Real Time/Zero Time

Real Time/Zero Time

Tung-Hui Hu

Discourse, Volume 34, Number 2-3, Spring/Fall 2012, pp. 163-184 (Article)

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Discourse, 34.2–3, Spring/Fall 2012, pp. 163–184. Copyright © 2013 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.

Real Time/Zero Time

Tung-Hui Hu

Like hard-core pornography, about which U.S. Supreme Court

justice Potter Stewart notoriously said, “I know it when I see it,”

the phrase “real time” may be much easier to spot than to define.1

What digital media scholars see as evidence of real time—the

copresence, for instance, of an event and its live stream on the

Web—is different from what computer scientists refer to when they

talk about real-time computing, which is a system’s mission-critical

aspect: for example, an air bag inflates before a driver is thrown

through the windshield. Or consider the phrase itself: real time is

not real-time or realtime; the noun refers to a certain temporal-

ity, while the adjective form can refer to speed, rate of change, or

interactivity; real time can be a synonym for virtuality, or even its

putative opposite, realness.

The trouble with real time is not the proliferation of definitions,

which should be welcomed; the trouble is that we too often confuse

real time with the medium that manifests it. Whereas digital media

scholars see real time as synonymous with the temporality of com-

puter networks, television scholars might see real time in terms of

the liveness of television broadcasts, while film scholars may find it

in the moving image’s seeming continuity, a motion simulated by

twenty-four frames a second. This leads to confusion between cause

and effect. Consider, for example, art historian Michael Newman,

who invokes the term when writing of the ethical stakes of analog

cinema in the face of digitization. For Newman, digital technology

164 Tung-Hui Hu

leaves in its wake “interchangeable media in the global simultane-

ity of ‘real’ time.”2 The words he uses to discuss the regime of the

digital are striking, because “‘real’ time” aptly describes the very

thing he opposes to digital media: analog cinema.

Quoting a character of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who exclaims

that “by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a

great nerve,” Mary Ann Doane has suggested that electricity pro-

duced instantaneity roughly a hundred years before digital tech-

nologies such as the Internet.3 In her investigation of films such

as the Execution of Czolgosz (1901), in which bodies were burned

with electricity and other stimuli, she notes that electricity gener-

ates a virtually instantaneous bodily response—the “nerve” of the

world. By “annihilating delay,” electricity tied together the globe,

producing its own “global simultaneity.”4 Electricity also pointed to

the delay or “dead time” that occurs between action and response

in everyday life. Doane uses this idea to argue that by structuring

time through narrative and editing, cinema achieves a “maximum

reduction of wasted time,” a “‘real time’ that is much more ‘real’

than ‘real time’ itself.”5 In other words, a hundred years before

Newman’s critique of global simultaneity, cinema too was billed as

global, simultaneous, a “real time” medium that annihilated all ear-

lier forms of media.

What my example suggests is that real time may at the present

moment be synonymous with digital technology, but the term is

much more malleable; it has a way of adhering to the latest tech-

nology. Within the history of computer technology, the effort to

locate the earliest moment of real time often results in ever more

diffuse examples. We know that real-time technologies came largely

out of the machine of war; we know, for instance, that the Semi-

Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system, deployed in 1958

to track incoming Soviet bombers, was the first computer system

that offered the ability to interact with the screen in real time and

led to the first real-time business applications.6 The phrase is fi rst

used in J. P. Eckert’s 1946 description of a digital “‘real time’ com-

puting machine” that might replace analog (or “true”) computing

machines in gun positioning, missile guidance, fl ight simulation,

and industrial control.7 Eckert limits himself to four applications,

because analog devices would have been considered more suitable

for real-time applications than their cumbersome digital coun-

terparts. It would take a decade and a half for this advantage to

change. But open our historiography to analog technologies—such

as the radar screen, which Lev Manovich argues was the fi rst screen

continuously updated with real-time information8—and locating a

start to real time becomes very complicated indeed.

Real Time/Zero Time 165

My main reservation about such historical detective work is

its implicit investment in real time’s assumed inevitability. Stories

of ever-advancing technological speed or progress always end the

same way: with the invention of real time. We discover, inevita-

bly, a result that begs the question of what exists beyond the real.

When Paul Virilio says, for example, that “real time” means we

have reached “Terminal—and final—sedentarization . . . a live (live-

coverage) society that has no future and no past,”9 only the pres-

ent, he ironically echoes the presentness constructed by digital

rhetoric. The risk is that focusing on this presentness comes at the

expense of other temporalities that often arrive later. While data

centers enable the almost instantaneous retrieval of data, for exam-

ple, the coal plants that power them have delayed environmental

and health effects that will only come to light decades from now. It

seems crucial to approach the question through other means.

What would it mean to think of real time—and the technology

that exists within it—as a historical, fragile, and even mortal phe-

nomenon with its own time span, rather than as a limit case in the

evolution of media? This essay turns back the page to the 1950s,

an era when computer speeds were slow enough that digital tech-

nology was not synonymous with instantaneity and when the very

idea of real time required explanation. In that period, the threat

of nuclear attack, quantified in the four-minute warning said to

describe the time between a Soviet missile launch and its impact

on American soil, lent urgency to the development of computer

networks. These anxieties thus offer a window into a postwar dis-

course about time and delay, and with it a fantasy of media’s imme-

diacy.10 In today’s moment, real time has become part and parcel

of the digital cloud; network transmissions are so quick that files

and applications are said to be stored in the cloud. But the impetus

for real-time technologies in the 1950s came from another kind of

cloud: the mushroom cloud.

