AUTOPSIES: THE AFTERLIFE OF DEAD OBJECTS

SABA CP 23 Baladeur [Walkman] (advert first broadcast on French television, 1 May 1990)

L’Institut national de l’audiovisual (INA, or National Audiovisual Institute), was established in 1974 to take responsibility for archiving French radio and television programmes. In 1999, when INA began a sixteen year project to digitise its collections, 60% of the television programmes and 90% of radio programmes held in the archive only existed as a single copy in its original state. Between 1999 and 2015 INA is digitising its complete professional archives. In 2006, the INA archive held 2.3 million hours of footage, of which 1 million hours is television footage.

The great majority of this material dates from 1995 (when French law required all television programmes to be archived) to the present day, and with the introduction of dozens of new digital terrestrial television channels in recent years, the archive will not take long to double in size. Before the television legal deposit law, INA could only preserve a select portion of television output, however, its professional archives, including its historic archives (between the 1930s and 1974), are a dense and rich treasure trove for historians.

Not only is INA undertaking the extraordinary task of digitising all its material, currently held on scores of different types of obsolete tapes, films and other media, but it is also making access to its archive as widely available as possible. While accredited researchers can consult the entire digitised output of the legal deposit and fonds of the five professional archives at the Inathèque in Paris, the whole world can view a selection of the material on INA's public website. Viewing most items is free of charge, and some clips can be downloaded for a small fee.

Since June 2009, the most recent addition to the online version of the archive is the ina.pub pages, which holds 200,000 television advertisements from the last forty years (1968 to the near present). As a taster to this remarkable source, these videos show a number of adverts for products that are now on our dead objects list.

Jacob Paskins

[please note videos may take a short moment to load before they play]

The domestic hair dryer was invented in the 1920s and relied upon a mechanism through which hot air was produced by heating a wire element which could be directed by a fan. Due to their use of heavy materials and industrial design, domestic hair dryers failed to gain in popularity until the post-war period. The hair dryer used for this ‘autopsy’ was a 1936 design by the Ormond Electrical Engineering Company, who also manufactured radios. The hair dryer was produced in Clerkenwell, London and the design survived until 1962. This particular design was featured in Which magazine’s first assessment of the domestic appliance.

The hair dryer could be purchased in cream or brown imitation walnut (made from urea/phenol plastics) and came housed in a Bakelite vanity case with a comb and mirror. The element would be formed from chromium and nickel wire, wrapped around a mika or asbestos board.

I have been unable to trace the materials used in this model of Ormond hair dryer but reports suggest that in any model of hair dryer pre-dating 1980, asbestos was likely to have been used (needless to say safety precautions were taken when handling the autopsied object).

A Ghost of the Past

Hair dryers are not in the conventional sense ‘dead.’ They continue to sell today in designs similar to, or even replicating those from the 1930s. When I purchased this particular hair dryer, I was told that it was still in working condition; had I plugged it in, it would have switched on.

It is not the hair dryer which is dead but the materials which form the components inside it. An appliance which may blow chrysotile—or white asbestos—particles into the air is a dangerous and potentially deadly object.[i]

Asbestos was banned from import and use in the UK on August 24, 1999, in line with EU regulations. In a case not entirely dissimilar from that of the use of lead (explored by the Autopsies group below), industry lobbyists were keen to disassociate the cause and effects of asbestos inhalation. The British Asbestos Newsletter described how ‘The Asbestos Institute (AI), a Canadian body set up in 1984 to "maximise the use of existing resources in a concerted effort to defend and promote the safe use of asbestos on a global scale," went on red alert’ when French investigations began to expose the risks of exposure to the material.[ii]

The health risks posed by asbestos had long been a political policy issue and cause for debate: it is reported that on coming to power as prime minister ‘Blair expressed his determination to "deal effectively with the problems of asbestos."’[iii] 

Investigations into the inhalation of asbestos particles preceded this by nearly a century according to journalist Geoffrey Lean. He refers to Montague Murray, a doctor at a Charing Cross hospital, as treating patients with asbestosis in 1899.[iv]

Lean also states that an estimated 3,000 people continued to die from exposure to asbestos in 1999, a figure which rivalled the 3,400 deaths occurring through road traffic accidents.[v] Asbestos found in cladding, insulation, cement, toasters and working hair dryers could still be accounting for deaths today and most certainly renders the working object obsolete.

