (Fig. 1), while simultaneously revealing repressed realities and rich potentials within contemporary technology that are often lost in the fetishization of the “new” within media studies and production.

Fig. 1.

Cracked Ray Tube performance, 2011. (Photo © Andy Rivera)

Fig. 2.

TV 06, still photograph from CRT television displaying wobbulated broadcast video, 2014...