Accountability and responsibility must be thought of in terms of what matters and what is excluded from mattering. (Barad, 2007: 220)
This is a ghost story about a poltergeist that haunted me through the winter of 2023-2024 on my Vimeo account. My account appeared to be hacked into repeatedly during this period, and almost all the files that were publicly visible were downloaded multiple times (See Figure 1). This happened despite Vimeo support informing me that I had maximised my security options. The files downloaded included everything and anything – student exercises from my time at the National Film and TV School, clips from my older films, various animated animal studies. Also crowdfund pitches, storyboard images (which I’d uploaded as I was hoping to use them as crowdfund perks), as well as sample animations from my work in progress project (See Figure 2).
I posted about this activity on Facebook, as I wondered if my experience was commonplace. I got some helpful comments. A few people mentioned that you do not need to have any significant level of skill to be able to download from Vimeo – there are websites dedicated to this black art, and anybody who has access to a computer and the internet can use them. However, my poltergeist not only altered my security settings several times, but eventually did so in such a way that I couldn’t override and reset the settings myself. So, I think this particular poltergeist did have some digital skills. One of the comments on my Facebook post asked why it matters if somebody has possession of your digital files. I thought this was an excellent question. It prompted me to write this personal reflexive text.
The Haunting
I have been working on a mixed media documentary project, titled Chernobyl Journey, since 2009. This project, the practice element of my PhD, remains a work in progress. Until 2021, I was working on this project with my editor and friend Marianne Kuopanportti Fennell. Marianne died very suddenly and unexpectedly in December 2020. I made an animation of a horse morphing into a swallow a few months later. I had been planning to make this animation for a while, so it wasn’t a response to losing my friend, but as I made it so soon after her passing, it became associated with this in my mind. In 2022 my PhD supervisor suggested that I should include something completed with my final PhD submission, to support the work in progress. I had not managed to process Marianne’s death at the time, and I felt a need to make a gesture. So I took some of the finished animations from Chernobyl Journey and tweaked them to fashion a mini-film tribute to Marianne, drawing on Bede’s famous evocation of life as a bird appearing briefly in the firelight as it enters, flies through and leaves a hall[1].
I crowdfunded. My university, Wolverhampton, kindly donated. I made a very low budget film called Pripyat Horse, completed in February 2023. I couldn’t afford to pay Festival fees, but I sent the film around to a few Festivals that had free entry or would give fee waivers. It took a while to get accepted anywhere, so when it was accepted at Mill Valley Film Festival in California, I was delighted & I posted about this on Facebook. That is when the haunting began – it started on Facebook first with vaguely threatening messages being sent to pages I had created for crowdfunding. The messages came from companies and individuals who couldn’t be traced and appeared not to exist. I learned to ignore them, as they appeared to serve no practical purpose, but they caused me stress. I stopped reporting Festival screenings on FB, and abandoned my crowdfund pages, trying to avoid any additional worries, as I was working on the final stages of my PhD thesis.
Then I received an email from a Festival. They told me that the link I had provided to Pripyat Horse did not work on Film Freeway, or on my Vimeo page. I didn’t understand at first, but eventually I worked out that the file’s privacy setting had been changed from ‘Password Protected’ to ‘Unlisted’ which changed the link. I uploaded the film again, with a different password, and set the Film Freeway link to the new file. That worked for a while, but then I got messages from a different Festival telling me the link wasn’t working. I found the privacy status of the new file had again been changed to ‘unlisted’. I changed it back to password protected, and changed my Vimeo password, but it wasn’t long before it was changed back to ‘unlisted’ again. Vimeo Support were helpful, but I had a long cross purposes conversation with them, as it didn’t occur to me that my account might have been hacked. I’m a little-known animator, why would somebody bother to hack into my account? Vimeo told me only a person with access to my account could have changed the security status of my files. Only two people had ever had access to my account – myself, and Marianne. I therefore assumed that these changes must be coming from Vimeo admin.