Rebecca Harrison

Notes
[i] Richmond Borough Council. ‘Asbestos Guide.’ 
[ii] British Asbestos Newsletter issue 39. 
[iii] Laurie Kazan-Allen. ‘Asbestos Finally Banned in the United Kingdom.’ 
[iv] Geoffrey Lean. ‘Asbestos Deaths to Soar Despite Ban.’ In The Independent. December 12, 1999. 
[v] Geoffrey Lean. ‘Asbestos Deaths to Soar Despite Ban.’ In The Independent. December 12, 1999. 

In 1939, technological innovator, Vannevar Bush (1890 – 1974) wrote a memo noting his ideas for a machine that would revolutionise the interaction of readers with their libraries.

This electromechanical machine, the ‘Memex’ (a compound of memory and extension), would store the contents of thousands of volumes within a few cubic metres of desk-space.  Texts would be condensed into micro-photographic film records, which, at the press of a button or manoeuvre of a lever, could be viewed on screens, to “furnish a compressed time scale for a shrunken world”. Upon the typing of an index code, page images would be brought into view - a time-saving retrieval of information, and way of creating associations between texts. 

This process of association-making Bush described as the making of memory trails. These ‘trails’, Bush envisaged, would be analogous to the connections of neural pathways in the user’s mind, inscribing personal memory links between written material to support and improve “man’s processes of thought”, methods of classification, and the scientific record. Unlike links in human memory, the trails inscribed by the Memex would not fade over time, but act as mechanical traces to create novel associations for readers and enable the recall of information stored in physical media swiftly.

Bush’s imaginative engineering, contemporary to H. G. Wells’ utopic ideas for a ‘Permanent World Encylopedia’, was never brought into material existence. The Memex is not therefore a dead object. The ideas behind the machine, though, live on, having inspired early forms of the digital networks we rely on today. Hypertext inventor, Ted Nelson, and modern web architect Tim Berners-Lee, acknowledge the influence of Bush’s manifestos on their construction of internet models. A conceptual autopsy of the internet would reveal layers of code distantly derived from Bush’s foresight.

As readers now flick through multiple web pages, fielded from one hypertext link to the next, a course of trails is produced through the material they read. Today this process of trail creation is integrated into the make-up of the Web. It does not exist to improve our memory capacity, or enable us retrieve information instantaneously (Google does the latter for us). But when we harvest the links posted on blogs, or browse the del.icio.us links of others, we are able to share information collectively, and place our own digital bookmarks. 

As digital realms continue to evolve – to augment, complement and confuse contemporary society - so too do our systems of classification, information access and reading practice.

“Undoubtedly man will learn to make his aircraft fly faster... but what can he do to mechanically improve a book?”, Bush writes, in 1939. For this question, we are still in search of an answer. 


Hannah Gregory
Autopsies reading group participant



All quotes from Vannevar Bush, ‘Mechanization and the Record’, in Nyce J. M. and Kahn, P. (eds), From Memex to Hypertext, Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine (Academic Press, 1991).

Sources:

Nielson J., Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet & Beyond (Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 1995).

Link to Bush’s outline essay of his ideas in 1945, ‘As We May Think’ in Atlantic Monthly, which was also published in a condensed version in Life magazine.

A bout de souffle (dir. Jean-Luc Godard) first came out in cinemas in France on 16 March 1960. Members of the Autopsies Group will no doubt be turning to their copy with fresh eyes on the lookout for objects now absent from everyday life (Patricia's vinyl collection, the many tools of the trades of journalists and photographers, the operator controlled telephone system, etc. etc.) In the meantime, this clip from a French television programme broadcast on 25 March 1960 shows an interview with jazz pianist Martial Solal who performed the original music for the film. Solal explains he discovered jazz aged 15 when American troops arrived in Algiers in 1943, and jazz records began to be played on the radio, introducing the music of Art Tatum, Kenny Wilson and Benny Goodman. Inspired by the editing techniques of Godard's film, Solal says he found it easy to come up with the refrains to 'punctuate' the sequences.


Fifty years on, A bout de souffle looks, and sounds, a fresh as ever. 

While carrying out research into Paris transport networks I recently came across an image that seemed strangely familiar. Illustrating one of the many proposed transport projects for the Paris region during the 1960s was a photo of a suspended metro train. The project has now been completely forgotten and despite lengthy development and testing the technology was never adopted in France. And yet the suspended metro is known the world over for it is immortalised in François Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451. In the film, adapted from Ray Bradbury's novel, the suspended metro appears in the daily commute between the city centre and the residential suburbs. On board, Clarisse notices her neighbour Montag, and the two establish a friendship on the daily commute to their respective jobs in the fire station and school.

