
English: 
Over the past 10 years, as the speed and influence
of digital media has increased so has the
writing expressing a concern for its effects,
particularly that it's eroding our capacity
for silence, solitude and slowness.
The attention economy 
- everyone's writing about it,
it's the thing that currently has our attention.
And, so, while brevity might be the soul of
wit it seems we're increasingly worried that
it's also the soul of that which is frivolous
and disposable - that the incessant flow of
information that has become the undercurrent
to many of our lives is disorienting to the
point of catastrophe.
And sure whenever twitter asks me 'what's
happening?'
I interpret the intonation as:
[audio: Poltergeist (1982)] “What's happening?!?”
But it's no revelation to say that this trend,
both of speed and the concern around it, isn't so recent.
As that ancient proverb of Billy Joel declares:
we didn't start the fire!

English: 
Hamlet Illustration by H. C. Selous (1864-68)
Christopher Baker - Hello World! (2008)
Poltergeist (1982)
British Pathe - Power Constructing a Car Engine (1930-1939)
British Pathe - Under London Trunk Telephone (1968)
British Pathe - Computer Room (1970-1979)
Billy Joel - We Didn't Start the Fire (1989)

English: 
Building A Steam Locomotive (1941)
British Pathe- Tv Telephone (1963)
British Pathe - Telephone Switchboard (1970-1979)
British Pathe - Pool Of London (1970-1979)
British Pathe - High Speed Steppers (1934)
British Pathe - The Slow Fox Trot (1931)
British Pathe - Rocket Take Off (1964)
British Pathe - Auto Stunts (1969)
British Pathe - Slow Motion Dives (1952)
British Pathe - Printing The Daily Express
(1940)

English: 
Certainly, since the invention of the railroad
every century has been defined by speed, just
with each one we feel more fast and more furious.
"And here we are in the 21st", as Steven Poole
writes in the Spectator "in another culture
that both worships and deplores its ostensibly
unprecedented speed."
So, ever the contrarians, it's not surprising
that we might start to become equally fascinated
by the opposite - to believe that, in a culture
of speed, maybe slow is the new radical,
our tool of resistance.
But now, with the "coming renaissance of long-form
journalism," and in 'the age of the hour-long
YouTube video' - is slow media in opposition
to contemporary demands, or submissive to them?
In considering why things are the length they
are, the most immediate answer is that the
duration of media has long been the dominion
of capital.

English: 
And capital remains the dominant influence
on… everything.
Even the great tomes of novels like War and
Peace or Les Misérables have been accused
of padding for profit.
As Susan R. Gannon suggests of 19th century
writing: "In an age when writers were paid
by the page, long windedness was profitable…"
Then, in the age of digital media, this pressure for length turned to pressure for brevity.
And while, say, YouTube no longer enforces
the 10 minute limit that was in place until
2010, to some extent brevity is baked into
its form: hyper-narration, jump cuts, every
frame of silence removed - as author and youtuber
John Green explained in this vlog from 2014:
"Quiet is an interesting thing to talk about
on YouTube because attention has become so
fractured on the internet that there is no
longer room in YouTube videos for any silence.
I think I go back and I watch our videos from
2007 with the jump cuts that are really really

English: 
What Is Money (1947)
British Pathe - Money Makers (1960)
Star Wars Kid (Raza, 2002)
Charlie bit my finger - again! (HDCYT, 2007)
Charlie Schmidt's Keyboard Cat! - THE ORIGINAL!
(Keyboard Cat, 2007)
Stalking Cat (モアクリ, 2008)
Dramatic Chipmunk (cregets, 2007)
YouTube Rewind 2010 Year in Review, (YouTube,
2010)
YouTube Rewind Now Watch Me 2015 (YouTube,
2015)

English: 
In Pursuit of Quiet (vlogbrothers, 2014)
How YouTube's Home Screen Works
(Youtube Creators, 2017)
Charlie Schmidt's Keyboard Cat! - THE ORIGINAL! (Keyboard Cat, 2007)
Conspiracy Theories with Shane Dawson (shane, 2019)

English: 
slow, and the space between the jump cuts
is just absolutely unbearable."
And that's a pressure I know I feel 
making videos on YouTube.
Are these sentences brief enough?
Are these ideas relevant enough?
And with my own videos slowing down and getting
longer, it can feel like going against the
idea of what a YouTube video should be - 
but, is it?
It's no secret that YouTube has adapted it's
algorithm to favour watch time, incentivising
those creating videos to increase their length.
The more minutes you watch the more ads you
can be served, and the longer you spend on
a platform the bigger role that platform plays
in our culture.
And so, once again, short is out and long
is in.
But more than just the renewed profitability
of long-windedness, in 2013 the editors of
Politico claimed that 'long-form' journalism:
“is a genre that is even more essential
in today’s hyperkinetic news environment."

