by Evelyn Kreutzer

Creator’s Statement

DESKTOP SOUNDS explores the uses of non-musical sounds in a range of desktop films from the past decade. Kevin B. Lee, whose TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE (2014) is considered one of the first and most foundational examples of the form, coined the term “desktop documentary” and defined it as a “form of filmmaking [that] treats the computer screen as both a camera lens and a canvas” (Lee 2014). While he later expanded it into a definition about desktop cinema that includes fiction films (Lee n.d.), fictional and documentary examples of the form are otherwise rarely considered in the same category. Scholars have noted desktop documentaries’ performative qualities (see Anger / Lee 2022, Kiss 2021, Köhn 2020), their ability to present investigatory and scholarly processes, as well as their meta-reflexive relevance to questions of market, power, and our roles as “users” (Distelmeyer 2018). Through text boxes, zooms, webcam footage, and insertions of email or text exchanges, many of them reenact investigations that actually occurred in the past and over much longer periods of time (see Schindel 2020). Desktop fiction films, on the other hand, while also requiring an immense degree of curational and choreographic planning, tend to evoke an unusually improvisational impression. For example, in the case of the horror films UNFRIENDED (Levan Gabriadse, USA 2014 – the first full-feature desktop film) and HOST (Rob Savage, GB 2020), screen time and plot time are identical, with each film almost entirely unfolding over the course of a continuous video call on Skype and Zoom, respectively. In HOST, shot during the Covid lockdown in 2020, actors did in fact improvise some of their dialogues and received live directions from director Savage via the Zoom chat (Fordy 2020). 

Given the performative and scripted nature of desktop documentaries on the one hand and the improvisational quality of fictional desktop films on the other, the desktop format fundamentally blurs and plays with the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Desktop films’ setting on computational interfaces that all of us use on a daily basis evokes an overarching notion of immediacy, authenticity, transparency, and realism in each of the two categories. At the same time, watching a desktop film from a ‘passive’ spectatorial position can feel particularly alienating and rather uncanny (perhaps even more so when watching it on a computer screen rather than in a cinema). This position adds to the anxieties attached to the desktop, on which personal and professional, private and public communication intermingle and through which we constantly observe and are being observed – even more so since the beginning of the pandemic. The particular ‘uncanny’ of the desktop format lies in this ambiguous experience of intimacy and public exposure.

Horror films like HOST and UNFRIENDED build on this idea by invoking ghostly, supernatural figures who infiltrate the protagonists’ desktops. As such, Host transplants the classic horror trope of a séance-gone-wrong into a virtual zoom setting. In UNFRIENDED, the ghost of a dead classmate manipulates the protagonists’ Skype and Facebook chats in a manner that reminds us of the many creepy messages we have seen on steamy mirrors in conventional horror films. Desktop horror plays with fears of electronic media as windows into a world beyond our control that have a much longer history. Jeffrey Sconce explains this history through the concept of “electronic presence,” by which he means cultural associations of electronic media with spiritual, paranormal, and supernatural phenomena. He traces notions of electronic presence in relation to all major electronic media inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries, from telegraphy to television, computers, and the internet. Drawing on Mary Ann Doane (1990: 222), Sconce describes it as an “animating, at times occult, sense of ‘liveness,’” which evokes an experience of “This-is-going-on” rather than the famous Barthesian “That-has-been” (Sconce 2000: 6). This emphasis on liveness and presence further ties into what Shane Denson would later call the “computational microtemporality of post-cinematic screens and networks,” meaning “the super-fast, real-time processing of images in a digital media ecology” (Denson 2020: 26). In his reading of UNFRIENDED, Denson argues that desktop horror films evoke anxieties about the displacement of older media and analog embodied spectatorial experience: “post-cinematic horror trades centrally on a slippage between diegesis and medium; the fear that is channeled through moving image media is in part also a fear of (or evoked by) these media” (Denson 2020: 27).

My video explores the uses of non-musical sounds in the following desktop films:

• the feature films UNFRIENDED, SEARCHING (Aneesh Chaganty, USA 2018), and HOST 
• an early fictional desktop short: NOAH (Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman, 2013), and
• seven desktop documentaries: TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE, WATCHING THE PAIN OF OTHERS (Chloé Galibert-Laîné, 2018), FORENSICKNESS (Chloé Galibert-Laîné, 2020), NO, IN MY ROOM (Luís Azevedo, 2019), ONCE UPON A SCREEN: MY MULHOLLAND (Jessica McGoff, 2020), FRIENDS FROM TV ON THE INTERNET (Myrna Moretti, 2021), and THE MECHANICS OF FLUIDS (Gala Hernández-López, 2022).

