Artifacts
Analog videotape is preserved through digitization, where the video signal and corresponding synchronization pulses output during playback are fed into an analog-to-digital converter (ADC),which translates the visual information into 1s and 0s for long-term storage. Sometimes during this process, the video signal can become unreliable, perhaps because of physical tape damage or diminished magnetic field strength. As the signal becomes increasingly unstable, the systems designed to correct image problems instead fail to reconstruct it properly and can produce increasingly abstract fields of color, bands, geometric forms, and fragmented imagery. Over time I collected some of these “errors.” Instead of taking digital screenshots of the postdigitization video files, I chose to photograph the resulting images directly from a cathode-raytube (CRT) display, the analog screen in which they were originally intended to be viewed. By photographing these fleeting images and translating them into physical prints and video, the work preserves not the original recording, but the moment at which its reproduction breaks down and something new emerges.