Scratch Video a mutant hybrid of scratch DJ music and guerrilla TV
scratchvideo/theory/jolts_per_minute
Matching visual samples to every beat in electronic music can be hypnotizing to watch -- techno has 135 beats per minute (bpm), and drum and bass 180 bpm. This "hypnotizing" feeling needs some context --- how and why can people watch images this quick?
Kalle Lasn , founder of Adbusters Magazine and author of Culture Jam, uses the term "jolt" to describe, "any 'technical event' that interrupts the flow of sound or thought or imagery -- a shift in camera angle, a gunshot, a cut to commercial. A jolt forces your mind to pump for meaning." (Lasn 15) Lasn thinks jolts trigger our biological programming:
"The behavioral psychologist Ivan Pavlov was among the first to try and explain this. Any stimulus change -- any jolt -- releases hormones that trigger the biologically encoded fight-or-flight response, vestigial from a time when survival depended on being alert to anything in the environment that happened at faster than normal or 'natural' speed. The response was designed to keep us from being eaten by cave bears. It was not designed to keep us glued to our television sets." - Kalle Lasn
Whether Lasn likes it or not, jolts are part of our relationship with TV. People remembered the rush of running away from cave bears, and have been abusing their fight-or-flight response ever since. Lasn models his "jolts" on "technical events" from Jerry Mander's 1978 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, in which Mander found average TV programming had 8-10 "technical events" per minute, and commercials had 20-30 (Mander 308).
Twisting Lasn's original intention, jolts also perfectly describe the cuts between samples in scratch video. Electronic music is measured in beats per minute (bpm), and scratch video visuals could be counted in "jolts per minute", or "jpm". Techno visuals would hypothetically clock in at 135 jpm, ten times faster than average TV back in 1978. After years of TV getting faster, and gaining more channels to switch through, audiences adjusted.
If the medium is the message, then the message of scratch video may be that the television audience has evolved and is accustomed to significantly higher amounts of jolts -- television producers and advertisers (now facing competition from video games, movies, and even flash web sites) are in a constant battle to reach audiences by bettering each other with faster cuts. Scratch video is one way people are testing how far their fight-or-flight mechanism can be pushed, developing out of a club culture always seeking new overwhelming sensations.
How fast can scratch video get? Wave Twisters' co-director Eric Henry admits that "when we first watched the latest track (of the movie), we were worried that if people watch this for forty-five minutes, people are going to barf." And Syd Garon also said that "our main concern is that this is going to be a feature film, and we don't have a shot that lasts even ten seconds. It is so spastic, and so fast, I don't know how people are going to react. They may need an eye break in the middle. It seems no matter how quick anybody accelerates the world of film and music videos, people seem to adapt to it. So, we're just going to go for it and make the fastest movie ever." (Snider 47)
Copyright 2000© Hart Snider