HOUDINI Magazines's resident noise channeler and digital-detritus-obsessed psychonaut, Mindape, breaks down 3 of their newest works made in Decker.
VIDEO LEECH
Some observations on the digestion of dead media matter, VHS television capture, the psychology of broadcast retrieval, and some personal, uncanny confrontations with ‘undead’ channel surfing on video. For the last year or so I have been digitizing old VHS cassettes of television recordings. Originally I just wanted to preserve some broadcast media, but I quickly began having strange ideas about the effect the “replays” were having on my psychic state. One phenomenon that I thought was incredible: finding VHS recordings of people channel surfing in the 80s or 90s. There is something shocking about watching someone navigate in real-undead time like that. So I came up with this Decker project for Monazone’s Media Essay Jam (still ongoing). This was an attempt to “mount” some of my digressions into a pseudo-TV deck essay format.
PathoBytes
Screensaver or torture chamber? This one was kind of a grab-bag of ideas. It was inspired by the haphazard weirdness of those pointless interactive 1990s CD-ROM releases, especially pre-Internet things like clip art CDs and other redundant forms of “utilitainment.” It is also kind of a subconscious derangement of After Dark, one of the earliest and most iconic screensaver programs. Finally, I layered in a “modifier” layer which was inspired by the customizable “Battle Room” in the 1990s Sega Genesis fighting game Eternal Champions. You could turn on various missiles, buzz-saws, and obstacles to make 1-on-1 fights more challenging.
DEGRADED!
All plots resolve themselves into background noise. More residue from my VHS phase! Found footage frames handpicked from deteriorating VHS cassettes. Arranged according to various strains of paranoia, chance association, pareidolia, and other subconscious promptings. I aimed to capture only distorted images for this collection. I was inspired again by old stock footage CD-ROMs on Internet Archive and Discmaster. These things have some of the strangest categorizations and naming conventions imaginable. So I really just grouped things haphazardly and according to whatever associations came to mind. Like a static-filled Rorschach test. Note: None of the noise was artificially induced, but occurred “naturally” during the transfer process. Many of these tapes are colonized by the common basement mold Cladosporium, and/or are experiencing various other states of decay. These images were exhumed especially for NOISE JAM but are free for anybody to use and abuse!
