{"id":5645,"title":"The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions from Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/politics-video-memory-electronic-erasures-and-inscriptions-resolutions-contemporary-video-practices","version":"c84859cbb2c9e94a41832033e06313a7a50bdffda880c941703e6a6e73814125","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4437813+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Marita Sturken"}],"authorKeys":["Sturken, Marita"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"University of Minnesota Press","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1145","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions from Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/politics-video-memory-electronic-erasures-and-inscriptions-resolutions-contemporary-video-practices.","publication":"Marita Sturken. The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions from Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices. University of Minnesota Press. 1996.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5645.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":35035},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":887}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images that I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don\u0027t film, don\u0027t photograph, don\u0027t tape. How has mankind managed to remember? -CHRIS MARKER, \u0022Sans Soleil\u0022 Since its invention, the camera has figured centrally in the desire to remember, to recall the past, to make the absent present. Photographic, cinematic and video images are the raw materials used to construct personal histories: events remembered because they were photographed, moments forgotten because no images were preserved and unphotographed memories that work in tension with camera memories. The memories constructed from camera images are not only personal, but collective. History is represented by the black-and-white photographic or cinematic image, and increasingly by a faded color film image or low-resolution television image. The camera image produces memories, yet in offering itself as a material fragment of the past it can also produce a kind of forgetting. Projected and transmitted on screens, these images can be seen as \u0022screen memories.\u0022 According to Freud, a \u0022screen memory\u0022 functions to hide painful memories that are too difficult for a subject to confront; the screen memory offers itself as a substitute, while \u0022screening out\u0022 the \u0022real\u0022 memory. The camera image can often screen out other, often unphotographed memories and offer itself as the \u0022real\u0022 memory, \u0022becoming\u0022 our memory. Freud demonstrated that memory is essential to the notion of a self and described the complex ways that we disremember those memories that are too damaging or painful. Similarly, the construction of memory and history is essential to a specific culture or nation; we often \u0022forget\u0022 as a nation. I am employing the term cultural memory to designate cultural processes that stand outside official history and mainstream culture yet have served as a catharsis for healing, the sharing of personal memory, and community building. History in the United States is constructed through a complex apparatus of media, written texts and popular culture. Cultural memory is a kind of living memory that is produced at sites of disruption in history; it intervenes and tangles with history-making. For instance, both the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the AIDS Memorial Quilt are sites of an intense production of cultural memory, where people have actively shared memory, usually anonymously, in order to construct meaning out of the grief and loss of those events. The stories shared at these memorials are powerful testimonies that actively question aspects of their historical narratives. Similarly, independent video constitutes a field of cultural memory, one that contests and intervenes with official history. This is not to say that all memories produced with a video camera constitute modes of resistance or political intervention - the 1990s, videotapes as cultural forms shift meaning all the time. Yet many independent videotapes are deliberate interventions in history and conscious memory constructions. The politics and phenomenology of television and video converge to both produce and negate history and memory. THE TELEVISION IMAGE MAKING HISTORY In the late twentieth century the photograph, the documentary film image, and the docu-drama are central elements in the construction of history. Yet electronic images have a constantly shifting relationship to history. The television image is an image of immediacy, transmission, and continuity. \u0022Flow,\u0022 as defined by Raymond Williams - the incorporation of interruption until it becomes naturalized in the stream of images - is a central aspect of television. Television is the image without an original, for which the status of the copy is ultimately irrelevant. Stanley Cavell has noted that the primary \u0022fact\u0022 of television is its serial format; we do not distinguish the particular television episode so much as the ongoing series or event; hence, the series is what is memorable in television.[1] In contrast, most videotapes that fall under the rubric of video art or independent video are meant to be seen not as interruptions in the flow but as unique events. Certain works are designed for the context of satellite transmission and other videotapes are identified as \u0022art for television.\u0022 However, most independent videotapes aspire to be seen in contexts that separate them from the ongoing information flow of TV. Yet the video image is implicated in the relentless electronic flow of the television image. Television is coded, like all electronic technology, as live and immediate; it evokes the instant present, in which information is more valuable the faster and more immediate it is. Television technology has thus never been conceived in terms of preservation, and videotapes deteriorate rapidly. Videotapes that were made as recently as the 1970\u0027s, look like distant antecedents to contemporary television, with their blurred and worn images and muffled sound. Many videotapes and early television shows are in fact already irretrievable. Despite this problematic relationship to preservation, television-video has inevitably become a medium in which memory and history are recorded. Since the early 1980s, an increasing number of \u0022historical\u0022 incidents have been recorded on television (until the late 1970s, most television news footage was still shot on film). The Challenger space shuttle