A brief 1956 promotional film by IBM’s Military Products Divi-

sion makes these atomic fears explicit by linking real time to the

time zero of the bomb. The opening sequence of On Guard! The Story of SAGE cuts from a shot of children playing to bombers in the

sky, from dreadful black-and-white footage of a bomb detonating

to the mushroom cloud that follows it. The next sequence imme-

diately returns to status quo ante as it displays a shot of the clock

on IBM’s headquarters, leaving little doubt of SAGE’s purpose: to

reedit the timing and sequence of events to avoid the atom bomb,

to turn back the clock on the horrors of the atomic age. When the

narrator asks rhetorically, “What is the most precious commodity

that electronic defense wins us?” a shot of the school clock (one

166 Tung-Hui Hu

of five such shots) serves as the answer: “Time. Time is everything.

This is electronic defense in debt” (figures 1a and 1b).

But this is not any sort of time: it is a new temporality that still

feels difficult to describe. So the narrator tries several approaches

to explain real time. First, in contrast to normal computers,

which print out data in batches, a real-time computer is a way of

Figures 1a and 1b. On Guard! The Story of Sage (1956), IBM Corporation,

Military Products Division.


“translating volumes of changing data into a continuous flow of

interpretations.” Lest the phrase become too abstract, however, he

offers an analogy: this continuous flow is something like the elec-

tronic scan of radar. A shot of a radar screen’s sweep precedes a

match cut to the sweep of the clock hand.

The narrator latches onto a more concrete metaphor when

he describes “the newest and most revolutionary advance in data

processing: the displayscope.” Displayscopes, the narrator explains

ominously, may “look like the offspring of a marriage between a

television tube and a radar screen,” but they “do not show physical

images transferred from elsewhere.” As he speaks, a chord progres-

sion more typically found in a horror film plays in the background.

To watch the narrator’s contortions as he labors to explain this

freakish device is amusing to us, because the displayscope is now

ubiquitous and common: it is what we call a computer monitor.

But the narrator must resort to explaining—and thus understand-

ing—the monitor not just in its physical resemblance to a television

set, but also in contrast to television’s live broadcast. When he later

describes computer memory—and its ability to go backward in

time—as “one feature possessed by neither a television nor a radar

screen,” he is referencing the presentness of television moments

before the invention of rewind. Ampex video recording technol-

ogy would come to the television industry that same year.

The computer screen is something like television’s frightful

offspring, combining the properties of liveness with the possibility

of interacting with the image.11 This context—the real-time com-

puter as a further evolution of televisual media—suggests the main

direction for my inquiry. If SAGE’s big innovation was to give oper-

ators the liveness of television broadcasts (plus or minus the radar

screen), recall that liveness, in the context of television studies, is

a myth. As Jane Feuer and others have amply shown,12 liveness is

an ideological construct rather than a function of the broadcast

technology itself, a product of stylistic codes and modes of address

that cover over the fragmentary nature of television programming.

This construction has carried over to the digital media. Developing

a phenomenology of Web surfing, Tara McPherson reminds us that

“as with television, this much touted liveness is actually the illusion

of liveness.”13 This was the case with SAGE: it could only refresh

its displayscope every 30 seconds, leaving a lengthy delay between

event and image. The displayscope pictured in On Guard! was, in

fact, a mockup.14

Where did this shared fantasy of liveness come from, and how

did it take root? To find out, the next section proceeds inductively

from a single historical event. I have suggested that time zero was

168 Tung-Hui Hu

the disaster that SAGE was meant to anticipate and also forestall,

a disaster that always threatened to happen more quickly than

SAGE’s displayscope could register. As it turns out, time zero was

also the elusive goal of the national television networks, which

finally managed to broadcast a live detonation of an atomic bomb

on April 22, 1952.15 We typically think of television and computer

networks as separate entities that are only recently converging, but

in the 1950s, SAGE used the same microwave relay stations and Bell

System circuits—the same root structure, as it were—that carried

television signals.

This suggests a curious overlap between early television net-

works and even earlier computer networks in 1952. The telecast

was the first time that an electronic image of “local liveness” fed

back into and became “network live,” to use the terms of televi-

sion scholar Mark J. Williams.16 Using a newly built series of micro-

wave relays, a local station, KTLA, fed live signals from the bomb

test into the national network, setting the stage for local and net-

work data to become fused into a bidirectional structure of live-

ness. Television signals, in other words, could no longer be cleanly

categorized as network or local; they were increasingly something

of both.17 SAGE later adopted this bidirectional or feedback struc-

ture in its data link network. Connecting more than one hundred

radar installations around the country to its twenty-four Direction

Centers, SAGE’s network relayed signals to its computers, which

then flowed back to the world in real time. SAGE’s data links

influenced ARPAnet, and in turn the present-day Internet, where

the definition of the word “network” includes and is inextricable

from local transmission.

The Internet did not directly evolve out of television networks.

