In Praise of Low-Fidelity
We live in a period of ever-accelerating technological change. A smartphone camera today is as powerful as, if not more powerful than, an expensive, professional camera was fifteen or so years ago. A consumer-grade computer is able to hold entire filing cabinets’ worth of information. There exist copies of recently released films in ultra-HD, as we get closer and closer to the television and computer monitor being able to almost perfectly replicate the cinema screen. The music we listen to on our noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones (with frequency responses similar to those one would only have found in a recording studio a decade or so ago) is of sufficiently high quality that it accurately replicates the sound of an original master tape. In short, we live in the period of high (highest) fidelity.
Yet, increasingly, we find ourselves drawn to the grime, noise and dirt of analogue formats. Record shops have started selling vinyl records again, and some musicians – especially those in the vaporwave music scene – have started putting their music out on cassette tapes. Film cameras have experienced a recent resurgence in popularity, and a small industry of independent darkroom technicians have risen up to develop film that can no longer be simply spirited to the nearest pharmacy to be developed in an hour. Artists like Jack Stauber have started creating short animations, transferring them on to VHS tapes, and then scanning the tapes back into the computer, giving them a fuzzy, nostalgic look. On YouTube, 24-hour livestreams of lo-fi instrumental hip-hop have become popular as background music for weary students.
What happened?
In his 1996 book A Year With Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno writes that “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”
I recently found myself thinking of this quote while editing an old photograph of myself in costume as a Second World War evacuee aged ten, trying to artificially age it and make it look older than it actually was. Putting the image into sepia was not enough, I found. The image had to be made to look old. It had to look like it had been taken with a crap camera, rather than the (at the time) relatively high-resolution digital camera it had been taken with circa 2006. The image had to be slightly blurred, to emulate imperfections in the lens – there were, after all, no CMOS chips in the 1940s – and I had to artificially add computer-generated noise to give the image some grain. Only then did it resemble the real deal, and upon posting it to Instagram with a joke caption claiming it was an image of my grandfather, at least one person was fooled into thinking it was genuinely over sixty years old.
Since then, I have created a few faked “double exposures” using similar techniques, using photographs taken with my smartphone. My smartphone’s camera has a resolution of about twelve megapixels, yet I am deliberately making images taken with it look, by all objective measures, worse. I am blurring the fine details, adding noise and artifacts, the precise opposite of what my phone’s CMOS chip is supposed to do!
Why is an entire generation so drawn to low-fidelity, analogue reproduction, so much so that we have to take great pains to get hold of it? For example, tape hiss is no longer an annoyance to be eliminated, it is a desirable thing to add in. Very similar is the frankly terrible video reproduction quality of VHS tapes. As Harry “Hbomberguy” Brewis argues in his video, “The Power of VHS”, a lot of horror movies are actually scarier on VHS because the image is of such low-fidelity that darkness appears to constantly flicker and shift, giving the sense that there might be something lurking there.
“My smartphone’s camera has a resolution of about twelve megapixels, yet I am deliberately making images taken with it look, by all objective measures, worse.”
It’s not necessarily just analogue, however – a lot of video games are using pixel art in place of advanced graphics to tell their stories. One of my personal favourites, Undertale, which I became obsessed with in the spring of 2016, uses pixel art and chiptunes to tell a compelling and poignant story that is not only about love and violence, but also a meta-commentary on the nature of video games themselves. It is arguably one of the best games of the last twenty years, and it does it without any flashy, ultra-realistic, 1080p graphics.
So it seems that what we are really obsessed with, especially people of my age and generation (that is, kids born roughly between 1983 and 1998) is low-fidelity. Something about the hazy, the fuzzy and indiscernible; perhaps because it reflects our own memories – perpetually blurred, impossible to fully grasp, slowly growing more and more worn out with every replay.
We are the first generation to grow up surrounded almost exclusively by screens – television screens, computer screens, phone screens, camera viewfinders – our lives viewed eternally through gleaming backlit windows, constantly, inescapably beaming information into our brains. This is the Information Age, after all – our entire world is built on information. It is our crude oil.
“…it seems that what we are really obsessed with…is low-fidelity. Something about the hazy, the fuzzy and indiscernible; perhaps because it reflects our own memories – perpetually blurred, impossible to fully grasp, slowly growing more and more worn out with every replay.”
As such, we are also the first generation to grow up around twenty-four-hour news – the constant, dizzying flurry of news stories, today a murder, tomorrow a bombing, then a mass shooting, then a fire, then a war, then another shooting. We, especially those born in the mid-1990s, have spent almost our entire childhoods and adolescences in the shadow of 9/11 – which at the time of writing happened seventeen years ago this September. We live in a state of constant, perhaps not terror, but anxiety and existential malaise. Our identities perpetually shift from one day to the next. There are no constants any more. All that is solid has melted into air. Past, present and future collide and negate each other, leaving in their wake a thin haze of temporal displacement. Cultural theorists have a name for this feeling of temporal displacement: hauntology.
We are attracted to low-fidelity out of nostalgia, but a specific nostalgia: A longing to return to a world that makes sense, to escape the phantasmagoria of modern life. Audio cassettes, VHS tapes, vinyl records and pixel-art offer the comfort of knowing there was a time, not long ago, where the world seemed to make sense, where there was no constant, bewildering cycle of outrage from moment to moment. We know, of course that this past never existed. We escape into a past we have constructed, a comforting fiction made of polaroids and videotapes. We make music that sounds like it might have appeared on some obscure, unlabelled tape we found behind the back of a washing machine; we take photographs on film and make our digital photographs look like they were taken twenty years ago; we make music videos that look decades older than they are.
We live in a period of cultural stagnation, where everything is recycled, rebooted or remade, touched up, given a makeover with millions of dollars worth of production spent on making things look and sound and feel cleaner, more streamlined.
“We escape into a past we have constructed, a comforting fiction made of polaroids and videotapes.”
Perhaps, then, the most radical and rebellious thing to do is to embrace crap – to embrace inferiority and obsolescence, to embrace that which has fallen out of fashion. Vinyl records pop, crackle and skip. Tapes hiss and hum. VHS video wobbles and fizzes. Old film cameras add grain and overexposure. These are all abandoned formats, vastly inferior to the high-fidelity of audio CDs, MP3s, FLACs, DVDs, Blu-Ray discs and twelve-megapixel smartphone cameras; yet they are formats that make sense to us.
This, too, is a recycling of the old. But there is no remastering here. We are not seeking reissues of the past. We are seeking to record the present using the tools of the obsolete. We are trying to create a future using those visions of yesterday. This is why we are so drawn to low-fidelity reproduction. Because, for sure, the technology of the past is inferior to the technology of the present, but psychologically and ontologically, it belongs to a time period before adult responsibility, before the painful loss of innocence. These objects are a psychological Eden; a time before the serpent stole that blissful, timeless world of light and colour from us.
Perhaps all generations go through this at one time or another. Alas, we are the first generation to have grown up surrounded by such rapid technical advancement that we are able to step back into our pasts through the medium of objects, these old eyes, these old ears, to retreat from today in an effort to create a tomorrow that we can make sense of.
The future has been cancelled. The present does not exist. The past is fictitious.
It doesn’t get more millennial than that.