English: 
Even the title 'long-form'
implies that its value lies simply in its
long-ness - following an established association
between 'long' and 'important'.
Author Peter Wayner wrote about being asked
to expand a book from 20,000 words to at least
80,000, explaining that: "readers wanted to
feel like they got some heft, both physical
and intellectual, for their money, … Big
thoughts were heavy and thick tomes telegraphed
just how much work went into writing a book—and
reading it."
And this highlights a cultural
fetishisation, not only of length in media,
but in process - the idea that something is
more worthy if it took a long time,
when something is valued, first, for the dedication
of its own production, over its intrinsic
form or quality - garnering praise in the
vein of: "wow, that must have taken a really long time."

English: 
British Pathe - Blanket Making (1969)
British Pathe - Map Making (1952)
British Pathe - The Making Of Wedgwood Reel 1 (1958)

English: 
Unless, of course, the pursuit is deemed unworthy
- in which case comments will likely take
the form of: "don't you have anything better
to do?”
As if this kind of dedication can threaten
the conception of labour we rely on to define worth.
Because, you know… rude.
But this is what writer and curator David
Campany believes is the 'radical appeal of photography':
[voice: David Campany] "that there was no correspondance between labour and artistic merit.
You could have 15 people working to produce
a photograph or a kid could go out in the
street and just do something extraordinary
with a single frame and there's something
very liberating but unsettling about that."
Here, rather than conforming to cultural expectations,
it's speed that's disruptive.
This isn't to say that the notion of deceleration
isn't a radical one, which is something that's
demonstrated in Douglas Gordon's film installation
'24 Hour Psycho', slowing down Hitchcock's

English: 
British Pathe - Map Making (1952)
British Pathe - The Making Of Wedgwood Reel 1 (1958)
Conversation David Claerbout with David Campany, FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerp (2017)
British Pathe - Camera Club (1950)

English: 
original to 2 frames a second which, as the title suggests, would require 24 hours to view in its entirety.
As a character in Don DeLillo's 'Point Omega'
observes, this reconstruction encourages us:
"To see what’s here, finally to look and
to know you’re looking, to feel time passing,
to be alive to what is happening in the smallest
registers of motion."
But while this slowness provides
an all too infrequent relief from what another
character calls "the nausea of News and Traffic", 
there's an equally disruptive
potential in embracing speed and brevity which
I think is, at least right now, more frequently overlooked.
Like how the short film or story have always
been considered lesser mediums compared to
their longer counterparts, "something you
played around with", as short story writer
Alice Munro complained, "until you got a novel".
But author Steven Millhauser identifies
the revolutionary promise of the short story,

English: 
Douglas Gordon - 24 Hour Psycho (1993), 
at Modern Art Oxford February (2016)
Douglas Gordon - 24 Hour Psycho (1993), 
at Modern Art Oxford February (2016)
Psycho (1960) 
(re-edited by me)

English: 
Hito Steyerl at the ICA (ICA, 2014)
Thriller (byronfgarcia, 2007)
Evolution of Dance (Judson Laipply, 2006)
Panda sneezing (Lloyd Thyen, 2007)
Otters holding hands (2007)
David OReilly - Compression Reel (2008)
TikToks from BabyAriel, Loren Gray, LadBible (2019)

English: 
explaining that it: "apologizes for nothing.
It exults in its shortness.
It wants to be shorter still.
It wants to be a single word.
If it could find that word, if it could utter
that syllable, the entire universe would blaze
up out of it with a roar.
That is the outrageous ambition of the short
story…"
And it's in this manner that artist Hito Steyerl approaches 'the poor image', the low resolution image
- its deterioration evidence of its acceleration:
"It transforms quality into accessibility…
images that can be made and seen by the many."
This offers an alternative understanding
of value - one based, not on capital, but
on access - the outsider appeal of non-commercial
images.
And its replicated in the excitement around
TikTok's 3-60 second loops in opposition to
the increasing commercialisation of YouTube.