Truffaut made the suspended metro sequences on a location shoot near Orléans in France. In 1959, engineering film SAFEGE built a 1370 metre track at Châteauneuf sur Loire to conduct tests for a new form of rapid and silent public transport. The project generated much interest from abroad but before the company could sell the technology it would first have to build a working system in France. When Truffaut's team arrived for filming at the test track in March 1966 development for the SAFEGE metro was at its height, and the system seemed likely to be rolled out imminently for commercial operations. At least two proposals were developed for the Parisian suburbs, but the first was rejected due to technical difficulties, and the second abandoned in October 1966 for financial reasons.

A few years later the test track was dismantled and the carriage was sold for scrap. By chance, however, the unit immortalised on film by Fahrenheit 451 escaped the smelter and after providing a home for the iron merchant's son it was used as a chicken hut. Discovered in a field in 1991, the carriage was bought by members of a local association (ARSATI) interested in the history of the Aérotrain - another experimental transport system developed near Orléans in the 1960s and 70s. After restoring the carriage in 1994, ARSATI planned to display the SAFEGE metro in a museum dedicated to innovative transport, but sadly the unique metro was vandalised and the project abandoned.

Truffaut wrote he was determined to use the suspended metro in his film, and remarked that even though it seemed out of date compared to the neighbouring high speed Aérotrain experiments it was still a glimpse into a future that otherwise pretty much resembled contemporary England. Over forty years after the release of Fahrenheit 451, the suspended metro of the film still seems strikingly modern - or at least timeless compared to the brick houses of Montag's street, resembling the London outer-suburban commuter belt of the 1960s, and the sea of rooftop television aerials in the title sequence. The film remains the last resting place of a transport system out of its time.


Jacob Paskins


References to the SAFEGE suspended metro from Le Métro Suspendu website (in French).

For those not yet following us on Twitter, or for those are and would like an overview of our recent 'tweeting' activity, thoughts and discoveries, here is a digest of some recent postings and links from the last fortnight.

Our search for blogs that take our interest continued this month, and the group found the following favourites. The bioscope blog provides detailed news and information on all aspects of early and silent cinema, including pre-cinema techniques. Luke McKernan recently launched his British Library Moving Image Blog, which replaces his popular and now missed Screen Research site. All the best, Luke. And as a literal echo to our own project, looking at the places we put the dead, cemeteryscapes is a blog about 'the material and visual culture of cemeteries in the past, present and future.'

Dead media, it seems, sometimes struggles to stay alive against the odds. The BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped project shows the incredible efforts made to save Britain's audiovisual heritage. Discovering of a battered old video, they attempted to save the only surviving copy of Pink Floyd’s debut on Top of the Pops. Wired.co.uk, meanwhile, reported on the upcoming auction of a Giroux 1839 Daguerreotype camera. Does the oldest extant camera still work, we wonder?

On the exhibition front, Christian Boltanski raises questions of memory, monuments and death in his exhibition entitled Personnes, part of Monumenta 2010 at the Nef du Grand Palais in Paris, on show until 21 February. Meanwhile, photographer William Eggleston shows interest in dead objects in his exhibition 21st Century, held at Victoria Miro Gallery in London.

Finally, group members highlighted a number of important campaigns. Bristol's Cube Microplex launched an appeal for help and donations for their Haiti Kids Kino Project. Henry Jenkins's blog reported on the threatened closure of the University of Iowa Cinema Studies PhD Programme. The Autopsies Group is also very concerned about cuts to UK Universities, and no doubt there will be more on this soon.

Digest compiled by Jacob Paskins from material posted by members of the Autopsies Group to the Twitter feed.

The new year marked the 10th anniversary of the Longplayer project, a musical composition that is intended to play for 1000 years. A mind boggling thought.

So far so good, but the developers of the project are concerned about the long term continuation of the piece of never repeating music. Although a computer is currently performing Longplayer, the project developers are aware present day technology will one day be obsolete. For this reason, they are seeking a non-technological and nondigital way of ensuring the survival of the composition for the next 990 years. The developers are experimenting with alternative performance methods from mechanical, non-electrical devices to human performance.

In its section of 'Survival Strategies', the Longplayer project website asks, 'How does one keep a piece of music playing across generations? How does one prepare for its technological adaptability, knowing how few technologies have remained viable over the last millenium?'

Beyond suggesting a number of mechanical and technological possibilities, the developers believe Longplayer will only survive if people are interested in the survival of this ambitious scheme, akin to launching a probe deep into space on an unknown journey. With it being nearly impossible to predict how technology will change within even the next ten years, live human performance may be the only way of guaranteeing the continuation of Longplayer through the millennium. The first live performance of Longplayer was held in London's Roundhouse in September 2009.

