Julian himself has re-photographed low resolution digital files and video stills, indulging his “aesthetic affection,” as he writes in his essay, “for the layers upon layers of mediation-schmutz that overlay the artifacts gathered from these rather obscure networks.” In a gesture that updates this Richard Princesque practice with the unmistakable qualities of contemporary media, Julian simply photographs his laptop screen. Whereas Prince’s pristine photographs betray the imperfect printing and color of mass-produced magazine pages, Julian’s photographs capture the pixilation and blur of the infinitely reproduced and resized jpgs of the web.

Curiously, he captions these images with his name and a descriptive title—for instance, in your blogpost above, “Julian Myers, Guns N’ Roses Riot 1991″—thereby suggesting authorship and artwork. Upon asking him, however, you’ll find that he neither considers himself an artist, nor these photographs artworks. (But perhaps all this is another discussion.) They are high-quality images that portray in crisp detail the hiss and muddiness, as he says, of “imagery recorded on the cheap and bit-crushed into near-abstraction.” And, “these things seem as important, in their way, as the performances and crowd-recordings—wagers against the phony infinitude of digital reproducibility.”

We pointed out that the ambiguity is closely related to the quality of the sound/image. The coarse texture (against the presumed clarity of a crisp high-definition) endows the material a sense of the archival and thus further alienates the moment of the riot. The material, as you quoted in your essay of Retort’s Afflicted Powers is “a way of deliberately alienating the moment, of putting the non-lived, the non-significant, at a distance” in order to “take the ownership of the passing moment” and to make it endurable and valuable. I think this might also partially answer Mr. Bradbury’s question (in the post above) about the “cellphone Golden Gate Bridge photo” as the photo taker has the impulse to “own” the moment not just the postcards.

I also see the ambiguous agenda (the perspective of the witnessed-eyes through the camera and the purposes of the web sharers) embedded in the bootlegged materials when it was recorded and shared later. Especially, with the increasing popularity of video-sharing websites, there is this “self-compulsive” satisfaction when a certain video reaches highest hit because it captured some “very” moment. This echoes the question that you posed in your essay, which I find very intricate and interesting for further discussion: “Whose interests are served by everyone carrying a camera?”

I wanted to ask about a place where we seem to disagree, or at least have different takes on the material. Above you say that the quality of the recordings exacerbates their ambiguity. I say something different in the essay, that the recordings serve as a kind of primary material, which allows the audience to build counter-narratives more in tune with what actually happened. So, I wonder about the value you both see in things being ambiguous—or if somehow we can have our cake and eat it too.

I wanted to respond to some of the points you’ve raised. I am of course interested in some of the sources you name, alongside, say, the investigations of Jeffrey Schnapp and the Stanford Humanities Lab on such matters. That, for instance, Canetti did not come up explicitly, does not mean that he wasn’t on people’s mind. I do refer to him in my essay, as Joanna notes above. Elizabethan theater does have a place in the archive too.

The archive’s focus, however, dwells primarily on crowd politics after the development of the modern amplifier, alongside portable recording devices, for obvious reasons. And you don’t mark out, in your comment, exactly how you imagine Canetti’s anthropology of fascism should be measured against these interruptions in a modern consumer culture (through the loudspeaker, perhaps), or in relation to the particular situations and history I’ve marked out.

As for your description of the event as ‘rather chaotic’: I assure you that Joanna and I meant to produce an event that was not strictly academic, that made room for people to engage at different levels, and that produced an active dialogue. This, I think, is in tune with the ambition of the Open Space events as they were put to me, precisely to be “open” and not a panel of experts. On these terms, I was happy with how the evening played out. Certainly a more traditional format could have produced a different sort of conversation and knowledge. But that’s not what we pursued this time. I assure you that we considered the event down to the last detail, and that there was no ‘chaos’ there— whatsoever.

As for your suggestion of Springsteen, perhaps you can point to the recordings you have on your mind. I haven’t seen them. The presentation, as Sharon and Xiaoyu mention above, was of three recordings, not one, and I don’t see that G N’ R was presented as ‘uncompromised.’ I can only say that I regret you didn’t bring your thoughts to bear during the forty minute discussion, where they might have been tested against other opinions and ideas, instead of launching your missiles from the safe and rather diminished cover of the comments box.