 Upon its invention in the 19th century, cellulite acetate plastic was heralded as a marvel of modern chemistry. A number of sectors, ranging from the medical sciences to small-gauge motion film manufacturing, began using acetate plastics to create what they believed would be permanent images and fire and decay-resistant objects. By the 1950s, however, this image would begin to be tarnished when acetate microfilm collections began to show the first symptoms of deterioration. It seemed acetate was not nearly as tough, nor long-lasting as originally promised. Industrial leaders, archival institutions, and even the Kodak company themselves scurried to find a cure for what was described then as an unexplained outbreak of, quote, the measles. Within a few short years, this mysterious malady became a named phenomenon, the vinegar syndrome. Acetate-based media products were soon phased out and replaced, first by polyester films and eventually by digital media formats. And yet, even as acetate film products were hurtling towards obsolescence, the signs of their material undoing would also become an alternative visual aesthetic in the hands of both avant-garde filmmakers as well as amateur photo editors. In this paper, I will interrogate how the aesthetics of acetate plastic aging and decay inform the works of two visual artists, Owen Land and Vincent Price, who I promise aren't actually the same person, though it seems they use the same beard stylist. I'll focus specifically on Land's 1967 film, Bardot Fallis, along with Luther Price's 2013 to 15 series of cinematic slides entitled Light Fractures and Light Windows. Each of these works bring new life to acetate film by killing it, while also recuperating decay as both an aesthetic tool and a beautiful visual experience. In these works, decay is not critically demonized nor presented as evidence of acetate's failure. Rather, it is celebrated and allowed to persist in a spectacular visual display worthy of being witnessed, valued, and even preserved in and of itself. I'll further argue that Land and Price lay the foundations for an intriguing ethos within 21st century visual culture, namely a type of obsolescence fetishism that embraces technological outmodedness and offers an alternative to current cinematic restoration projects, which typically devalue signs of analog aging while chasing after visual clarity and high definition digital images. Ultimately, I use these cases to launch a counter-reading of acetate's unique aging process as not simply leading to failure nor loss, but rather as providing the foundations for an alternative value system that realizes the potential for valuable patina within photosynomatic art objects by allowing decay to have its day. In the midst of acetate's mid-century undermining, a shifting discourse and perspective towards film as an art form was also materializing within avant-garde cinema practices. As chronicled by scholars P. Adam Sidney and Peter Goddall, American experimental filmmakers began to directly engage with the material and structural elements of film, giving rise to a new genre of artistic practice termed structuralist-materialist filmmaking. Well-known practitioners, including Stan Brackage, Paul Chartis, Hollis Frampton, and Owen Land, attempted to reveal the essence of cinema by eschewing narrative and instead contemplating its filmic materiality, formal structure, and how the medium of cinema is its truest message. In Bardot-Falise, Land explores the material essence of film by destroying a reclaimed home movie strip printed on 16-millimeter acetate plastic safety film. The original film depicts a southern beauty queen as she waves goodbye, or hello, it's a bit of the ambiguity, to a group of tourists as they exit a pleasure boat ride. Land proceeds to repeatedly loop the film strip through a motion picture projector, subjecting it to intense light, heat, and friction until the individual film cells begin to blister and pop. The beauty queen image literally melts before our eyes in what essentially becomes a snuff show caused by the deterioration of acetate plastics. Land's elaborate deconstruction process is accomplished by using a motion picture projector as well as methods of optical reprinting. Historically, these techniques have been used to bring still photographic images to cinematic life, to create pre-digital special effects, and to preserve analog film objects. Most basically described, optical reprinting works by mechanically linking a film projector to a motion picture camera. While a film strip plays through the projector, the link camera records the projected image, thereby transferring it onto another film strip. So this made up Land's experimental process. So he played this home movie through a projector so many times and at such repeated pace and light exposure that he then recorded the deterioration processes that happened. When acetate safety film was first introduced as a replacement for volatile nitrate stock, optical printers were used to transpose nitrate-based film content onto what was then presumed to be a safer, more stable exhibition and preservation format. In the case of Bardo Fallis, however, Land does not use this technology to save nor preserve the content of the home movie. On the contrary, he repurposes the optical printer and brandishes it as a creative tool or a destructive weapon, depending on your perspective, that triggers acetate's autocatalytic decomposition process and brings a different sort of special visual effect to life. The scintillating dance of acetate's materiality and a plastic degradation. Whether this is an act of destruction or creation, however, hinges upon and literally brings to the surface if one thinks about cinema as an art object or as a media container. And if photosynomatic materials should be allowed to age or accrue patina, and I'm particularly interested in applying this concept of patina to film objects, a term that's been theorized more typically within art historical and fine art conservation contexts and particularly as a sign of aging, time passing, historicity