Nevertheless, the story of the first televised weapons test, related

below, will allow us to uncover a moment of coincidence around

the idea of time. Just as the speed of nuclear missiles challenged

SAGE’s real-time displays, the quickness of the bomb’s explosion

strained at the limits of television’s ability to capture it (or, after

1963, to mobilize the population quickly through the Emergency

Broadcast System). The medium’s glitches and failures resulted in

a corresponding fantasy of real time that would cover over those

very failures. After describing the weapons telecast, I then turn to

one of its afterimages to ask how we can imagine the time of the

real differently. Calling attention to a medium’s capacity to reg-

ister alternate temporalities, a found footage film by Bruce Con-

ner, Crossroads (1976), may offer a different way to understand the

recording of time in a digital age.


*An atomic bomb detonates over Yucca Flat, Nevada in 1952 and

appears on national television. But the one place you could not

watch the test, strangely enough, was in Nevada, for the state was

not yet connected to the national network.18 Crossing through the

northern part of the state, the coaxial cable relay left Las Vegas and

its surrounding area out of the transcontinental system that had

just arrived the previous winter in California. To feed the national

broadcasters, the Atomic Energy Commission turned to KTLA,

an independent television station in Los Angeles that took on

the challenge of building its own connection to Yucca Flat. KTLA

head and Paramount vice president Klaus Landsberg rigged his

own microwave relay system across 275 miles of desert, engaging

U.S. Marine Corps helicopters to parachute four relay stations onto

nearby mountain peaks.

Engineers were concerned not just with the jury-rigged system

but also with the optics. Billboard reported that “It’s feared that the

power of the blast will blow out the cameras even from the 11-mile

distance from Frenchman’s Flat and the Mount Charleston cam-

era site. . . . [M]otion picture cameras will be on the scene to take

footage of the explosion in case the blast knocks out the TV con-

nections.”19 Radio interference from televising the event was also

a concern: television frequencies were largely identical to those

used by nuclear test equipment. In the end, the engineers’ fears

came true, but not in the way they had imagined. Atomic Energy

Commission generators and, in turn, the camera feed failed before

detonation time.20 The power went out at 9:16 a.m., fourteen min-

utes before time zero; the newsmen worked frantically to cool off

the television tubes and restart the feed from the backup camera

forty miles away. Three minutes after detonation, the closest cam-

era had finally warmed up; the feed switched back to it, showing

the aftereffects of the smoke. The transmission was so variable that

some newspapers declared the test a success, while others reported

only a blank screen on their television sets.

“First Atom-Bomb Telecast a Dud,” Billboard proclaimed a week

later. Variety’s headline was snarkier: “A-Bomb in TV Fluff Fizzles

Fission Vision.”21 An officer at the Atomic Energy Commission

recounted the event: “The response in those precious seconds of

the burst and formation of the fireball apparently depended on

individual [television] sets. Two newspapers in Los Angeles got

good pictures all the way through. The sets in the other two news-

paper offices got only a black flicker and then the picture tore

up for almost a minute—the most important minute in the tele-

cast.”22 Other viewers reported geometric swirls and diagonal bars

170 Tung-Hui Hu

in the telecast. As Thomas Doherty explains, even the pinhole-like

image that many viewers took for proof of the bomb’s detonation

was actually a technical flaw. The “tiny white spot in a wall of pitch

black . . . resulted from an optical malfunction: the orthicon tube

in the pickup camera had blacked out under the blinding light of

the blast” (figures 2a and 2b).23

Figures 2a and 2b. KTLA telecast of the April 22, 1952, atomic test, via

Critical Commons.


What is striking about the telecast is how flat it feels.24 A con-

temporary viewer of the recording can barely make out a puff of

smoke above a grainy and overexposed black-and-white image

while the commentator describes the “beautiful, tremendous, and

angry spectacle. . . . Looking into the cloud you see the orange,

the brown, and the dirty black, and the fringe white.” You can’t

see, and therein lies the reason for the voice-off, for the temporary

shift from image to voice and the temporary reversion from tele-

vision to radio. Because even the auditory shockwave is delayed

by about thirty seconds, the viewer is blind. The viewer is almost

entirely reliant on the military announcer counting seconds after

the bomb has been dropped (“bombs away,” 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30)

and seconds until the explosion is about to happen (5, 4, 3, 2, 1).

The atomic test manifests itself primarily through the sound of

the countdown: when viewers can’t actually see what is going on,

the only thing they can be sure about is the time to the detona-

tion’s time zero.25

Yet if the countdown hinges on how many seconds before or

after time zero, the actual moment of detonation is a bit of a fantasy.

As the Atomic Energy Commission officer put it, “those precious

seconds of the burst . . . the most important minute in the telecast”

are lost.26 And the mushroom cloud itself is, by defi nition, an after-

effect. Any sense of presence from the April 22 telecast is due to

an imaginative slippage between the pinhole spot and the detona-

tion, between the absence of any image on the television tube and

the plenitude of the bomb’s explosion. The bomb also bursts far

too quickly for traditional optical technology; scientists have since

turned to Harold Edgerton’s Rapatronic film camera, which can

shoot the nuclear explosion at ten nanosecond intervals and gener-

ate thousands of meters of film in less than a second. Time zero is

precisely the moment that can never been seen, recorded, or filmed

by conventional means; it can only be approximated.

