Tracing Provenance
Daniela K. Rosner
Uc berkeley School of Information | daniela@ischool.berkeley.edu
Fifteen years ago, I was sitting
in a dimly lit room, leaning over
a Steinbeck (an old film-editing
machine) and cutting a strip of
film. Aligning the film beneath the
blade, I adjusted the blade once
or twice and then cut the film in
between two images on the strip.
I released the filmstrip and did
this once more, and then carefully pasted down clear plastic
tape, matching the notches on the
filmstrip with the notches on the
tape. After several cuts and reattachments, an edited filmstrip
developed. The process took two
full weeks: three days of filming,
five days for the film to develop,
and six days of reviewing and
cutting the film. The film ran for
three minutes in front of a small
classroom of students. It was a lot
of work to put together, and it was
satisfying to produce, but efficient
it was not.
The filmstrip now lies in a box
on my shelf. Though it will eventually erode, the images on the
filmstrip and my arrangement of
the cuts and the tape are still visible; they remind me of the time I
invested as well as my experiences
at design school. The object continues to hold value for the narrative
it embodies as much as the narrative it represents.
Next to the filmstrip on my
shelf sit several digital artifacts:
Hi8 tapes, zip disks, floppy disks.
Each contains an assignment from
my film classes, and all rely on
digital tools for access. I no longer
have a Hi8 camera or a functional
disk drive for accessing data on
zip or floppy disks. What’s more,
I have no software to decode the
obscure codec with which these
files were encoded. All of the files
look roughly the same: black,
worn plastic artifacts with clever
labeling, such as “Daniela II” and
“Daniela III.” Though they are still
intact, the objects are relatively
meaningless. I have no ability to
understand and review the ele-
ments of this work.
September + October 2011
