atopic — other, resistant to classification, slipping away from definition.

a greek concept applied to socrates by his interlocutors: not as a name, but as a way of marking his strange, incomparable figure; later taken up again by roland barthes in a lover's discourse: fragments.

is a video archive atopic — or, for that matter, any archive at all? it seems rather the opposite: an archive is a topos, ordered and named, hierarchized and structured.

accessing a video file might seem easy to compare with accessing o u r memory:

we recall something by setting ourselves in motion through a trigger, a beginning, an entry.

but the interface of file access is so unlike memory, and so determined — explicitly and implicitly — that it finds its alibi in the very freedom it presents: here it is, the possibility of control, yet you will almost certainly not use it, because convenience, stability, and predictability have already made the choice soft enough for it to stop feeling like a choice.

we choose files already sorted by categories and criteria chosen not-by-us:

date created
modified
alphabet
numbering order
our stale habit of choosing and watching,
no longer remembering why, or where the moment of consent and comfort took place.

nominally, we are given the freedom of control, but in the habitual mode of viewing the starting point is almost always pre-set: by the play button, the thumbnail frame, the title, the inertia of autoplay on double click.

what if the order of a video file's beginning were to lose its stability and acquire a certain plasticity?

the tonearm of memory is light and ephemeral; the inconsistency and instability of its reading operations, like the material itself, always slip away and jump.

remembering,
we squint not in order to see,
but to be simultaneously and equally accessible everywhere:
not at one chosen point,
but in a field of possible entries.

in dreams, we have several options — to try to connect to the direction of the dream, simply to watch, or to wake up.

so too, in the situation of watching a chosen video file, we have the options of stopping, jumping in any direction, speeding up or slowing down, zooming in.

the excess and self-assurance of the standard mode of video viewing — its dazzling detail, its poetics of perfectly straight lines and the shortest path — are tautological: it is ready to enter us without friction or any effort at all.

in this player, the video layers are independent of one another: the order of fragments in the color layer is random, and the size of both layers changes through gestures on the left and right sides of the screen, inviting our perception and self-actualizing digital archives into an equally atopic game.

fjodor gladilin, may 2026