We are left to conclude that the moment of time zero may

always be a lacuna, a missed moment. Time zero is zeroed out; it

becomes zero time.27 Like melodrama, the pathos of the telecast is

that we are always too late to see what happens; we are delayed, and

“those precious seconds” are irretrievably lost. There is no ques-

tion that the network feed quickly improved.28 But the blackout

of the orthicon tube may be a more honest take on the bomb’s

true nature as a “light weapon” (as Virilio terms it), a weapon that

disrupts the optical order, than the “beautiful, tremendous, and

angry spectacle” of the mushroom cloud itself.29 At least the black-

out preserves that loss, just as a fizzle may be a more honest way of

capturing the belatedness of any countdown.

172 Tung-Hui Hu

The first moment of feeding local liveness back to the national

television network—a moment that anticipates SAGE’s data links—

results in a technical glitch: a pinhole, the sign of a delay in switch-

ing between cameras. The pinhole points to the dialectical opposite

of live transmission, the zero time or dead time of the network, and

allows us to observe that covering over such (temporal and occa-

sionally visible) holes are at the very center of real time. This is the

case in all networks today, not just the prototype in 1952. The first

Internet protocol was designed to allow a series of delayed packets

to be reassembled back in order, and the Internet continues to be

full of gaps—such as the evocatively named black holes—as well

as the mechanisms to gracefully switch over to backup networks

without the user noticing.

Yet as John Harwood writes, we tend to forget that “the funda-

mental basis of real-time computing lies within the dimension of

time—delay,” a delay that is “rendered imperceptible to the human

sensorium by the familiar tactics of cinematic projection.”30 Even

Harwood does not go quite far enough: delay is a fundamental part,

not just of real-time computing, but of real time itself, whether on

television, in film, or on computers. Media operate within a gen-

eral structure of disavowal, suppressing zero time to produce a feel-

ing of liveness (TV) or interactivity (the Web). We see fullness and

presence in these imaginative or virtual reconstructions of the real.

Real-time media leave us with images that seem (artificially, phan-

tasmatically) alive. But in their rush to capture the next instant,

however, we lose the sense that any time has been lost at all: a loss

of a loss. Understood correctly, real time is not the present tense;

real time is a melancholic imagination of the present from the per-

spective of the future, which is always just a short interval away. We

always miss the “precious seconds,” “the most important minute”—

even if the interval is now counted in microseconds or milliseconds

in the digital age.

After the 1952 broadcast, atomic tests continued to be widely

rebroadcast on television; the U.S. Air Force even branched out to

other live weapons tests by the end of the decade. The bomb, the

ultimate bearer of mass death, was repeatedly remade live, and in

the process death became an image to be displaced by the next

image or sound onscreen. Death is normally the complete rupture

of everyday signification; it is unviewable. But television extends

the duration of the explosion to become an event. At the same

time, the watching and waiting within original film footage of the

bomb—the temporality that might accompany actual death—is

considered dead time, time cut and reordered so as to bring the

event to life. Visual technologies substitute the petite mort of the


bomb’s cloud, a cloud that Bob Mielke calls the “expensive ‘money

shot’ of this nuclear technoporn,”31 for the grande mort of the

actual bomb. We think we are seeing death onscreen, but in fact we

have missed it; we are seeing something related but imperceptibly

different.

Now there is something like a biopolitics of media at work

whereby the injunction of contemporary power to “make live,” as

Foucault puts it, to manage, control, and even produce life, tilts

the mediation of time toward liveness.32 In contemporary visual

culture this takes the form of technologies that allow moments of

death—for example, a weapons strike in Afghanistan or a database

of casualties in Iraq—to be mapped, visualized, streamed, and

rebroadcast, and even to become interactive.33 Although the image

of death requires time to bear witness, grieve, or mourn, real time

sutures over this death and transforms the event into a melancholic

reconstruction of it.

Yet real time is not the only way that these events can be medi-

ated. In the next section, I move to another way to look at the

bomb and, in turn, to inhabit its temporality differently.

Image/afterimage. This time, the atomic test is Operation cross-

roads, the maritime detonation at Bikini Atoll in 1946 that was

the most widely filmed event in the world. Mielke reports that the

test exposed 1.5 million feet of motion picture film at various slow-

motion camera speeds, causing a worldwide shortage of film for

months afterward.34 It was, again, a miracle of liveness: to avoid

flying too close to the detonation a television camera mounted

on a drone plane beamed the signal to television receivers.35 The

test’s afterimage comes from experimental filmmaker Bruce Con-

ner’s Crossroads (1976). Using footage that had been declassified

and stored at the National Archives,36 Conner edited together sev-

eral takes of Operation crossroads’ underwater test into a film

that plays havoc with the expected temporality of the countdown

(figures 3a and 3b).

Crossroads is a frustrating film by intention. It moves from still-

ness to explosion and back again, layering an electronic soundtrack

by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley to capture the desperate rhythm

and pacing within the explosion. The spectacle itself comes from

what is “outside”—the sea that initially appears to be empty back-

ground but then abruptly swells up, roiling, the water itself turned

into part of the cloud. Then the explosion ends, the water is calm,

and we are again waiting for the test to commence. This effect—the

time counter reset to a few minutes before the event, the extreme

174 Tung-Hui Hu

slow motion of the footage—disrupts our basic expectations of cau-

sality and resolution.