English: 
Though, unfortunately, a lack of monetisation
has previously led to the life of a platform
being as short as its videos.
There's a kind of neo-dadaist expression that
has come to define the meme's fast-paced absurdist
response to contemporary life.
As composer Edgard Varese declared in 1922:
"Speed and synthesis are characteristics of
our own epoch, we need 20th century instruments
to help us realise them in music."
And now nearly 100 years later,
maybe memes are that instrument for visual
culture.
But Steyerl's essay was written 10 years ago,
and while the joyful intensity of low resolution
is still present, it doesn't dominate the
internet like it used to.
YouTube has become the home of high production
value.
And though TikTok's videos might embrace the
amateurish values YouTube is abandoning, it
hardly compares to the grainy footage of 2009.
Even the source of one of our most loved memes,
[audio: All Star by Smash Mouth] "someBODY"

English: 
[SFM] We like to party (an0nymooose, 2014)
David OReilly - Compression Reel (2008)
Shooting stars meme (boat edition) (Bruno H, 2017)
Shooting stars meme (boat edition) (Bruno H, 2017)
HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA (ProtoOfSnagem, 2010)
Daytime Fireworks in 4k Slow Mo 
(The Slow Mo Guys, 2019)
TikTok from caenhilcc
TikTok from tinckerprincess0 (2019) 
Surprised Kitty (Original) (2009)
(rozzzafly, 2009)
Shrek (2001)

English: 
having languished in the resolution of the unworthy for 20 years, is finally available in all 1080ps.
As internet speeds increase, and access to those speeds increase, we no longer rely on compression.
And now these HD, 4k, 8k images are not a
mark of slow, exclusive media but rather speeds
of the kind we can no longer see - images
that can travel so fast they've lost the aesthetic of speed.
Of course, the sayings we have around time
attest to the fact that objective and subjective
speed have never exactly seen eye to eye.
But this demonstrates another condition of
the attention economy that access allows for.
Not only speed, but volume.
Not just fast, but more.
Which is where 'longform' might break down
as an antithesis to current dynamics of speed,
in offering exactly what our culture demands
- not slow, just more.

English: 
Smash Mouth - All Star (Official Music Video)
(1999) Apple Promo Video (1990s)
Daytime Fireworks in 4k Slow Mo 
(The Slow Mo Guys, 2019)
SONY – BRAVIA OLED TV advert (2019)
LG Curved OLED TV Advert (2019)
Samsung QLED 8K Official Introduction (2019)
Funny How Time Flies vinyl cover (1987)

English: 
It could be said that the 21st century has
become increasingly defined by a kind of cultural
white noise - visually depicted here by the
twitter account @GlitchTVBot which provides
a constant context-less stream of images from
live news channels, reintroducing that aesthetic
of speed via the glitch and resulting in possibly
one of the most accurate representations of
how it feels to exist under a tide of incessantly
breaking news.
heh...The news cycle, more like... the noise
cy...[cuts off]!
And white noise is closely associated with
speed, with immediacy - those constant demands
- live, premiering, ring the bell - 
whatever it is it's now!
But it also creates its own kind of stillness.
In offering maximum information, every frequency,
it provides minimum information, no frequency.
Like photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto's long
exposures of movie theatres which, in being

English: 
shot over the entire duration of the film,
result only in vacant screens.
An image that, as art critic Erika Balsom writes: "is at once the totality of the projected film and its negation.”
There's an alluring passion in this kind of self-destruction, though still not unique to the current epoch
since it's characterised in Edna St. Vincent
Millay's poem First Fig:
"My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night;
but ah my foes and oh my friends, it gives a lovely light."
This poem was published in 1920 and reflects
the way we culturally remember that decade
but as we approach the 2020s, this desire for
all consuming destruction has taken a new form.
In the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino writes about
the recent trend of 'begging for celebrities
to kill you', potentially stemming from a
need to express extreme physicality in response

English: 
'Theaters' by Hiroshi Sugimoto
Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
The Roaring Twenties Trailer (1939)
British Pathe - Time To Remember 1920s - Reel
1 (1920-1929)

English: 
Christopher Baker - Hello World! (2008)
Douglas Gordon - back and forth and forth and back (2008), Gagosian (2018)
British Pathe - Television Screen (1970-1979)
A Quiet Place (2018)

English: 
to the comfortable numbing of digital media-
creating the desire for "a sensation strong
enough to silence itself". 
The fact that this is as much
a definition of white noise as it is an opposing
response to it is likely a testament to its
dominance over our cultural moment - but also
to how it strangely provides its own relief.
The overwhelming enormity of its destructive
force even mirroring the decelerated effects
of a film like '24 Hour Psycho', considering
how, as art historian Claire Daigle writes:
"The actions of human beings cease to matter
when great swathes of time are unfurled.
Mortals are overtaken by brute materiality."
White noise can act as a liberation
from our own noise - problems, worries, decisions
- while it is all consuming, it overwhelms
the sounds of the things that might overwhelm us.

