This paper suggests that xerography or copy art -also called "generative systems" -may incite melancholia. The theoretical framework for this analysis includes Svetlana Boym's concept of "broken-tech arts" (2001) and her conceptualization of ruins (2010), as well as Laura Marks' model of "haptic visuality" (2002). With the proliferation of copy machines, including Xerox, in the US in the 1960s, artists began producing new work through inventive use and creative manipulation of copiers. Copy machines allowed distinct effects, such as stretching and degeneration, and specifically resulted in the generation of haptic images: synthetic ruins that can trigger melancholia in an aesthetic experience. I posit that melancholia has the potential to inspire one to contemplate the ruined image and explore new meanings. Xerography work by Stevlana Boym, Sonia Sheridan, and Timm Ulrichs will be analyzed as relevant examples. This review contributes to melancholia studies by linking the field of xerography to the concept and experience of melancholia.
This paper adopts an art-based research model to investigate how media objects, as entangled material agencies, can become co-creators with artists and condition the viewers' memory and imagination. My work Recycled Series among other artists’ work are the subjects of this analysis. All these works involve images that are degenerated with a copy machine. The degenerated images lose coherence and become forms of ruins that the copier builds. Drawing from theories of things (Brown; Harman; Shaviro), I examine these works as the examples of “media-as-things” to show when media is misused, the potential of media is revealed. I place these works in the context of “broken-tech art” (Boym) and “haptic visuality” (Marks). I argue that these images determine a different object-subject relationship for their audience and their “thingness,” which is intensified through degeneration effects, becomes a major factor in their aesthetic reception.
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This essay adopts a practice-based methodology to examine works that use copy machine as a tool of archiveology. Case studies are two of my animated films, collectively titled Recycled Series (2016-2017), and other examples of copy art, in which a series of (original and archival) images/films are degenerated with a black-and-white copy machine. I frame the degenerated images in these works as ruined images – anarchives that copy machines can produce for sensory experiences. I place these works in the context of archiveology (Russell 2018) to highlight two aspects in the ruined images: first, how the use of degeneration techniques in archiveology engenders urban imaginary; second, how archiveology as a mode of media art challenges the norms of authenticity and media specificity and unfolds the agency of recycling tools such as copiers. Using a copy machine to recycle film images, archiveology couples the practices of storytelling with the (re)discovery of the technologies of archives.
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