Grappling with the film shortly after its release, William Moritz

and Beverly O’Neill document the rush of questions that it raises

Figures 3a and 3b. Bruce Conner, Crossroads (1976).


about the phenomenology of viewing: What are we seeing? Is this a

trick for our eyes? This list leads to a larger question: “Are we see-

ing any real-time (whatever that is) shots?”37 Given the extended

duration of each shot, the last shot—lasting more than six and a

half minutes—offers the most provocative answer to Moritz and

O’Neill’s question, which they describe thus:

[T]he image cuts to blackness which is held on-screen for several minutes

while the music finishes.

The duration of this shot is crucial. The screen remains neutralized

for so long we suffer excruciating resentment, ennui, and helpless rage.38

Conner’s shot subverts the finality of the detonation. What Moritz

and O’Neill call “the true ‘nothingness’ of the black screen” is infu-

riating; the death of the image is the death that must be continually

disavowed in cinema.39 Like dead air on radio or the blacked-out

KTLA transmission, this shot reveals film’s inability to contain and

structure its contents, the unpleasure that intrudes onto the visual

pleasure of the spectacle.

But Crossroads offers another, perhaps more meaningful, lens

for reenvisioning real time. By reprinting found footage, Conner’s

film acts as a preservative: it keeps and exposes qualities within the

original film stock. Film was a resolutely material concern during

Operation crossroads; military pilots had to take extravagant

measures to avoid damaging the film. To avoid moisture conden-

sation on the emulsion, pilots would descend slowly, taking up to

an hour to land. Some cameras were installed inside special pres-

sure chambers on the aircraft. On Kwajalein Atoll, a cooled and

dehumidified lab was built to process the film.40 Despite these mea-

sures, the film suffered. The catalog description for Conner’s Cross-roads notes that some of the original film shot by the U.S. military

“appears to be fogged by radiation. All the footage is marked by the

duress of its original production.”41

Like a film badge worn in radioactive environments to warn

the wearer of dangerous exposure, the test film is fogged: trauma

bypasses the optical mechanics of the camera and exposes the

film by blurring the image. This is visible in one sequence about

two-thirds of the way through the fi lm, where individual frames

are intermittently fogged over (see figure 3a, fogged, and figure

3b, several frames later, unfogged; when viewed at film speed, the

effect is something like a flicker or pulse). Damaged by radiation,

the film is shown to be mortal. Yet because mortality describes

the qualities of a living being, the film’s finitude suggests that it

is also, paradoxically, alive.42 If each new medium—photography,

176 Tung-Hui Hu

television, digital storage—contains within it a sign of its finitude,

then as a medium ages, it becomes less and less transparent, and its

real and material aspects become visible in inverse proportion to

the virtual image that it carries. While the process of decay is con-

cealed in other media, film makes the process of its decay explicit.

As a film perishes over time, the events depicted within the reels

of lost or damaged footage take on a new temporality. Because this

temporality is a lived time, we might call it not the time of liveness,

but instead of something like livedness; we might write, instead of

“real time,” the “time of the real.”

Within the surface of the decayed film is a dormant image.

Lagging behind the presentness of the event, it emerges when we

internalize the trauma of these decaying films. Aligned with latency

and forgetting, the image only becomes visible after the initial

event has been lost. Walter Benjamin, quoting André Monglond,

states that “the past has left . . . images comparable to those regis-

tered by a light-sensitive plate. ‘The future alone possesses devel-

opers strong enough to reveal the image in all its details.’”43 The

damaged film asks that we acknowledge the medium’s mortality; it

may even connect us, via the medium’s decaying body, to the body

of history.

Following Conner’s lead, it is worth tracking those images

back to their physical (and material) locations in the archive. In

1997, as part of an initiative to improve government openness,

Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary announced that a selection

of nuclear test films would be declassified; this continued until

2001, when funding was not renewed amid the general hysteria

around security after the September 11 attacks.44 During this four-

year window, the Department of Energy located roughly sixty-five

hundred nuclear films produced by Lookout Mountain Studios in

the 1940s that were stored in vaults underneath Kirtland Air Force

Base in Albuquerque; others were found in Wright-Patterson Air

Force Base in Dayton. Announcing this program, the Department

of Energy wrote that: “many of these [celluloid] films have been

lost or destroyed. Others have been stored under conditions less

than ideal for preservation. The DOE’s Albuquerque Operations

Office is currently engaged in transferring these old, deteriorat-

ing films, many of which are marked as classified, to digital data

(Betacam) and stored on videotapes to capture the information

before it is lost.”45

The archivists found the films in fragments, cracked, brittle,

and color-faded. Their filmmakers had never intended to preserve

the test films, as they were simply documents of transient events.

In their ephemerality, they resemble the “in-the-air” liveness of


television broadcasts before they could be recorded.46 As a note

accompanying the films in the Prelinger Archives indicates, “there

were disturbing results in archiving these extremely historic

events in color, related directly to the properties and instabilities

of Kodachrome I film of the time. The pigments of these color

films reacted with the lacquer coating meant to protect the films

in common storage conditions, causing very disappointing fad-

ing of blue dye, as well as changes in other dye components in

these films.”47 Although the change in color is seemingly a marker

of loss, it contains valuable information: the faded artifacts are

a viewer’s tactile counterparts to the virtual image. Like invisible

ink, the image of instability activated by the bomb only becomes

visible after time in storage.

