I found a bunch of old recordings from friends and indie music makers. Usually they are labeled "Track 1" or "Track 3". It's so much awesome and I'm getting the warm fuzzies from listening through years of random recordings. Pop a beer and enjoy!Edit: Try "Unknown Artist > Unknown Album" too. Lots of good stuff. :)
In this way a better as the analogies to the human brain suggest: more natural organization of knowledge should be possible. The problem is of course that trails in the archive produced with microlmbased technology cannot be erased.26 A user of the MEMEX would have to be very careful to not build useless or nonsensical trails. Bush describes a scenario of usage: The owner of the MEMEX, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. Bush continues to state that such a user has dozens of possible books or articles in his MEMEX: 334 335 Storage
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The Lumire brothers captured a maximum of movement through the depth of space by lming an arrival and a departure. These gures also distinguish Le Princes strange fate in pre-cinema. The train is connected to cinema as an emblem of modernity, and linked to Le Princes disappearance. In France to arrange nancial matters, Le Prince boarded a train in Dijon in September 1890 but he never disembarked in Paris. This famous vanishing act brings together key features of modern time and space in the genres of early cinema. Le Princes disappearance connects the train lms of the rst years of cinema with the sudden disappearances in the transformation lms made famous by Georges Mlis, Segundo de Chomon, Ferdinand Zecca and others, to make his train journey the quintessential phantom ride of cinema. The phantom rides and the Hales Tours (screenings inside train cars to simulate real journeys) draw on the immersive powers of cinema projection. Le Prince was engulfed in the crowd at the train station, swallowed up by the urban space never to reappear. Since Le Prince was never seen on the train and his luggage was not found in Paris, and since his body was never discovered on the route between the two cities, there are good reasons to believe that he never boarded the train. This enigmatic transformation cut of Le Prince in the Dijon station where he was accompanied by his brother to the station platform in Paris, where he never descended, has invited many theories from lm historians. Some claim that he committed suicide, with homosexuality, nancial difculties or lack of success with his inventions as chief motivations. His biographer Christopher Rawlence tests many different theories about Le Princes disappearance. Le Princes wife believed he was killed by Edison so he wouldnt pose a threat to the other mans patents. Rawlence nds no evidence to substantiate this theory, however.11 Le Princes cameras still exist, and they inform us that he shifted from a 16-lens camera constructed in Paris in 1887 to a single-lens technique built in Leeds in 1888.12 This shows that Le Prince was one of the rst to record an event on a lm strip. He did this at the same time as Etienne-Jules Marey, who also shot chronophotographic images on paper lm in October 1888. One could even favor Le Princes work over Mareys, in a retrospective view, as a precursor to cinema, since Le Prince shot outdoors, in the everyday surroundings that were later so popular in early cinema. Etienne-Jules Mareys movement studies, just 322 323 Storage
Not only do the images themselves return in a different medium, the screening mode of the loop becomes accessible in the digital format. If the looping format has to a large degree made the return of these frames possible, this also implies a return of the loop. As demonstrated by the techniques of the Praxinoscope, the Zoetrope and the Vitascope, as well as the Kinetoscope, the loop was a dominant screening practice in the pre-cinema years. Even in the rst years of cinema, it was not uncommon to edit shots as loops in order to screen them in multiple repetitions.9 Even if the linear temporal mode has been dominant throughout cinema history, there is a vein in experimental cinema, in the lms of lmmakers as different as Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs and Michael Snow, that elaborates on the idea of identical repetitions of 320 321 Storage
Roundhay garden with the family of Le Princes wife. The scene from the garden is central to the dating of his lms, as the presence of his mother-in-law in the image veries Le Princes annotation of October 1888, since she died later that month. Thus, in the act of dating the invention, one encounters death and people moving after their disappearance. One important aspect of these lms is that they are being seen for the rst time on YouTube. They were never shown publicly by Le Prince, as there is no evidence that he had a functioning projector, and there is no record of these lms being shown in early lm programs. Since only about twenty frames from each lm have survived, it would have been difcult to program them in cinema retrospectives.8 In normal lm projection, each shot would last about a second too short for a viewer to recognize the image before it disappears. But when streamed or downloaded, these images may be repeated and looped, which gives the viewer a different kind of access to the image through repetition. These ghostly frames of pre-cinema thus, in a way, come to life in a new digital setting. When they are animated, be it on lm or digitally, it is a resuscitation of something that has never moved, and by extension never lived. Le Princes lms are in many ways ghosts of things that never were. Each of these lms have been (as is usual on YouTube) uploaded in several versions. They are to be found as short les of one to two seconds, in variable resolution and with variable speed of movement. But they are also repeated and re-edited with inserted intertitle jokes, such as the epic and coming to a cinema near you in the fall of 1888 in the case of the Roundhay Garden scene. Re-editing a one-second shot as a trailer, with closeups, repetitions and standard contemporary trailer music, seems to be a popular treatment of the images. This second of movement has also been released as a directors cut, and many les also have opening and end titles. The jokes made at the expense of this footage are almost all about how these lms fail to meet the expectations of ordinary cinema today, marketed for example by trailers, and with the properties of the lm industry stamped upon them. This demonstrates how these images are almost invariably seen from the perspective of analog cinema, with a classical lm tradition in mind, and not as isolated digital les without a history or a home in the analog domain. The return of these images on the Internet, and on YouTube in particular, thus cannot be understood solely from a logic of the digital. They must also be seen in an intermedial and intermediary archival situation characteristic of the moving image in digital interfaces.