English: 
In an episode of the podcast Reasonably Sound
titled 'Peace and White Noise', host Mike
Rugnetta describes a comfort in being able
to lose yourself in the sight and sound of the ocean:
[voice: Mike Rugnetta] "If you’re at the right beach you can stand in front of something that not only fills the
entirety of your periphery, 
but also doesn’t give a damn about you one bit."
And, outside of the inherent eroticism of
the sea, for better or worse we're frequently
invited to lose ourselves in a sea of people.
Even the meme, our instrument of 21st century
speed, relies on the assimilation of the individual
into an essentially oceanic mass.
This, perhaps, gives new meaning to the title
of 'YouTube', originally derived from a founding
principle of unrestricted individual expression
- one they've been trying to walk back ever
since - which is that, according to music
professor Justin Patch: "one of the most delicious

English: 
Christopher Baker - Hello World! (2008)
British Pathe - Computer Room (1970-1979)
British Pathe - Computer Aids Railway (1969)
British Pathe - Computer Orchestra (1968)
British Pathe - Computer USA (1972)
British Pathe - Power Constructing a Car Engine (1930-1939)
British Pathe - Computer Orchestra (1968)
British Pathe - Crack-Ups Stop Big Car Race (1951)

English: 
ambiguities in the English language is the
word you - it encompasses both the singular
and the plural with no clear grammatical distinction."
So rather than an acknowledgement of the individual,
we're united here, foes and friends, powerless
under the disquieting monolith of content.
So this brave new world might not be unique
in its defining quality of speed, but the
new channels it takes leads to a persistent
sense of being overwhelmed, where we can read
accounts from 20, 50, 150 years ago that seem
as though they could simply be describing
our current experience and think only: 
'oh honey, you have no idea'.
But if the age of steam and the age of meme
(yes I went there) are so emotionally similar,
it indicates that as speed increases so does
our tolerance for it.

English: 
British Pathe - Auto Stunts (1969)
British Pathe - Crack-Ups Stop Big Car Race (1951)
British Pathe - Computer USA (1972)
British Pathe - Secrets Of Nature - The Frog (1930)
British Pathe - Computer USA (1972)
British Pathe - Sand Artist (1964)
British Pathe - Swimming In Sea (1970)
British Pathe - Seaside Birthday (1954)

English: 
Maybe speed has been the focus of cultural
catastrophe because it's difficult to separate
the idea of speed from the idea of crashing
but slowness has its own kind of insidious influence.
Like the fabled frog slowly boiling alive,
humans can get used to just about anything,
as long as it's a slow process.
It's good to question the trajectories we
find ourselves on, especially if you can't
quite remember how you got... wait, why am I on twitter?
and that involves being aware of how platforms change
what we value, how we experience, what we
think we want.
But shortness isn't necessarily a submission
to the dominant culture - its resistance to
monetisation translating to a resistance towards
traditional ideas of value.
Of course, that hinders its longevity, but
if shortness embraces brevity it follows that
the short itself should be ephemeral, maybe
even exhibiting an unsettlingly enthusiastic

English: 
Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
Nicolas Provost - Long Live the New Flesh (2009)
(edited onto 'Theatres' by Hiroshi Sugimoto)
British Pathe - The Cup Final (1960)
British Pathe - Books In Boot Of Car Aka Feeding Stand (1937)
Douglas Gordon - 24 Hour Psycho (1993)
TikToks from esperborzoi, 70800017, mirandah_fleury,
dänkmëme, imjaylloyd, davidkasprak
British Pathe - Demolishing A Castle In New York (1938)
British Pathe - Secrets Of Nature - Starting In Life - Version 1 (1930)
British Pathe - Rocket Take Off (1964)
British Pathe - Moon At Night (1960-1969)
British Pathe - Crack-Ups Stop Big Car Race (1951)
British Pathe - Fine Arts Palace Demolished (1964)
British Pathe - Summertime Meadow (1940-1949)
British Pathe - Telephone Switchboard (1970-1979)

English: 
acceptance of its own inevitable demise.
This is an era increasingly defined, not by speed or stillness, but the constant tension between the two.
Where speed is emotionally loved
 but intellectually despised,
and slowness is intellectually admired  
but emotionally feared.
Both acceleration and deceleration can be
nonconformist desires, but while extreme slowness
reminds us of our insignificance against the
vast expanse of time, intense shortness implies
an insignificance in each passing second - already
falling away, already obsolete.
It's a form that encompasses change, and therefore
the essence of every historical moment, both
despite and because of its brevity, but its
most unsettling quality is that it also contains
all the promise and threat of the change yet
to come.

English: 
[music: We Didn't Start The Fire by Billy Joel (instrumental)]
[music: We Didn't Start The Fire (vocals only)]
"We didn't start the fire..."

English: 
British Pathe - Defence By Fire (1945)