Despite this fading, the events within the films still carry a

barely containable potency, as if the destructive force of the images

contained within had threatened to erupt into the archive. A sense

of the ninety-five films declassified during this four-year window is

possible by examining the catalog of videotapes available for order;

the catalog promises “dramatic scenes” that are “spectacular” and

“awesome,” featuring “boiling, tumbling, rolling fireballs” and a

“brilliant aurora” that is a “special feature of [certain] explosions.”48

Figure 4. Operation Castle (1954), test fi lm #0800013, U.S. Department of

Energy.

178 Tung-Hui Hu

These descriptions seem to hint at the orgasmic pleasure contained

within the test films. As if to echo this implication that each tape

contains knowledge of the obscene (literally, knowledge ob skene, offscreen), the tapes have been sanitized. Each videotape begins

with an intertitle noting that classified footage has been removed

(figure 4). The tapes were censored at the same time that they were

preserved, and their images cleaned simultaneously for content

and physical damage, foregrounding the ways that curatorial desire

is braided into each object of the archive.

These cuts and ruptures within the body of the test films

acknowledge what we have known all along: the films could never

be a complete documentation of history because history itself is

incomplete. Ninety-five films out of an acknowledged sixty-five

hundred is not much, and we are seeing at best the smallest tip

of the iceberg. Yet if part of the archive has been lost, it activates

the Nietzschean sense of forgetting, one that allows the viewer an

imaginative engagement with the past. The missing frames of his-

tory release the viewer from the spell of liveness and melancholy

and allow her or him to experience the films not as the indexes of

truth but as they have always been: virtual images shot through with

a grain of the real.

Commenting on the footage of the first Trinity test, filmmaker

Jon Else has written that for “maybe ten or fifteen frames . . . the

heat from the first atomic bomb burned a hole through the film

in the camera. . . . It’s not just an image on the emulsion, it’s

actually a hole in the film.” Else calls attention to a barely visible

artifact around the moment of detonation, a piece of footage that

he calls the “ultimate movie” because it is the most direct trace of

light imprinting itself onto film ever recorded.49 The obverse of

the pinhole on the television set during the 1952 broadcast, the

burned hole forms a circuit between us and an outside hidden

from us, an abrupt puncture of actual violence onto the realm of

the virtual.50 Not only an image of violence, it is also a tangible

interface between the viewer and the time of death, between real

time and the time of the real.

The hole is the result of the bomb touching the film negative

or the orthicon tube, but also represents the event that touches us

across history, implicating us, as creators of the bomb, in its mak-

ing. When we discover there is only a hole where the image of “time

zero” should have been, we retroject this knowledge back into the

film or recording, and the event that initially felt instantaneous at

time zero now expands in time, as a detail in a photograph once

did for Roland Barthes.51 No longer a single instant, the event of

the film frame works on us “like the delayed rays of a star.”52


Barthes once wrote that light is a “carnal medium, a skin I

share with anyone who has been photographed.”53 Here we dis-

cover, belatedly, that this sharing of carnal affect goes beyond what

we had imagined. If the equation of the virtual constructs the cam-

eraman or a screen as a proxy for our vision, here the equation

is revealed to be commutative: our vision is affected by what the

cameraman sees. The bomb is alarmingly present; it overwhelms

us. A film viewer’s perception is traditionally described as a process

of voyeuristic identification with the image onscreen. Nuclear test

films, I argue, are different: the hole is not a signifier for but the

index of a real, unrepresentable explosion. To recall Virilio’s ear-

lier definition of an atomic bomb as a “light weapon,” the atomic

bomb is light incarnate; this is no image made of light but rather

pure light itself.

Watching the footage, it is as if our bodies have been turned

into instruments for receiving light. The blinding light that over-

whelms or blackens the screen retroactively invites us to participate

in a mode of perception in which all parts of our body have the

potential to receive the event. We are not merely photographers of

the bomb; the bomb has photographed us, too.54 This is the recip-

rocal touching that goes on: we view the film or the broadcast, but

through the hole, the event sees and even reaches us. An almost

imperceptible touch reminds us that inside each moment of live-

ness is a delayed moment of death.

This essay began by claiming that the real time of the digital is a

construct that has less to do with its technology than with disavow-

ing the dead time or zero time at its center. In different but related

ways digital media, television, and film convert war and death into

live, interactive events; this is readily visible in TV’s around-the-

clock coverage of 9/11 and the websites that allow users to map

and aggregate civilian deaths. The way we watch is always tinged

with melancholy. Unable to recognize that our vision is always

enabled through zero time, we are barred from the recuperative

time of mourning.

In addition, a second story is at work. At the same time that

the speed of nuclear strikes motivated the development of what

we now call real-time computation, the bomb left its own trace on

film and television. Exposed and irradiated by the “light weapon,”

optical media recorded the bomb’s violence through nonpictorial

means—through the fogging of film stock, for example. In turn,

years after the event, the media begin to transfer that sense of vio-

lence and loss back to us. The essential unrepresentability of death

180 Tung-Hui Hu

gradually becomes perceptible, even if the ways it does so—decayed

emulsion, a video’s erasure—are latent effects of the very technolo-

gies developed to obscure that moment of zero time from us.