Le Prince: The Ghost in the Tube The spectral presence of YouTube becomes especially interesting in the case of uploaded shots of pre-cinema lms. One can nd several of Etienne-Jules Mareys chronophotographic studies on YouTube, and since they were shot with a camera technique that recorded images at regular intervals, they can be easily synthesized for screening. The animation of Eadweard Muybridges series of instantaneous photographs are also found in the ether of YouTube. This article, however, will specically address the return of the lms of an inventor who himself is the true ghost of lm history: Louis Aim Augustin Le Prince, born in 1841 The content of any medium is always another medium, Marshall McLuhan once explained.7 The return of lm on YouTube in a different medium is, in the case of the inventor Le Prince, a resurrection of the pre-eminently ghostly gure of cinema. His name has always haunted lm history for two reasons. The lm cameras he invented are among the very rst in cinematic history, and he shot lms on photosensitive paper rolls as early as the fall of 1888. His cameras have survived and display a working mechanism devised at a very early stage. However, there are uncertainties concerning how his projector worked, and in patent applications and disputes with the famous inventors of cinema, such as the Lumire brothers and Edison, the description of the projector was considered insufcient. Our limited knowledge about Le Princes projector is most of all due to the second reason for his spectral position in lm history, his personal biography. Le Prince mysteriously disappeared on a train journey between Paris and Dijon in 1890. On YouTube, one can see all three of Le Princes lms from which frames have survived. There is a shot of the Leeds bridge in the summer of 1889, an image of an accordion player and a scene from the 318 319 Storage
soon enjoy original content on Apple TV, but more importantly, YouTube became sort of a killer app for the new and hyped iPhone. According to a press release from Apple, YouTube had in fact begun to encode videos in the advanced H.264 format to achieve higher video quality and longer battery life on mobile devices. Initially, some 10,000 videos would be available, but YouTube promised to continue adding content each week until the full catalogue of videos was available in the H.264 format. 33 Apparently, YouTube made great efforts to hook up with the mobile community. Offering video services on mobile devices seems to have been a key opportunity for the company, and YouTubes partner Nokia serves as a case in point. Rumor has it that a Nokia cell phone due to the companys 40 percent share of the world market is currently the technological device producing the majority of media on a global scale. Consequently, there are innumerable blog posts, sites and online comments on mobile-media usage. For instance, a year ago, thenokiaguide. com stated that YouTube has made a huge impact on our Web 2.0 lives. Its popularity can best be seen from the amount of [Nokia] apps specically made for YouTube alone. In a time frame of just a few months we have not one but four apps: Mobitubia, Emtube, YTPlayer and the YouTube Java app. In addition to these, the blog mentioned the mobile YouTube site, as well as the option on some Nokia devices to watch clips directly from the browser with Flash Lite support. Since when did we have so many apps and services available for just one video service?34 306 307 Storage
are working intensively on an online-based operating system called Windows Azure. Others have been quicker to switch over. Adobe recently launched Photoshop.com, where anyone can now arrange his/her pictures online something Flickr has offered its users since 2007 . Naturally, Amazon as well belongs to the clouds avant-garde. Already in August 2006, the company launched the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. 14 The service was designed to make Webscale computing easier for developers, and since the launch, hundreds of thousands of developers and programmers, websites and applications have been paying to use the companys servers. Because Amazons total computational capacity is used only a few times a year, it is more lucrative to rent out servers that are not used regularly. For instance, about a year ago, the Animoto company, which customizes media presentations of users photographs and music, was able to serve 25,000 customers an hour using Amazons cloud of computing capacity. Instead of increasing its own server capacity a hundredfold, which would hardly have been possible technically, Animoto paid ten cents an hour per Amazon server. In fact, cloud computing has been so vital to Animotos operations that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has used the company as an example of how well EC2 helps web apps scale when their trafc hockey sticks, according to TechCrunch.15 Naturally, for actors the clouds attraction lies in new markets and business opportunities, but with regard to information theory, the shift from desktop to webtop also implies a fundamental change in how we understand binary categories such as computer and Web, archive, database and sharing. YouTubes model of using the Web as the platform for media content and distribution was hardly the rst, but it was a preliminary and popular move toward this digital cloud. Of course, this meant initial hassles and nuisances. For instance, in April 2006, Forbes pointed out that the 40 million videos and 200 terabytes of data that were already being streamed from the companys too few servers and undersized machinery certainly constituted a signicant element of risk.16 Three months later, USA Today reported that 65,000 videos were uploaded to YouTube daily, and that every day, users clicked on about 100 million video clips. These enormous volumes meant that time spent watching YouTube clips already amounted to almost two thirds of general video watching on the Internet.17 At the same time, the companys costs for bandwidth were approaching a million dollars a month. Consequently, much of the venture capital YouTube brought in was likely used to nance and optimize the websites technical infrastructure. The deal YouTube made with the ISP Limelight Networks was certainly as advantageous as it was secret, but Forbes nevertheless expressed some skepticism regarding a business model in which so much money was invested in something that hardly generated any revenues at all.18 In his book Planet Google, Randall Stross claimed that YouTubes phenomenal popularity was technologically grounded in the close timing of three central IT factors. What rst enabled YouTubes success was the rapid expansion of broadband. During the dotcom boom around the turn of the millennium, optical bers that could circle the Earth 11,000 times were being laid down,19 and YouTube and others were able to reap the benets of this digital infrastructure. During the period when Web connections were made using 56.6 kbit/s modems, a similar video website would have had no possibility of breaking through. Moving images, 300 301 Storage
The Internet is, of course, an optimal medium because of its decentralized network structure; in short, it is a cloud made up of different smaller clouds. However, in terms of IT infrastructure and databases that lie below the cloud, it does not seem rational anymore to build separate storage systems at individual archives, to use the ALM sector as an example. The current international trend among cultural-heritage institutions is certainly merging and centralization. 296 297 Storage