as actually adding value to fine art objects. Different case in film object contexts. So it is, as motion picture films are projected, they pick up nicks and cuts, scuffs and scratches to the plastic backing of the strip. And it is on this surface layer that the film object collects battle scars, which are actually referred to as artifacts, that attests to the life it has led as an analog film object with its own history of projection. The topmost surface layer, however, is where the actual image contents are held and remain impervious to the same processes of wear, tear, aging and natural decay that the bottom plastic layer is vulnerable to. In Lan's process, he disarticulates these layers and brings the typically invisible bottom most plastic layer to the foreground by stripping away the typically prized and privileged image. What he stages then is more than just a destructive death, it is also a generative rebirth. Like the proverbial phoenix, the acetate film base bubbles up and arises from apparent destruction to become newly visible through its visual spectacle of decay. And so another interesting point about Lan's work, he actually does label and segment his film into progressive stages, which again, depending on perspective, one could read as sort of the same chronicling that we give to biological diseases, so the stages of cancer, for example, or Lan is particularly interested in certain Tibetan philosophical practices that actually then see stages in that sort of forward moving progression as a way to leave behind the material world and attain enlightenment. So part of the title, Bardo Fali's Bardo being a liminal sort of state on the process to that path is referenced here. So in traditional cinematic restoration and preservation practices, this type of work that Lan is proposing to us would not really be allowed to happen. In these contexts, film objects are seen more as vessels and containers and the image contents take priority while the dinged up decay prone base layers typically stripped away and replaced in order to preserve visual access to the image. Other industry leaders and even the Koda Company has stated that the primary goal and the majority of these motion picture conservation scenarios is to preserve the irreplaceable image content supported by the film strip, not the actual film strip itself. Best desires for the image and access take precedence over the film as objects and all resources and technical interventions are typically allocated towards the maintenance of the image. Lan questions and even reverses these paradigms by repurposing an old preservation technology to neither serve nor protect the image but rather to make the off invisible base materials visible even if it is through their own destruction. Working through many of the same themes though almost 50 years after Lan's Bardo Fali's Luther Price began his own experience with acetate decay by encouraging his photos cinematic works to age, crumble and eventually dissolve into oblivion. While Price's body of work includes a wide range of film practices including collages that piece together medical films and home movies with hardcore pornography, I'll be focusing on one particular strain of his work so never fear, no pornography. His light fractures and light windows installation pieces. In these works Price uses damaged pieces of 16 and 35 millimeter acetate film to open a window onto the sublime beauty of decay as well as shed light on a growing ethos for ephemeral images and roughed up aesthetics that are becoming more prevalent in popular and contemporary visual culture. Using materials inspired techniques, Price employs physical manhandling, chemical baths even underground burial to instigate acetate's natural decomposition processes. The end results are and this is a quote incredibly fucked with film objects that exist as monstrous resurrections. In fact, Price's images are so impacted by their physical alterations that they cease to be playable through standard motion picture projectors. Price's films actually even inflict damage to projectors instead of being damaged by the projector as in the case of Lance's work with Pedro Fales. To overcome this obstacle, Price turns his cinematic snippets back into still photographs and presents them to his viewing audience as a care-selling parade of decomposition. Price's slideshow format not only brings cinema back to its photographic primal scene, but reenacts the early practices of travelogue exhibitions, a genre that desired to show off beautiful sites and preserve exotic experiences of travel and turning them into lasting visual souvenirs. The evocation of travelogs is especially poignant when further thought through the lens of the recent fetishization of ruined landscape images within contemporary visual culture, which have colloquially been referred to as ruin porn. There is no standing definition for ruin porn, though perhaps some of you know it's ever-present on many a tumbler feed, in the same way that one just knows pornography when they see it, but there is a common theme within most ruin porn images, decrepit man-made buildings and other feats of civilization or technology that have fallen into ruinous disarray or have been literally overtaken by unchecked natural forces. What is desirable in these ruins, even if objectively so, is to see, confront, and embrace the ruining of previously exalted structures. Price's images of decay conjure these same aesthetics and sentiments, though within the context of ruined film materials and acetate film structures. While acetate safety film was previously exalted as a preservation platform, in Price's work, they are overtaken by aging and decay. Repressed natural forces have returned with a vengeance to overtake the plastic technology that was meant to keep them at bay. Price does not intervene to stop this process, but rather actively assists it and invites his viewers to partake in the sublime experience of coming face to face with film's mortality. In Price's ruin porn treatment of film, he does not reject material