A BRIEF GUIDE TO THE QUANTUM PHYSICS OF CHILD STARS

THE VCR IS A TIME MACHINE Here at the Pop Tronic Institute we are dedicated to developing the experimental science of video as a technics of time travel. More than any other medium, video reveals our ability to teleport fragments of the Past into the Now. Viewed from this angle, the rental video store becomes a temporal gateway to other space-time co-ordinates in the Dataverse. Contained within the electromagnetic force-field of a rental videotape is a densely packed nucleus of time-codes. Each timecode refers to a different axis of time that the video intersects with. For example, these codes include the date when the film footage was shot, the era in which the narrative of the film is set, as well as the history of the video as an object. THE REMIX: A WEAPON OF LINEAR DESTRUCTION A Hollywood film is already a mash-up of footage from different time zones. When making a film, Spielberg might shoot the last scene first and the first scene four months later but when it is cut together these temporal jumps are carefully concealed beneath the chronological hyper-drive of the narrative. It’s all part of a universal conspiracy to keep viewers oppressed within a linear system of time.  Alternatively, the video remix is a hacktivist devise designed to invade the viewer through their eyeballs and reboot their temporal thoughtware programs. The video remix not only accepts the time-warp capacity of the recording but actively pushes this potential to the point of implosion. By sampling from existing film and music tracks the remixer takes fragments of the past and faxes them into an alternative future. Short-circuiting the sham of cultural history, the remix reveals the Dataverse as the mash-up that it has always been.  THE ACTOR’S BODY IS A CLOCK The most highly charged temporal field of a video is the time in which the original film footage was shot. A ‘period film’ may dress-up in the stylistics of a certain era, but if it stars Winona Ryder then the viewer will be clued into the actual timeframe of the footage. In other words, the actor’s body is a clock that the viewer uses to tell recorded time. Which means that plastic surgery is a technology of temporal subterfuge. Apparent-time and real-time collapse as the Demi Moore of Charlies Angels 2 in 2003 seems visibly younger than the Demi of the 1990s. Of course, not all skin-jobs are successful in their attempt to scramble time. Plastic surgery disasters can function as their own calendar - it is easy to date a Michael Jackson music video by the shape of his nose.         CHILD STARS ARE PORTALS Hollywood ‘Child stars’ are a unique extension of the body-clock phenomenon. Watch Drew Barrymore as the little girl in E.T, then as a teacher in Donnie Darko. What you experience is two decades of real time swallowed up in the time it takes to switch a DVD. Now add some other time-codes to the mix, like the time you originally watched E.T at the cinema when you were a kid. As you watch it for the second time, the you-of-the-present collides with your younger viewing self. The strange sensation is inescapable because Drew acts as an unavoidable visual measure of time passed. When you watched E.T the first time you related to Drew because she was your age, and now to your horror you find you have more in common with her onscreen parents. The Child star is a portal through which the viewer can access temporally distant versions of themselves.   DEATH IS AN EVENT HORIZON In the text Camera Lucida Roland Barthes speaks of the melancholy of the photograph. For him the frozen time of the photograph is a marker of mortality, a reminder that the person in the image will one day die. Initially we felt that this logic didn’t fly with the retro-futurist ambitions of the remix. After all, the remix was not about the future of the real but the creation of unreal futures from pieces of the past.   All of which was true but could not explain away the acute feeling of longing that we encountered upon watching ‘My Own Private Idaho’. There in River Phoenix’s face was the secret melancholy of every recording. His death seemed strangely suspended between the ‘past’ of the viewing present and the ‘future’ of the video clip, revealing the event horizon that opens onto every recorded moment. Soda_Jerk 06/06