I am interested in the so far overlooked role of sound in the aesthetic conventions of the (still very young) desktop film format, and how sound establishes and/or deconstructs notions of intimacy, authenticity, and domesticity on the one hand, and anxiety, publicness, and exposure on the other. The sounds of clicking, typing, and dialing evoke a great sense of familiarity and realism, establish the sonic trademarks of specific apps (such as Skype, Zoom or Facebook), and yet they can also be considered the most performative elements of desktop films. For example, my anecdotal experience tells me that few people activate the typing sounds and pings of incoming or outgoing messages in apps like iMessage in their daily lives, yet they are ubiquitous in desktop films. Some desktop films further employ voice-over narration (by the makers, by actors, and/or by AI voices), including voices that read text passages while they also appear on screen. In addition to establishing a sense of recognizability, these sounds subtly direct the spectator’s attention. In this, they correspond to visual means like zooming in on parts of the desktop screen or highlighting text passages on screen with the cursor. Possibly the most obvious means to break with the format’s supposed realism is the use of glitches (both visual and sonic). Glitches might reveal an “amateurish tinge” (Anger / Lee 2022: 15) in Moretti’s FRIENDS FROM TV ON THE INTERNET, a PhD student’s exercise video, or an element of medium reflexivity in Gabriadse’s UNFRIENDED (Denson 2020: 44).

I do not consider my video essay a desktop documentary itself. While it includes screen recordings, it was predominantly produced in a video editing software and not on my desktop. It is a playful attempt at demonstrating, investigating, and imitating the sonic conventions of desktop films. I draw on the above film examples because I find them representative of the range of approaches in this format. My main points of entry are what I call internal software sounds (e.g. Skype dial tones and iMessage sound effects) and external hardware sounds (such as recorded sounds of someone typing on a keyboard), human and AI voices, and sounds of glitch. I argue that by playing with our sense of familiarity and intimacy while simultaneously producing a sense of estrangement, these sounds establish the afore-mentioned ‘desktop uncanny.’ In that spirit, the video makes its audiovisual sources and the desktop format itself both familiar and strange as well. 

Bibliography

Anger, Jiří / Lee, Kevin B.: Suture Goes Meta: Desktop Documentary and its Narrativization of Screen-Mediated Experience. In: Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2022.2033066

Distelmeyer, Jan: Desktop-Filme: Hilfe, da gibt’s keinen Button! epd film (09.07.2018): https://www.epd-film.de/themen/desktop-filme-hilfe-da-gibts-keinen-button (accessed on 15 October 2023).

Denson, Shane: The Horror of Discorrelation: Mediating Unease in Post-Cinematic Screens and Networks. In: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60/1 (2020), 26–48. https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2020.0061

Fordy, Tom: Zoom, the Horror Movie: How the Brits Behind Host Made a Chilling Lockdown Masterpiece. The Telegraph (16 August 2020): https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/zoom-horror-movie-brits-behind-host-made-chilling-lockdown-masterpiece (accessed on 19 October 2023). 

Kiss, Miklós: Desktop Documentary: From Artefact to Artist(ic) Emotions. In: NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies. #Solidarity, 10/1 (2021), 99–119: https://necsus-ejms.org/desktop-documentary-from-artefact-to-artistic-emotions/ (accessed on 19 October 2023).

Köhn, Steffen: Screens as Film Locations. In: Philip Vannini (ed.), The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video. London 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429196997

Lee, Kevin B.: Transformers: The Premake. AlsoLikeLife (personal website), 2014: https://www.alsolikelife.com/transformers-the-premake (accessed on 19 October 2023).

Lee, Kevin B.: What is Desktop Cinema? AlsoLikeLife (personal website), n.d.: https://www.alsolikelife.com/home/desktop-films (accessed on 19 October 2023). 

Schindel, Dan: Film Essayist Chloé Galibert-Laîné on the Careful Choreography of Desktop Cinema. In: Hyperallergic (2020): https://hyperallergic.com/555214/chloe-galibert-laine-interview-images-festival/ (accessed on 19 October 2023).

Sconce, Jeffrey: Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham 2000.

Audiovisual Sources

FORENSICKNESS (Chloé Galibert-Laîné, 2020): https://www.chloegalibertlaine.com/forensickness

FRIENDS FROM TV ON THE INTERNET (Myrna Moretti, 2021): https://vimeo.com/520818455

HOST (Rob Savage, GB 2020)

THE MECHANICS OF FLUIDS (Gala Hernández-López, 2022)

NOAH (Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman, 2013): https://vimeo.com/65935223

NO, IN MY ROOM (Luís Azevedo, 2020): https://youtu.be/uCQ9rZKQqls

ONCE UPON A SCREEN: MY MULHOLLAND (Jessica McGoff, 2020): https://vimeo.com/426494447

SEARCHING (Aneesh Chaganty, USA 2018)

TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE (Kevin B. Lee, 2014): https://vimeo.com/94101046

UNFRIENDED (Levan Gabriadse, USA 2014)

WATCHING THE PAIN OF OTHERS (Chloé Galibert-Laîné, 2018): https://www.chloegalibertlaine.com/watching-the-pain-of-others