Jacob Paskins

2nd December 2009

The Autopsies’ museum roundtable (with guest speakers Oliver Winchester from the V&A and Alexandra Goddard from the Geffrye) engaged with some of the research group’s key concerns, namely when/how we talk about ‘things’ or ‘objects’ and the ways in which film can be used to preserve them.

With Jann Matlock chairing and contributing as a panellist, our guests were asked to discuss the various similarities and differences between their museums in the processes of curating and collating information.  The Geffrye Museum, Goddard told us, acquired supporting documentation to create a ‘mise-en-scene of the object.’  This documentation included oral and written histories of the objects, as well as photographs. 

Film had yet to enter their remit as a medium of preservation.  At the V&A, however, Winchester described film’s utility in demonstrating to visitors how objects actually work (both panellists agreed that they dealt with ‘objects,’ although these were once people’s ‘things’). 

I found this use of film fascinating.  Film was not a necessary tool in the preservation of the object per se – the object itself existed within the museum space – but visitors could only understand the application of the object through moving images.  The way in which museums display objects divorces them from utility.  Film can help museums to design an experience of the object that gives life to what would otherwise be  dead or static.

One has to consider whether it is possible to understand any object without first comprehending its ‘thing-ness.’   The iPod was used as an example: without touching it, playing with it or glancing through its menus, does it really make sense as a technology?  Is there any point in simply looking at a dead object and can film help rescue it from the after-world that is the museum display?  Could film help items retain their essence of ‘thing-ness’ in the face of museum objectivity?

Perhaps these are some of the questions we can take forward into the new year and put to our next selection of museum panellists. 


Rebecca Harrison

‘A bad dream about objects that has been forced into the corporeal realm’ is Siegfried Kracauer’s description of a UFA film studio in Germany, in his essay entitled ‘Calico-World. The UFA City in Neubabelsberg’. The film studio offers a mixture of  both old and new objects, stacked in a disorganised fashion, waiting to be used. Kracauer questions the authenticity of these objects that he sees on set that construct the make-belief world of cinema. Astonished by the fickleness of these objects’s lives that can be destroyed, disposed of, at any time a specific film requires it, or just ends, Kracauer remarks how objects created for the cinema are not meant to last, and yet when projected on screen these same objects attain such an immortal status.

A museum’s collection can never be exhaustive: there is only so much space, money and information one can acquire in order to display and understand one’s objects. How does a museum decide what is worth acquiring, keeping or disposing of? A team of curators for the UCL collections decided to ask just that, throwing open the debate to students, staff and the general public.

Housed in the Chadwick building, the Object Disposal project mounted its own museum collection of objects that might be considered for disposal. From plastic dinosaurs to Agatha Christie’s picnic basket, cowboy boots to soil samples, the collection displayed objects that were either too large or expensive to store; replicated objects within UCL’s wider collections; or what to the untrained eye might be considered ‘trash.’

On entering the building, visitors were asked to identify themselves as staff, student, or other. This was recorded against a number, which in turn was written onto two stickers – one red, one orange. Visitors were then asked to consider five objects (slides of planets, a rhinoceros skull, a picnic basket, soil samples and medical equipment). They stuck their orange sticker next to the object they considered the most appropriate for disposal. Before leaving the display, they reconsidered and used the red sticker to indicate if they had changed their mind.

This was a fantastic way of demonstrating to the visitor the difficulties involved in the elimination process. Why was one object more worthy than another? How should one try to understand these objects comparatively when they were so different contextually? I particularly enjoyed reading visitors comments in a display dedicated to public opinion. This ranged from ‘Get rid of the dinosaurs!’ to ‘Get rid of everything!’ (a comment which provoked both laughter and fear on my part). One hopes they could keep everything, or at least give it to a deserving and appreciative home.

The project’s organiser, curator Jayne Dunn, expressed the hope that this interactive display would help the UCL collections to update and regenerate their manifestos on object disposal. Asking the public to become involved in the decision making process ensured that questions about what we deem to be representative of ‘us’ both culturally and socially were fixed firmly on the agenda.

The statistics collected from the sticker exercise should be collated and published on the UCl website in due course. I wonder if the curators will keep the sticker sheets and comments as objects in their own right, as records of an event that has potentially shaped UCL museums’ disposal policy. In any event, I’d love to see which object got ‘voted out.’ My money’s on the medical equipment. Not the planet slides, surely?

- Rebecca Harrison