Core Response #3 by SMDI

Margaret Morse’s piece is provocative and enlightening despite some fleeting moments of faltering logic. Perhaps nodding to structuralist traditions, she understands television—and its cousins, the freeway and the mall—as symptoms of a larger post-War social condition, one in which predominant ideological forces institute an everyday rhythm as well as cyclical recursions into non-spaces. In this humble post, I’d like to dig deeper into two points Morse makes in passing.

First, arguing that “the work of time itself as decay is seldom represented in images of the human body or everyday life” (202), she discusses the dehistoricization of the past by means of “archival images”—sandwiched across new images—and of commercial restoration, which seeks to render past and imperfect texts with the present’s expectations for resolution and quality. To make this claim in 1990 requires extraordinary foresight because restoration debates are very much a topic of our advanced digital age. Rather than watching 1950s shows as they were, barely approaching 480i and riddled with interference, we watch pristine 35mm transfers of its original masters, resituating these texts into the rhythms of our contemporary lives. I’d love to talk about restoration methods in general as we discuss historical media. Are our audiovisual sensibilities, otherwise incompatible with the past, another symptom of the structures Morse identifies?

Lastly, she conceives of the z-axis, otherwise defined by David Antin, as a visual dimension. I would argue, conversely, that television’s z-axis is instead more complicated. Rather than attributing that dimension of immersion to a text’s form, how else can we model it? Since the television retains attention even when the spectator does not watch it directly (say, when looking elsewhere, operating the kitchen, etc.), could we assign this z-axis instead to its sound? If so, what are its conventions?