Finally, I realized that I had been hacked. The hacker was repeatedly changing my privacy settings and downloading my files freely. I uploaded the Pripyat Horse file directly to Film Freeway, hoping that this might give it more robust protection and still keep it available for Festivals to view. I started to change my Vimeo passwords regularly – which didn’t appear to deter the poltergeist at all. The piracy intensified until it seemed whenever I looked at my Vimeo account something new had been downloaded. At the height of the haunting the setting for where my files could be embedded became fixed on ‘anywhere’. I couldn’t change this. Vimeo support also couldn’t change it – it took a week to put me back in control of my security settings. I panicked and started to remove some of my files.
Our culture of abundance, the culprit in this situation, has thus brought about “the end of decay time” in digital culture, leaving us wading not only in tech-junk but in post-scarcity memory culture of endless amounts of data. We have lost loss itself. (Lagerkvist, 2018: 55)
Amanda Lagerkvist argues we are all wading in so much ‘endless data’, through our proliferating digital traces, that ‘We have lost loss itself’. But I did feel loss on removing those hopelessly ephemeral things, my digital files. I was looking at a Vimeo folder devoted to Chernobyl Journey where I’d uploaded 5 state-of-the-art edits of the film from 2018 through 2021. Two admins had access to the folder – myself and Marianne. As I was poised wondering whether I should remove these from Vimeo, or whether having the setting ‘Private’ was safe enough, suddenly another Sally Pearce icon appeared, so there was one Marianne and two Sally Pearces, as Admins. Perhaps this was just something I’d done myself, as I was thoroughly flustered by now. But I panicked and deleted the files. In doing so I deleted a digital trace of all of the work Marianne and I had done together over 5 years. Sure, those files will be on my hard drives in various forms and formats, but the Vimeo folder was like a living, and potentially shareable, trace of our journey of making – so it felt like an erasure to delete our digital footprints.
Some Thoughts
This assault on my Vimeo account made me painfully aware of how dependent I am on being visible online, on Vimeo, or another platform like it, and how vulnerable this makes me. As Vimeo Support pointed out, the only way they could make the platform safer would be to introduce encryption and this would make the platform too expensive for me. They are right, I couldn’t afford to pay more for my digital platform. I’m a relatively marginalised animator – an animation gleaner. I glean for audiences for my work, and I glean for budgets, mostly through crowdfunding. A person who has robust funding and support perhaps can keep their work in progress private, until they are ready to release it. But if you are a gleaner, if you rely on crowdfunding, your work needs to be out there and visible. At the time of this assault on my Vimeo account I had included Vimeo links to my work in my nearly finished PhD thesis, in job applications, in funding applications and on the project page of Pripyat Horse on Film Freeway. It seemed the only way I could protect my animation during the haunting would be to make it private. But if I removed my animation from the online platforms I rely on so much, it would be an own goal – I’d effectively cease to exist as an animator.
This brings me to one of the ways in which this piracy might be said to matter. At the time this ghostly activity started I happened to be reading The Book of Trespass. In the book Nick Hayes recounts his series of overnight stays on privately owned parkland, and then explores the history of how that land became privately owned when it had once been common land on which common people had rights – to graze their livestock, to collect wood or water, to fish or trap game.
You have no right to be here’ moves easily, with the slip of a comma to ‘you have no right to be, here, there, or anywhere. (Hayes, 2020: 23)
This coincidence is where the title of this paper originated. Of course, the analogy is very imperfect because I pay for my ‘right’ to use Vimeo as a platform, it’s a commercial arrangement. However, before my Vimeo poltergeist haunting, I was viewing this platform as a kind of commons for me – a place where I have a right to showcase my digital files, where neither they nor I will come to harm. I don’t have to enter any kind of competition, I don’t have to apply or be selected, I don’t have to run the gauntlet of a pitch – I can just make my work available for public or private viewing if I choose to, as though I had a right to do this. The history of the enclosure of common land reveals that people can very easily be disenfranchised, even of rights so basic as that of just being there, standing on the earth, breathing air. People who are already marginalised, and therefore most dependent on the commons for their survival, of course, will be disenfranchised more rapidly and more profoundly than others. One argument why it might matter if the digital files that represent an animator’s time and labour are routinely taken without the animator’s permission could be that animators who are marginalised, vulnerable and unable to defend themselves will be most profoundly affected.