Digital media leave us with nothing but real time, but that time

also contains the potential of its mortality. Computer scientists, for

instance, refer to the decay of magnetic data as “bit rot.” But given

the way that digital media have suppressed their own materiality,

what is zero time for digital media? What are the digital equivalents

of film or television’s dead time? The task of a media scholar is to

locate finitude within the world of the digital, or, as I have been

suggesting, to look for it, always knowing that it is visible only in

retrospect.

Notes

1. Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio (378 U.S. 184

[1964]): “[C]riminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornog-

raphy. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to

be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed

in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved

in this case is not that.”

2. Michael Newman, “Medium and Event in the Work of Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean, edited by Clarrie Wallis (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001), 26.

3. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 150.

4. Ibid., 151.

5. Ibid., 162–63.

6. See the numerous references to real time and SAGE in, for example, Paul

Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Patrick Crogan, Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2011). Note that SAGE’s predecessor, the 1951 Whirlwind computer, was the first

computer that did not receive input in batches to be output later but instead pro-

cessed input as it was received.

7. Eckert begins by cautioning us that “real time” is not the same thing as “speedy”

or “quick”; a real time computer instead takes in account reaction time. A non-real

time computer, Eckert explains, might compute results too quickly (or too slowly)

for a human to handle. John Presper Eckert, “Continuous Variable Input and Output

Devices,” in The Moore School Lectures, eds. Martin Campbell-Kelly and M. R. Williams

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 394.

8. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001),

99.

9. Paul Virilio, Open Sky, translated by Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997), 25.


10. I am by no means suggesting that time and delay are exclusively postwar

phenomena, but instead am building on a recent scholarly conversation that uses the

intersection of cybernetics, war technology, and media studies to investigate postwar

anxieties about time. This conversation includes Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), and Charlie Gere, Art, Time, and Technology (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2006).

11. This is a formula that Doane, revisiting an earlier essay on television history,

writes as follows: real time = liveness + interactivity. Mary Ann Doane, “Epilogue (2003)

to Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, edited by Thomas Keenan and Wendy Chun (New York: Routledge, 2005), 263.

12. Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” in

Regarding Television, edited by E. Ann Kaplan (Los Angeles: American Film Institute,

1983), 12–21; Robert Vianello, “The Power Politics of ‘Live’ Television,” Journal of Film and Video 37, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 26–40; Mary Ann Doane, “Information,

Crisis, Catastrophe,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, edited by Patricia

Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 222–39.

13. Tara McPherson, “Reload: Liveness, Mobility and the Web” in The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2002), 461.

14. As one Internet commenter, JimT, claims. “On Guard! The Story of SAGE

(ca. 1956),” The Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org/details/OnGuard1956.

15. The April 22 telecast was an inversion of the first (surreptitiously obtained)

telecast in 1951, when KTLA engineers crawled up to a mountain 150 miles away and

with little lead-up broadcast the detonation live to its local viewers.

16. Mark J. Williams, “Paramount’s KTLA: Considering the Independent Station

as a Factor in the Rise of Network Television,” Spectator 7, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 29.

When the atomic telecast happened, the local network suddenly became “a source of

‘network live,’ if only for a day,” feeding local news back into the national networks

of NBC and CBS. But this triumph is an ambivalent one; a few years later, KTLA

acceded to the programming schedules of the national network. Thus, the first atomic

telecast of 1952, for Williams, encapsulates the history of liveness in a single moment;

it serves as both a symbol of immediacy and the symbolic ending (or, I would suggest,

subsuming) of “local” liveness by or into the national networks.

17. Television, of course, grew out of radio networks, and radio’s interactions

between local and national programming offer an intriguing precedent. Early radio

sets invariably both transmitted and received signals, and amateur broadcasters were

common, but in the 1920s, radio stations inaugurated the era of chain broadcasting,

which copied transmissions from one station to the next and eventually formed

the network monopolies—NBC Red and Blue, CBS, and Mutual—that squeezed

out independent stations. Despite many similarities between television and radio

networks, there is one subtle distinction: video transmissions of television were

understood as one form of data among others (for instance, audio). The bandwidth

necessary to accommodate multiple forms of data led to the rapid expansion of

network infrastructure. AT&T’s new transcontinental microwave relay of 1951 carried

TV signals along with phone and teletype transmissions. As a result, the post-1951

national network, which AT&T dubbed the “electronic skyway,” was increasingly

seen as a data network rather than a network tied to a specific medium (e.g., radio

network, telephone network).

182 Tung-Hui Hu

18. “Vegas Linked: First Telecast of Atom Bomb Set Tuesday,” Billboard, April

26, 1952, 2, 6.

19. Ibid., 2.

20. “First Atom-Bomb Telecast a Dud,” Billboard, May 3, 1952.

21. “A Bomb in TV Fluff Fizzles Fission Vision,” Variety, April 23, 1952.

22. Charter Heslep was chief of the Radio-Visual Branch at the Atomic Energy

Commission’s press office and was assigned to the joint Atomic Energy Commission/

Department of Defense information office during the time of the telecast. Heslep,

“They Said It Couldn’t Be Done,” in New Horizons in Journalism: Press, Radio, Television, Periodicals, Public Relations, and Advertising as Seen through Institutes and Special Occasions of the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism, 1951–52, edited by John Eldridge Drewry

(Athens: University of Georgia, 1952), 72.

23. Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 9.

