Resumen de Scratch, a Study in Digital Audiovisuality
This article discusses a burgeoning contemporary audiovisual practice whose innovative modes of production,distribution and access, and its distinctive aesthetic and narrative structures are underpinned by digital mediatechnologies. Thus the bounds of what we call cinema have been redrawn by the advent of digital technologies,whose absorption into audiovisual practice has engendered an independent ethos that characterises contemporarydigital audiovisuality. As digital technologies have democratised audiovisual practice, moving it away from theindustrial processes whereby it has hitherto been largely defined, the texts produced by these means have alsodiverged from conventional aesthetic and narrative formulae. Using two digital audiovisual texts, or a/vs, to supportmy argument I examine an aspect of digital audiovisuality that introduces scratch to the aesthetic and narrativeorganisation of the audiovisual text. I briefly outline the cultural provenance of the loop and identify scratch as asubversion of the loop, a subversion first employed in hip-hop composition to enact a resistance to the conventionalnarratives of recorded music. I argue that the digitally enabled remediation of the sonic scratch in audiovisual mediahas introduced a similarly disruptive aesthetic to audiovisuality through which it subverts the conventional linearflow of narrative. The scratch draws attention to the technology involved in mediation by drawing evidence of thesesystems into the audiovisual narrative. These texts incorporate the artefacts of the mediating technology with live-action footage, and through this process the conceptual aspect of the scratch aesthetic interprets the subject of thenarrative.
