***sound very loud

After carrying out the fatal shooting of two of his former coworkers, reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward, and the injury of Vicki Gardner, the executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce, who they were interviewing about the 50th Anniversary of Smith Mountain Lake in Moneta, Virginia, Vester Lee Flanagan II (whose on air persona was named Bryce Williams) posted a video of the killings from a first person perspective to both his Facebook and Twitter accounts. Later that day, August 26, 2015, after running his rental car off the road and with the police close behind, Flanagan received a phone call from his friend Robert Avent and then turned the gun on himself. About thirty minutes after the videos were posted, his social media accounts were taken down, and the only images easily available to the public eye were the ones snapped up by various news agencies. These images where curated as a representation of the most evil form of the man, and now that his accounts have been taken down, they are the definitive portrait of him. The quality of the images selected plays a crucial role in their selection. Pixelation and artifacting act as signifiers of evil, of technology gone wrong and of physical evidence of the disturbance of the man himself that exist on the surfaces of his images (see image 1). Often the parties reporting on them have distorted these images even further. His Facebook profile is scrolled through erratically as a camera video tapes the screen creating scan lines across the image. The physical photographs from his days as a male escort are piled on a table and shot in low light with an in camera flash (see image 2). A screen playing a video of Flanagan reporting is played in an otherwise pitch black room while the camera zooms and sways towards him, the colors of the image awash in blue (see image 3).

 

I was first exposed to the story through a blurry image on the cover of the Boston Globe. It was a still from the camera of Adam Ward and was the only image of Flanagan himself, captured in the falling lens after Ward had been struck. He is standing extremely straight, seemingly aiming his handgun directly at the camera. His face is distorted by motion and low light of the early morning. The camera, however, is tilted sideways so that his feet are to the right of his head, which sits at the left edge of the camera’s view and whose top third was sliced away (see image 4). After reading only the first several sentences of the article, I resolved to find his first-person video. This being the day after the incident, it was cropping up everywhere but most media outlets were doing a relatively thorough job of keeping it contained. After about eight attempts, I found a video that seemed promising. I had relocated to my room in my apartment, though I was living alone, and had walked straight there from the library where I had seen the article. The video is the aspect ratio of a vertical smart phone screen, and fills the screen of my own phone perfectly.

 

The camera slowly approaches the unaware news crew down an outdoor wooden platform, at the end of which a gun is lifted from the left bottom corner. The gun, first pointing at the anchor’s torso, then swaying trancelike to the back of the cameraman’s head, and then returning to the anchor, hovers for several seconds and then begins to arch back with the pressure of the finger against the trigger. Then the video cuts to black.

 

The video had been edited. I had seen no flash, only the finger depressing the trigger. In that moment I felt a wave of disappointment wash over me followed shortly after by a slow trickle of disgust I had been robbed of the climactic scene it had advertised. The video was a tease. I wanted so badly to see these people be killed.

 

This experience has been stuck in my head for months. I feel guilt surrounding my desire to see death, a desire which became salient at the moment the screen cut to black.

 

In the past, the way I have worked is through writing until I come up with some sort of definitive solution. I try to distill my idea into one communicable point, and then execute a piece demonstrating that point. But perhaps because of the complexity of the incident or because of my own perceived emotional stake in it, I found myself completely immobilized by it. So I began creating master copies of Flanagan’s first person video, which began by viewing it in its entirety on my phone and trying to imitate the camera’s movements. But the more I executed this action, the less clear the video, its content, and its relationship to me became. It was broken down into a series of bodily sways and short steps and I was treating it like a game of mirroring. The content of the video itself became less and less meaningful, to the point that I did not even think about what I was copying (see image 5) (see image 6).

 

The piece that I am presenting now was initially meant to act as a neatly packaged metaphor for the sort of dissolving of the content of the video over multiple viewings. I have begun an ongoing process in which I view Flanagan’s first person video over and over for about an hour a day. Each time I view the video, I upload it to my Facebook profile, and then re download it. This causes a cycle of compression. Every time I watch the video, it is compressed by Facebook’s proprietary algorithm and is then saved as a new file. As of the moment that I am writing this, the video has been viewed and recompressed 828 times.

 

For around the first 200 times I viewed the video, the act of repetition was acting as a sort of therapeutic measure. In addition to the inevitable desensitization to the content of the video, which I had predicted, the video began to become extremely diffuse and muddy, the colors de-saturated, and the sound was reduced to a low bass hum that was rather soothing. It sounded almost as if the action was occurring under water. But since that point, as I have pushed the video far beyond what would be considered by most to be an acceptable level of compression, it has begun to change. It has grown in length from 58 seconds to 1:28, with a long period of black that extends for most of this time. The video has begun to cut, and has slowed down considerably. The sound has become a series of drawn out screeches that flat line and then fragment wildly. The video, in many ways, feels alive. It feels as if it has evolved to continue to grow despite its compression, and is biting back. It has become almost completely separated from its source material, but has become something for more unpleasant. The original video was extremely difficult to watch because of the violent and disturbing content and my knowledge that the content is real. Now that the content has been eradicated, the video has grown grotesque in its formal qualities. It is as if the content of the video is so ingrained in it that it is impossible to pacify (see video).

 

What I initially believed to be a process of re compression of the same video over and over, which I hoped would mirror the fading of impact of that videos content through study, is in fact the singular compression of many videos. A video was originally posted to Facebook from the iPhone on which it was shot, that was then re downloaded and edited and posted to YouTube. Then I downloaded it, uploaded it to Facebook, and then re downloaded it, a process that I have now repeated 793 times. What this sequence describes is not the evolution of a video but rather the chain of creation of a series of similar videos. The file has been moved, compressed, and saved in two places. It does not replace its predecessors but rather follows them. I have not viewed one video 828 times, but have instead watched 793 sequential videos once. This 793rd video has barely any connection to its original. It’s sound has been crushed and made way for new feedback, screeches and drones with seemingly no connection to the original audio. The color spectrum displays a fraction of the original and is now composed of muddy browns and tans except for a hint of pinkish red that drains into the newly formed pixel clusters that surround it. What was once an unbroken sequence of events is now chopped in several places where the action jumps, severing a total of eight seconds of picture, with an expanse of blackness at the end that has extended nearly thirty seconds past the original. The content, which once displayed the first person slaying of two news correspondents at the hands of a former coworker is now completely disorienting and unrecognizable.

 

Is there any true connection then to the original video? If every aspect of something has been changed can it be considered the same thing as or even related to its source? Each time the video is translated, not from the original, but from a translation of the original or a translation of a translation of the original. What I have downloaded is not what I uploaded, the trail of lineage connecting it back ends there. I am the only thing that creates this connection. My knowledge of the origin of this media is the only thing that links these otherwise unrelated images. My perception of this thing is shaped almost entirely from the origin to which it has almost no relation. Every time I watch each subsequent iteration, I crane my neck and squint my eyes to make out what I think I know is there. I attribute to it a narrative that no longer exists outside of myself.