exploding, the lone Chinese student halting a tank in Tiananmen Square, the people clambering on top of the Berlin Wall, and the \u0022targets\u0022 taken from cameras on bombs in the Persian Gulf War: these are distinctly television\u0027s images of history. Slightly blurred, often shot with the immediate feeling of a hand-held camera, these images seem to evoke not a fixed history but rather history as it unfolds - the making of history. While the feverish immediacy of these images connotes an instantaneity, their status as historical images is somewhat muddied. They will, in a sense, always be coded as live, immediate images - their blurriness or lack of image resolution is often read as evoking the speed of information rather than their electronic materiality. The electronic image thus presents a paradox for memory and history, connoting the immediate instead of the past. This has led certain cultural critics to declare television as the site of memory\u0027s demise. For instance, Fredric Jameson has written: \u0022But memory seems to play no role in television, commercial or otherwise (or, I am tempted to say, in postmodernism generally): nothing haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the manner of the great moments of film (which do not necessarily happen, of course, in the \u0027great\u0027 films).\u0022[2] Yet, despite Jameson\u0027s pessimism, it is too easy to declare memory dead in a postmodern context. Jameson nostalgically mourns the passing of history in the postmodern \u0022weakening of history, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality.\u0022 [3] But what is the history mourned here, a pretelevision history? I would argue that the stakes in memory and history are ever present in electronic media (and postmodernism) - that despite its paradoxical relationship to the preservation of memory, television-video is a primary site of history and cultural memory, where memories, both individual and collective, are produced and claimed. VIDEO MEMORIES In independent video, the preservation of images and recording of history has been an underlying desire in the accumulation of videotapes. Video collectives in the 1970s, such as the Videofreex and Raindance, were interested in compiling databanks of alternative images and in accruing an alternative visual history to the nationalist history produced by broadcast television. Concerns with preservation were deemed irrelevant; consequently most of the early videotapes by the collectives have not survived, and television stations routinely destroy master tapes of old programs. The maintenance of collective memory is a problem, it seems, in the case of bulky one-inch tapes or old heat-sensitive reel-to-reel videotapes. While the notion of a video databank utopically envisioned by these collectives conjured up alternative histories stored neatly in electronic space and accessible to everyone, in reality tapes are material objects that stick, erode, and warp. Yet in this dual role of image retention and loss, video has increasingly become a medium in which issues of collective and individual memory are being examined. The politics of memory and identity, the elusiveness of personal memory, and the relationship of camera images to national and cultural memory have become topics explored by artists in video. I would like to examine several of these artists\u0027 works in order to explore how the phenomenology of video intersects with a contemporary politics of memory, and how video has been used to create counter-images to nationalistic histories: Woody Vasulka\u0027s \u0022Art of Memory\u0022 (1987), Rea Tajiri\u0027s \u0022History and Memory\u0022 (1991), Janice Tanaka\u0027s \u0022Memories from the Department of Amnesia\u0022 (1990) and \u0022Who\u0027s Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway?\u0022 (1992), and Jeanne Finley\u0027s \u0022Nomads at the 25 Door\u0022 (1991). These tapes are concerned with the memory of political and historical events, how those memories are preserved and embodied, how they permeate the present, and the intersections of personal memory, cultural memory, and history. In all these works, the role of video as a technology of memory is ever present: remembering, forgetting, and containing memories. Among these tapes, Woody Vasulka\u0027s \u0022Art of Memory\u0022 is concerned most directly with the different phenomenological relationships of film and television-video to memory and history, and the fluctuating cultural meanings of images that are coded \u0022history.\u0022 \u0022Art of Memory\u0022 takes as its material the black-and-white photographic and filmic images of the \u0022historic events\u0022 of the twentieth century: the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution, World War II, the atomic bomb. Vasulka mixes codes and tropes to make the signification of historicity his central topic. Cinematic tropes for the passage of time, such as images reeling past or flipping by, are contained within stylized, electronically created shapes that deny these cinematic codes their narrative potential. Vasulka\u0027s project is to use video to examine and ultimately consume cinema. In \u0022Art of Memory\u0022, newsreel and documentary footage and still photographs are transformed into image objects that appear to sit on a southwestern desert landscape. These image objects are evocative, strange, and unpredictable. Sometimes they resemble large movie screens in the desert, at other times their shapes are awkward and bulky. They function to decontextualize the film images: one cannot read them as windows onto the world, but only as generic images of history. Some assert themselves to suggest narratives - Oppenheimer\u0027s famous post-bomb speech, in which he quotes the Bhagavad Gita, for instance - but then are submerged again in the stream of images contained within the object forms that deconstruct narrative in the tape. Yet within this dense layering of images, Vasulka does hint at a narrative of history and the image. In one of the few purely video images, a mythical figure with wings sits on a cliff. Seeing it from a distance, a man tries to capture its attention. He tosses a pebble at it, and then, when it turns toward him, he photographs it, causing it to rise up in apparent anger and swoop down upon him. The creature is ultimately unexplained in this tape, but it evokes many possible meanings - an unattainable, mythic man beast that the nervous and distracted middle-aged man, haunted by images of history, tries to capture with his camera. It is as if he is trying to photograph the well-known \u0022angel of hist","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":35035,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}