Bradley Eros, who creates multimedia installations and performs with the collective Optipus, a film and media group that works in a number of moving-image formats from small-gauge film to analog video to digital, romantically rejects the idea of digital’s fungibility with respect to older media forms:

“It may be the high point of certain technological art forms from the 20th century that are disappearing from the spectrum of the experiential, but most people won’t know what they’re missing. I could say “you just had to be there,” but some subtle perceptions in the texture, the tone & the ephemeral touch or friction of these mediums can not be duplicated. Something raw & direct, yet precise & mysterious is contained in analog art. An arcane secret that humans tapped into with these rare recording & creating devices, like the skin of consciousness.”

Eros’s lament stems from a perceived loss of the bodily experience in the use and reception of newer technologies–“the ephemeral touch or friction” that I argue handmade films insist upon and celebrate. Eros writes, the “artisanal exploration of materials and machines, and the challenge to the fixed assumptions of their proper function, opens the parameters of what can be done with, and can be known about, film.”