At 4 o’clock on a gloomy November afternoon in Cambridge, a small group stood in a gallery of the newly renovated Harvard Art Museum, waiting for the lights to be turned off. An official appeared with a remote control, pointed at an overhead projector, and clicked. "Oooh!" gasped the crowd.
The paintings of Mark Rothko can be breathtaking, but they don’t usually elicit audible gasps. This group had just watched a set of Rothko paintings suddenly drain of their colors, going from deep plum to ashy gray. It was akin to a musical moment—the change of a chord from major to minor.
The light that made a painting behave like a guitar was digital projection controlled pixel by pixel, which is not unrelated to the lighting array at a contemporary rock show. Harvard is employing this unusual technique for an art museum in order to "restore" a series of Rothko canvasses without touching them. Commissioned in the early 1960s for a dining room on the top floor of a university administrative building, Harvard’s Rothko murals were removed from view in the 1970s because they had so rapidly faded in the sun. Unwilling to use traditional restoration techniques of inpainting on Rothko’s fragile, unvarnished surfaces, Harvard hid these works away rather than display them in their "damaged" state. "The murals will probably not be shown again in our lifetimes," declared the chief conservator at Harvard in 1988.
Last month, the Harvard Art Museum unveiled the fruits of a technological collaboration with MIT’s Media Lab—a software-driven, pixel-by-pixel projection of compensatory color that makes the Rothko canvasses appear as they did in 1962, when they were first unrolled in Cambridge. Gasping along with the others at this digital projection, I was struck by another similarity to musical experience.
The first time I heard a CD was just about the same time Harvard’s chief conservator predicted the Rothko murals would never be displayed again. In the late '80s, CDs arrived, and like so many "hi-fi" marketing schemes it was freighted with promises of better sound, greater durability—all at a correspondingly deluxe price. It sounded like a pitch designed to part bored businessmen from their money. On the underground rock scene, rumors and conspiracy theories abounded. "There’s no physical way to permanently bind metal to plastic," a science-major friend told me, authoritatively. "You know they only cost pennies to make," said a record store clerk we considered a paranoid hippie, because he was a bit older than we were. "And if you look at the laser that plays them, you’ll go blind."
Those who had actually heard a CD—which wasn’t many in our circles, due to the high bar of buying both a new machine and the expensive individual discs—knowingly said they sounded "cold." Stereo salesmen eagerly explained that the dynamic range available to CDs was greater than our cheap set-ups could accommodate—you really had to hear them on an entirely upgraded system to appreciate the difference.
So when my then-bandmate announced that he had bought a CD player in order to hear one of our favorite albums—the Feelies’ Crazy Rhythms—without the scratch, I received the news with more than a bit of disdain. How bourgeois, I thought snootily. And then I eagerly asked to hear it, too.
It was true. There were no scratches.
The sensation of first listening to a CD for a record I had memorized—together with the surface noises on my copy, and in this case also the (different) surface noises on my bandmate’s copy—was something like driving a late-model car designed for a smooth ride home to the suburbs, in place of my rusty Fiat 128 that didn’t always manage to get us back from gigs. Just as in a big luxury car, I could no longer feel the surface.
Which is precisely what seemed most absurd at first about CDs—that nothing need touch them as they play. "Digital" was Orwellian in its misdirection: these were objects nobody handled. By contrast, we put our fingers all over LPs—a record dealer friend claims some collectors even lick them.
The digital projection on the Rothko canvas is much like a CD, in its disembodied approach to restoration. With the projector on, the murals are deeply colored, glowing images that bear no marks of use or age—"without the scratch." Shut the projector off, and the canvas is as black and scarred as an old LP. Every moment these Rothko paintings are seen in natural light, they decay a bit more; just as every time we listen to an LP, the needle digs a little deeper, pushing the sound further from its original state.
Seeing the Rothko murals as if they were new again, via digital projection, feels like the breaking of a bond between the viewer and the object—the bond of time that ages us together. This was, I think, the same shock of digital sound when I first heard it. It doesn't change along with us.
I am almost precisely the same age as those Rothko murals, as it happens; my LP collection, among other more corporal markers, proves it. But there's no disembodied return to the original state for me, I'm analog through and through. Perhaps that's why I never did buy that Feelies album on CD for myself—the noise it accumulates is a noise I know, inside and out.