decomposition as a troubling sign of failure, as would be the case in some restoration contexts that use digital technologies to battle back and control the unruly messiness of aging analog formats. Rather, decay becomes a type of patina in Price's work. Through a mixture of natural and assisted processes, Price invites us to see the temporal process and signs of acetate aging as simultaneously valuable and beautiful, emotionally gripping and also critically thought-provoking. The aesthetics associated with decrepted film products, fading colors, age spots, surface scratches, brittle cracks, have typically been labeled as serious problems and flaws that media preservationists need to intervene upon and fix. The July 9th, 1980 front cover of Variety, for example, proclaimed that old pics, as in pictures, don't die, they fade away, and used acetate's color fading as a rallying call to save film prints and archive collections by correcting their color changes. It's previously alluded to contemporary practices in film preservation and restoration have continued to utilize reproduction and optical reprinting and other visual manipulations like base stripping or emulsion scanning to fix acetate-based films. However, this corrective process also ends up threatening. What makes these film objects unique? The individual scars picked up from a lifetime of projection and even vinegar syndrome decomposition, which only affects acetate-based films. Instead of valuing these features as would be the case with antique furniture or other objects in antiquity within the fine arts, these cinematic artifacts are recast as fatal flaws needing to be cleaned up and corrected in the name of image clarity, access, and permanence. This institutional focus, however, also seems to be mutating within popular visual culture and consumer contexts. Now, the same faded colors negatively associated with aging and old film materials have been reclaimed as signs of an authentic, fetishized past tense-ness and analog realness within an increasingly digital media landscape. Instead of lamenting over faded colors and age spots as disturbing signs of pictorial death, new digital applications have introduced add-on filters and after effects to actually mimic these same signs. A return and revaluing of these aesthetics, even if only in an imitative form, reveals a certain obsolescence fetishism characterized by not disliking or turning away from an appearance of decay or outmodedness, but rather embracing these as newly valuable and even desirable. Acetate may have been rendered materially obsolete by the end of the 20th century, but it has also visually emerged from the dust and ashes to become a nostalgic aesthetic within digital image production. As noted on the iTunes page, for two recently released digital photo editing and sharing applications, 18 millimeter vintage camera, which was released in 2011 by Nex FICO Incorporated and a program called NLIGHT, which was released by a company called By Light Tricks Limited in March, 2015. So these two programs allow users to apply digital filters to their images that reproduce the analog style of vintage film stocks, from the vibrant familian hues of Kodachrome photographs to the tell-tale grain lines of super eight millimeter motion picture film. These applications designed mostly for mobile smartphones and social media uses, digitally recreate the unique features of analog media formats, including the hallmarks of their decomposition. In essence, they attempt to re-infuse digital images with an analog sole, through the imitation of grain, scratches, color fading, blistering pock marks, and even some of the symptoms of the vinegar syndrome. In her chapter on dying media and loving a disappearing image, film theorist Laura Marx has described how one comes to love the aesthetics of oldness as a way to reenact, quote, something like a perpetual mourning, something like melancholia, and its refusal to have been done with death. The same ethos can also apply to the love lavished upon dead and resurrected analog film formats, which are now beloved because they offer an aesthetic appeal and antique index that deviates from this sanitized pristine world of high definition digital formats. Freelance photography journalist, who I'm showing you a quote from here, Rod Loutin, aptly encapsulates the sentiment in writing about his desire for, quote, dirty, quote, a quote, a quote from filters. So he describes how photographers are never happy. We couldn't stop complaining about our dirty faded color transparencies when they were all we had, and we couldn't wait to swap to nice clean everlasting digital images. Now that they're the norm, we miss our grubby old transparencies. Photographers are clearly never happy. In contrast to the discourse and value system that has come to define contemporary film restoration and industry trends in high bit resolution rates and crystal clear images, amateur users like Loutin are willingly choosing to degrade their shiny new digital snapshots with lo-fi filters, grainy after effects, and faded color washes. So to conclude, as photography and cinema cease to be film-based imaging media practices, as we go forward into the 21st century, analog media objects and their associated aesthetics are in themselves becoming a kind of endangered disappearing entity. This apparent loss, however, whether caused by natural aging and decay or forced obsolescence, also opens the door for a nostalgic return and a retro-revaluing of these unique features, including the ways in which analog plastic film objects age, fade, and decay. These signs have become valuable aesthetic hallmarks as in the tears that we sow privilege and value in vintage clothes or the wormholes in antique furniture or even the same sorts of visual signs, color-fading, channeling, that we continue to allow and praise even within fine artworks. These same features can be rediscovered in acetate film and the processes of their decay reframed not just as loss but also as an opportunity for something valuable and unique to be found. Thank you.