Digital files are a profoundly alienable form of property. I make animation by pushing gooey paint around on glass, a labour that is as physically engaged as making mud pies. Then I capture with a DSLR and wipe the image I have just created out to make another one. The image’s life as anything other than a digital file is fleeting, just minutes or less, even though the process of making it feels so strongly physical and embodied. There is a strong dissonance between the embodied making of my paint on glass animations – and their disembodied mediation as digital files, which are, as Leah Lievrouh points out:
…notoriously fugitive and difficult to preserve in usable form for any extended period of time; they are among the most profoundly fragmented, disorganised, incompatible, and ephemeral forms of record keeping ever devised. (Lievrouh, 2012: 629)
This lightness of being of course is an argument for just letting digital files go, like you might let a balloon go (if you were environmentally irresponsible), as the digital file is so light and so ephemeral, why even try to hold onto it? If becoming alienated from our own physical and mental labour is inevitable in late capitalism, perhaps the un-grasp-ability of digital files is merely another manifestation of this. However, I look at the mattering of being alienated from these files through the matter of my body, as I have an embodied relationship with these digital files through my fleshy memories of making them, and through the fleshy memories they depict.
…distant times and places are forcefully infesting our everyday experientiality, not only as memories, but also as audiovisuals from the past that coexist with [the] heavily audiovisualised present. Increasingly, singularities of past moments salvaged from time in video clips and sound bites are re-presencing the past in audiovisual exoskeletons of our being together. (Pogaçar, 2018: 28)
All those visual and tactile sensations of moving paint with my fingertips will die with me, leaving only digital files, my ‘audiovisual exoskeleton’ (Pogačar’, 2018: 31). The same can be said for the memories the animations depict. However, while these memories of making, and memories of being, remain embodied – completely losing control of the digital files I call ‘mine’, without remuneration or consent, feels like a kind of physical harm.
Bibliography
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hayes, N. (2020) The Book of Trespass: Crossing The Lines That Divide Us. Bloomsbury: London,Dublin.
Lagerkvist, A. (2018) ‘The Media End. Digital afterlife agencies and techno-existential closure’, inHoskins, A. (ed.) Digital Memory Studies. Media Pasts in Transition. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 48 – 84.
Lievrouh, L. (2012) ‘The Next Decade in Internet Time’ Information, Community and Society, 15:5. 616-638.
[1] A sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another…. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing’ (Bede, 673-735 AD).
Sally Pearce graduated from the National Film and TV School, UK, with an Animation Direction MA, in 2008. Her NFTS graduation film, Elephants (2008) screened at over 100 Festivals including for instance, Annecy, Shanghai, Uppsala, Chicago, St Louis, Tehran, London and won the Welsh Short Film BAFTA, the Award for the most creative idea at Shanghai, and over twenty other awards around the world. Sally started a PhD by Practice in the Animation Department at Wolverhampton University in October 2018, with a Studentship award. She submitted her PhD early in 2024 and has passed her Viva with minor corrections. She has delivered multiple international conference papers and has two publications. In 2022, Sally was invited to talk about her work in progress mixed media film Chernobyl Journey in the ‘Best Practice’ section of Tricky Women/Tricky Realities Festival, Vienna, for which she made Shades of Invisibility, a 22m video essay. Her recent short piece Pripyat Horse (2023) has been selected and nominated at International Film Festivals, for instance, Mill Valley Film Festival, California, Oct, 2023; the Wild and Scenic Film Festival, Nevada City, California, Feb, 2024; Brighton Animation Festival, April, 2024, and The Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation and Technology, August 2024.