In Focus Introduction: Absence and Afterlives: Unwatched, Undistributed, Lost, and Inaccessible Media

In Focus Introduction:Absence and Afterlives: Unwatched, Undistributed, Lost, and Inaccessible Media Lauren S. Berliner (bio) and Jaimie Baron (bio) Cameras are everywhere, media files can be saved in the proverbial cloud, and images emerge and circulate at an alarming pace. We often characterize our collective relationship with media in terms of access and overload. From the thousands of photographs we have taken on our smartphones, to the constant flow of streaming content, to the ever-changing social media feed, there is just too much media to attend to. At the same time, online digital media have given us the sense that media artifacts are endlessly available and accessible. Search engines help us to find media we want to see, and algorithms are poised to pinpoint the most relevant content. Our gaze has been trained on the particular media artifacts that are available to us or are easily discoverable, turning our attention away from more obscure media. In this In Focus dossier, we seek to exhume artifacts that have been lost, buried, or otherwise overlooked in the morass of media. We note a methodological conundrum in which our analytic eyes have been trained on what is already apparent rather than what has been overlooked, often systematically so. We argue that, collectively, these media are not disappearing or lost or unwatched because of mere oversight, or by conscious choice, but because of End Page 154 structural obscurity. In other words, we wish to call attention to the struc tures that condition what we do not encounter. We ask, what can we learn from media that just do not circulate? What might it look like to attend to the labor and reception of making and sharing such media? And how might we do so in ways that value the presence underlying the apparent absence? What implicit values are indicated in the act—willful or not—of obscuring certain media from view? What methods might account for the lack of access to or exclusion of certain media? The essays included here encourage scholars and students of media to value the unwatched and unseen as they consider the production and status of existing but not necessarily accessible media artifacts and archives. We take an ambitious approach, spanning a range of media practices and technologies across geographies and time. Whether focusing on newsreel outtakes filmed in semi-colonial Shanghai, defunct websites run by southern US border vigilantes, retired domestic violence photography files, rarely seen YouTube videos, collections of African American home movies, or undistributed feature films, each essay contends with the factors that structure the relative obscurity of its artifacts and the implications of their absences. While media scholars have long attended to media that go unseen, the focus has generally been concentrated more on viewer or curator decisions rather than on the structures that obscure artifacts or practices. In the collections On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture and Unwatchable, various authors explore the reasons why viewers find certain content difficult to watch or not worthy of watching.1 And while literature on structured obscurity of media exists in the study of online media, such scholarship tends to focus more on the invisibility of production labor than on the artifacts themselves. While we are also interested in media labor and production practices, our aim is to stress the structures that occlude artifacts.2 Other texts have considered the ways copyright law structures the politics and practices of archival institutions when they digitize and share artworks that have no traceable owner or have been abandoned by their owners, such as Claudy Op den Kamp's The Greatest Films Never Seen: The Film Archive and the Copyright Smokescreen and Dan Streible's work on orphan films.3 Meanwhile others, such as Giovanna Fossati, have concentrated on the ontology of media artifacts themselves to discern how we can even begin to make sense of what we are looking at before we analyze it.4 End Page 155 Of course, there are many reasons that a media object goes (largely) unseen. Sometimes, copyright issues determine whether it can be (easily) accessed. In this dossier, Jaimie Baron draws our attention to the absence of an important but...