Bootleg Video

Visuality and the Technical Exigencies of Video

Electronic Signal

• catoptrics/dioptrics

A visual medium containing no images

• P- and I-frames/scanlines/half-images
• No linearity

Publics United through Timeshifting

The history of bootleg video begins not with television, but with radio. Magnetic tape's acoustic fidelity and ease of reproduction compelled radio stations to pre-record their programming for later broadcast. According to legend, Bing Crosby was one of the first advocates for pre-recording radio shows onto magnetic tape: his radio show's time slot was in direct competition with his regularly-scheduled golf game. (Hilderbrand 38) Thus networks were introduced, via magnetic tape, to the concept of timeshifting. The practice of timeshifting did more than appease the sensibilities of big-ring performers: it allows for viewers from different timezones to experience a televised event at the same time, thus synchronizing viewership. It is from network timeshifting of televised programing that the notion of "Prime Time" broadcasting arises. Thus timeshifting created the temporal possibility for a new mode of relation between networks and the television viewing public.

Video recording consequently introduced the ability to timeshift television. Timeshifting is the ability to delay the broadcasting of a televised event so that it may be experienced at a time more convenient for the viewing public. The ability to timeshift thus necessitates a system of capturing, archiving, and playing back television signal; only by achieving the capability to timeshift was the creation of a unified viewing public possible.

Before video recording technologies were brought to the consumer market, television networks readily adopted the technology, and the notion of timeshifting, to create prime time as a mode of mediation. Once the commercially-viable VCR democratized timeshifting, bootleg video emerged as the negative image of prime time television. Where the national viewing public was enabled and maintained by timeshifting televised programing at a centralized level controlled by the networks, bootleg video fan cultures were equally enabled by the timeshifting power wielded by each individual.

• Zizek and the super-ego directive to "enjoy"
• Flusser and the fingertips that select (remote control)
• bootleggers bring un-author-ized products to market where they would normally exist
• timeshifting and betamax decision
• the Law

The Camcorder, the VCR, and the Repositioning of the Viewing Subject

As the old adage goes, a visual medium's success is measured by how readily the medium can be used to make, distribute, and experience pornography. This saying, however glib, does contain some truth as it pertains to video— video radically redefined and redeployed the viewing subject in several key ways that acted on the libido directly. Bootleg video practice is a fecund site where modes of viewership, modes of distribution, relations between viewers, and even the content itself are reoriented around libidinal impulses.

Surveillance, Sousveillence

• rodney king
• cctv aesthetics
• foucault
• flash-forward to "citizen journalism"

Transferal of Jouissance

• the "pervert" who films
• pamela & tommy lee

Palimpsest of Jouissance

• the "pervert" who watches
• the underground tape railroad

The Freedom of Timeshifting

• the VCR will watch for you
• nationalism & shared time

Haptic Vision

Bootleg video reveals vision to be haptic. Its emergence onto the scene consequently redefines the eye in relation to its perceived agency and abilities vis-a-vis a visual medium. As Crary suggests, the eye was once a considered to be a passive or "neutral receiver" in the face of painting. The advent of psychophysical analysis and film forced this model to be reevaluated. In establishing that the same ocular faculty responsible for rendering the "imaginary" cohesive sequence of film from the "real" cut-up sequence of still images is the same faculty responsible for creating afterimages, the eye was upgraded to a more participatory or cooperative status during the film-viewing process. Bootleg video forces an upgrade of the mechanism once again: methods of tape viewership (pausing, rewinding, playing, dubbing, enjoying) necessarily involve the destruction of the medium. The eye is now an active, even aggressive, partner in the consumption of media.

Amorous Media/Promiscuous Media

Un-author-ized Media

• Barthes death of the author
• histories of viewership
• locations/origins of artifacts

Fake Timeshifting

We automatically, and mistakenly, tend to place technologies on a Cartesian plane of progress where the gradient from analog to digital is seen as a linear function of time. Video as a medium defies this tendency. Despite its arrival nearly a century after film, and its obvious remediation of the medium, video is a purely analog medium consisting of continuous flows of electric signal.

• TiVo
• YouTube
• Skeuomorph of play/stop/etc. buttons, but without the power to timeshift, these visual nods to the older medium are hollow
• Creation of technologies/creation of Users (Vismann)

References

• Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. The MIT Press. 1990.
• Flusser, Vilém. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. Reaction Books. 1999.
• Hilderbrand, Lucas. Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Duke University Press. 2009.
• Kittler, Fredrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford University Press, 1999.
• Spielmann, Yvonne. Video: The Reflexive Medium. The MIT Press. 2008.
• Vismann, Cornelia and Markus Krajewski. "Computer Juridisms" in Grey Room, Winter 2008.
• Zizek, Slavoj. "The Interpassive Subject" in Traveses. Centre Georges Pompidou. 1998. [1]