This article aims to theorise the metamorphosis of analogue media into digital media, a process enacted by digital media itself. The analysis will start by using the YouTube video “This is DVD (1998-1999) Advert” as an emblem of digital media’s desire to overwrite the analogue history of media. This is followed by an elaboration of how digital media simulates not only analogue media itself, but also the techniques of analogue media—using the progression of the freeze-frame from literal to illusionistic to ever-present simulacrum, as an example of the domination of the digital.

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Following Marshall McLuhan, we can define a medium as a technology working as an “extension of ourselves”. McLuhan separates a medium’s content from its message and asserts that an analysis of the technology supersedes any analysis of the uses of said technology. The aspect of media we are most concerned with is the notion that a medium’s “content” is other mediums (Mcluhan 1964: 7-8).

Video Clip 1. “This is DVD (1998-1999) Advert” Uploaded by TP Percival in 2018.

This is DVD, for example, was an advert for the medium of DVD on VHS. The medium of VHS is presenting the medium of moving image, which presents both sound and photography, which present speech, music, text, print, iconography, and animation—even as all this is already animation¹.

The same is not true of the YouTube video “This is DVD (1998-1999) Advert”, because the primary export of digital video is not the video, but its digital rendering. The act of ‘digitizing’ this advert works to propose a superiority of digital video over the analogue VHS, seeking to prove its claim by representing the artefacts of the VHS’s interlaced video (see Fig. 1 + 2).

Figures 1 + 2. Stills from “This is DVD (1998-1999) Advert”.

The digital video does not grasp the frailty of this endeavour, as the comparison allows us to see the digital for what it is. It does not copy, instead, it merely represents the VHS, with the artefacts aiming to remind us of its analogue ‘origin’, without reproducing either the analogue or its artefacts in any real way. While the VHS has frames that actually overlap each other, the digital video has discrete individual frames—being used to depict interlaced video in this instance. But for the digital video, this representation of the analogue is enough to consider the analogue ‘digitized’ and improved upon.

Figures 3 + 4. Stills from “This is DVD (1998-1999) Advert”.

The digital desire to simulate and replace the analogue is shown most directly in the advert when the narration announces, “the picture is twice as sharp as VHS,” and a ‘pixelated’ plane ‘depixelates’ itself (see Fig. 3 and 4). This suggestion that the imprecision of VHS comes from a deficiency of pixels emerges from an entirely digital imagination, in which all video is already digital. The VHS has no pixels, and its poor image quality is due to the limitations related to the speed the VCR could read from the VHS’s magnetic tape. But the digital cannot comprehend the analogue, so instead brings the analogue into its own understanding through a digitization process which strips the analogue of the analogue, and once understood as digital, is declared less digital than digital, worse than digital. Like is said of arguing with an idiot: “They’ll bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

Now we can discuss what the digital screen has done to the freeze-frame. Tom Gunning’s account of early cinema and Laura Mulvey’s analysis of Psycho (1960) both suggest that the freeze-frame negotiates the moving image’s relation to photography. For his part, Gunning describes Smith and Blackton’s exhibitions starting with a single projected still image—using a water cell between the bulb of the projector and the celluloid to absorb heat and hold the ‘freeze-frame’ for longer—before the cinematic apparatus started up, and the photos ‘came to life’ (Gunning 1989: 867-868). Mulvey’s description of the freeze-frame in Psycho (1960) is of an illusionistic freeze-frame, where hundreds of repeated frames present as one ‘still image’. For Mulvey, the freeze-frame is a reminder of cinema’s origin in photography (Mulvey 2006: 81).

Alan Cholodenko complicates this point with Still Photography? (2008), which describes La Jetée (1962) as a “movie made of freeze-frames, of ‘stills-in-motion,’ just like every movie.” For Cholodenko, the photograph is the virtual seed of the movie and is “virtually exchangeable” with the actualisation of that seed.

The digital freeze-frame is more of a farce than Psycho‘s illusionistic freeze-frame, as the high refresh-rate of many computer monitors outpace the framerate of the digital videos being watched on them, and every ‘frame’ becomes a freeze-frame. Not only are digital videos “stills-in-motion”, they are also a repetition of stills, stills stilled, only able to be put into ‘motion’ by being put through an additional digital stillness. Anything animated on twos are displayed as fours, eights, sixteens, and constitute a bombardment of more of the same.

The digital freeze-frames of “La Jetee (1962)” on YouTube, then, are not a reminder of photography, but a digital display of the nature of digital video. These freeze-frames, while containing more “freeze-frames” than La Jetée (1962), only manage to simulate the movement of the original’s “stills-in-motion” and showcase how digital media remains in its own disconnected ‘world’ of short-circuiting references—such that it does not present other (non-digital) media, but instead makes the other (non-digital) mediums metamorphose, despite themselves, into digital mediums, or into being virtually exchangeable with digital mediums.

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Laura Mulvey has said that theorising 16mm film was easier than theorising digital media, because 16mm is tangible (2023). Part of digital media’s greatest trick is pretending it is intangible, creating its own bubble in which everything is digital, and refusing to engage with anything outside unless it too is digital—or is made digital.

Video Clip 2. “Build AI assistants that know your world with watsonx”. Uploaded by IBM in 2024.

So when IBM announces that “Your personal AI assistant doesn’t need to understand THE world, just your world”, it reads to me as an acknowledgement that while AI can’t understand the world, it is more than willing to replace it with digital media–passing to the spectre, the HAL, of the Same.

References:

Cholodenko, A. ‘Introduction’, in The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation, ed. A Cholodenko, 13-95. (Sydney: Power Publications, 2007)

Cholodenko, A. ‘Still Photography?’ The Journal of International Baudrillard Studies, 5 (1), January 2008.

Cholodenko, A. ‘The Expanding Universe of Animation (Studies)’, Animation Studies 11, 2016.

Gunning, T. ‘An aesthetics of astonishment: Early film and the (in)credulous spectator’, in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 862-76. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Mcluhan, M. ‘The Medium is the Message’, Understanding Media: The extensions of man (Canada: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964).

Mulvey, L. ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)’ Death 24x a Second. (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).

Mulvey, L. Riddles of the Sphinx Q&A. May 13, Falmouth University. 2023.

Notes:

[1] Following from Alan Cholodenko’s position on animation (studies) traced and expanded upon The Expanding World of Animation (Studies) (Cholodenko 2016), that “all arts, media and communications are forms of animation”(Cholodenko 2007, cited in Cholodenko 2016).

Samuel Regan-Edwards is a recent graduate from Falmouth University’s Animation BA(Hons) course, interested in how reference and acknowledgement function in animation in its limited, broader, and broadest senses.