24. This flatness is particularly felt when viewed next to the Atomic Energy Com-

mission’s film of the same blast, which was released later as Operation Tumbler-Snapper. (The press dubbed the event “Operation Big Shot,” but the military refers to the

April 22 event as Charlie shot in Operation tumbler-snapper.) For more on the

telecast, see Mark J. Williams, “History in a Flash: Notes on the Myth of TV ‘Liveness,’”

in Collecting Visible Evidence, edited by Jane Gaines and Mark Renov (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 309.

25. In an editorial cited by Heslep, the Dayton News wrote that the “hazy and erratic

. . . dim” image of the telecast was vastly exceeded in quality by the atomic monster

movies popular at the time, even if it nevertheless gave a sense of the “physical,

momentary presence. . . . It was a living event.” Heslep, “They Said It Couldn’t Be

Done,” 73.

26. Ibid., 72.

27. Here one might recall John Cage’s use of the term “zero time” (as in his

piece 0'00"): “‘Zero Time’ exists when we don’t notice the passage of time, when we

don’t measure it.” Cage derived the term from musician Christian Wolff, who had

used the term to designate variable duration. See John Cage, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1981), 207.

The Wolff reference, in the context of real time, comes from Gere, Art, Time and Technology, 104, who calls zero time “the inchoate time of the now.”

28. Heslep, “They Said It Couldn’t Be Done,” 72.

29. Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events, translated by Julie Rose (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2000), 81.

30. John Harwood, “The White Room: Eliot Noyes and the Logic of the Informa-

tion Age Interior,” Grey Room 12 (Summer 2003): 31.

31. Bob Mielke, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Nuclear Test Documentary,” Film Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2005): 30.

32. Foucault contrasts sovereign power, “the power to take life,” with the power

to regulate and even promote life: “this technology of biopower . . . is continuous,

scientific, and it is the power to make live.” Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”:


Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, translated by David Macey (New York:

Picador, 2003), 247.

33. In a parallel tactic, Chun has described the way that software produces a series

of “real-time” crisis points; by doing so, it creates a false sense of a user as the ultimate

decision maker. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or Sovereignty and

Networks,” Theory Culture & Society 28, no. 6 (2011): 91–112.

34. Mielke, “Rhetoric and Ideology,” 29.

35. United States Joint Task Force One, Operation Crossroads: The Official Pictorial Record (New York: W. H. Wise, 1946), 77.

36. Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 438.

37. Williams Moritz and Beverly O’Neill, “Fallout: Some Notes on the Films of

Bruce Conner,” Film Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 37.

38. Ibid., 38.

39. Ibid.

40. United States Joint Task Force One, Operation Crossroads, 74.

41. Box cover for Crossroads and Looking for Mushrooms, DVD, by Bruce Conner (Los

Angeles: Michael Kohn Gallery, 1996). Fogged film was a pervasive problem; Kodak

even threatened to sue the Atomic Energy Commission because of it. In a settlement,

the Atomic Energy Commission agreed to secretly warn the company in advance

of nuclear tests. Kodak apparently discovered the problem in the 1950s after film

packed in irradiated corn husks became fogged. Matthew L. Wald, “US Alerted Photo

Film Makers, Not Public, about Bomb Fallout,” New York Times, September 30, 1997.

42. The term “mortal,” from the Latin mortalis (meaning “subject to death;

human”), is understood here in contrast to the immortal, who is deathless and

therefore atemporal.

43. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael

W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 405.

44. William J. Broad, “The Bomb Chroniclers,” New York Times, September 13,

2010.

45. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada

Field Office, “Historical Test Films,” http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/films/testfilms.

aspx.

46. This point is made elegantly by Wolfgang Ernst, “Between Real Time and

Memory on Demand: Reflections on/of Television,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no.

3 (Summer 2002): 634.

47. “Operation DOMINIC Nuclear Tests 1962,” The Internet Archive, http://

www.archive.org/details/OperationDOMINICNuclearTests1962.

48. Respectively, the descriptions for Atomic Weapons Orientation Part Five and Six (Videotape, No. 800070, no date), Operation Dominic Fireballs—Pacific Testing

(Videotape, No. 800029, 1962), Operation Doorstep and Operation Cue (Videotape, No.

800033, 1953), Atomic Blasts, Operations Greenhouse through Upshot-Knothole (Videotape,

No. 800042, 1951–53), and Starfish Prime Test Interim and Fishbowl Auroral Sequences

184 Tung-Hui Hu

(Videotape, No. 800062, 1962), all available for ordering via the U.S. Department of

Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Field Office, “Historical

Test Films,” http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/films/testfilms.aspx.

49. Jon Else, on the footage of The Day after Trinity, quoted by Michael Renov,

“Filling up the Hole in the Real: Death and Mourning in Contemporary Documentary

Film and Video,” in The Subject of Documentary, edited by Michael Renov (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 120.

50. As an analog, one might think of Bruce Conner’s film Report (1967), where

holes punched into the leader accompany the radio announcement of President John

F. Kennedy’s death. These perforations are normally visible only to film projectionists,

but in Report, they serve as visible lacunae in the heart of the film’s body.

51. “The punctum could accommodate a certain latency.” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 53.

52. Ibid., 81.

53. Ibid.

54. Akira Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), (Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota Press, 2005), 80.

Real Time/Zero Time

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Transcript of Real Time/Zero Time