Re: [-empyre-] Save As: Social Memory
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Jussi, Thanks for the kind words about Re-collection; I hope it doesn't disappoint. I can promise a chapter that addresses this quandary raised in your panel: On Dec 2, 2013, Jussi Parikka wrote: a situation which is defined by blatant censorship and a distrust of any centralised governmental organisation who could not be trusted to preserve the counter-memory of the activists. Indeed, this is where paradoxically the probably meticulous work of “archiving” the activists was more of a police-operation of following up the “dubious” elements, tagging them, secret arrests, databases of suspects, etc. Rick and I cite Diana Taylor's distinction between the written archive and the supposedly ephemeral repertoire. Although Spanish and Portuguese colonists outlawed oral performance during the Conquest, sacred dancing, mask carving, and other indigenous methods of preservation survived the attempts by conquistadors and the church to stamp them out. We think books are archival, but they can be burned, while many core aspects of Native American culture somehow survived 500 years of invasion from a continent bent on genocide and armed with muskets and smallpox. Can today's vibrant networked culture persevere by being re-performed in an analogous fashion, without leaving the NSA a trail of digital breadcrumbs to round up the netroots? jon ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Save As: Social Memory
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Ebru's panel sounds intriguing. While I'm glad to see a renewed interest in preserving software (the Preserving Virtual Worlds consortium, NDIIPP), the preservation of *social* memory is often relegated to the margins in favor of a focus on supposedly archival file formats. But especially when talking about the role of software in organizing and promoting social protest like the Gezi resistance, the dynamic of the social network seems much more valuable historically than the individual files shared on it. Take Vine, Twitter's video step child--those seven-second videos you can take with your cell phone and then upload and share. It's fairly simple to preserve the files itself, and it wouldn't be hard to migrate them to some relatively well-known codec like MPEG4. They are short, so they don’t take up much storage space. Unfortunately, the focus on file formats ignores Vine's networked nature: Vine clips shared over Twitter, hash tags that people use for discovering and promoting them. It's tied into the commercial apparatus, with Vine micro-trailers to promote a movie years before it comes out. Vine clips can stimulate activism. All of that is invisible and lost if all you do is save a bunch of MP4s on a hard drive. I'm curious whether the panelists proposed any strategies for preserving the social dynamic of participatory media--perhaps some drawn from the traditions of oral and performative culture. BTW the relevance of these older paradigms for today's social memory is a core theme of the book Rick Rinehart and I are publishing this spring (Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory, http://re-collection.net). jon On Nov 27, 2013, at 8:00 PM, Ebru wrote: Save As: Social Memory. - How can we preserve the software itself along with the content it generates? - In what way should we consider software itself as the creative archive, *arche*, of our digital culture? - What new archival practices does technology-based art and culture present? - How do software, social media, and network practices introduce a sphere of counter-representation which curate alternative narratives of the present? ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] -empyre- bios | listserv as historical document
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I've lurked on empyre since the early 2000s, starting as a new media artist and Guggenheim curator, and now an Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Maine. As a co-founder of Still Water (http://still-water.net/), I've helped build The Pool, ThoughtMesh, the Cross-Cultural Partnership, and an ecovillage on the Maine coast. On empyre I've probably been most outspoken about future threats to new media, such as copyright lockdown, academic co-optation, and especially technological and cultural obsolescence--all specters that have haunted my own creative work. I have the privilege of being an advisor on Tim Murray's Preservation and Access Framework for Digital Art Objects at Cornell. This preservation research dovetails well with the new Digital Curation program I've helped start this year at the University of Maine (http://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu). All the online courses are online; in addition to a two-year graduate certificate, we host periodic hit-and-run events. One of our webinars last spring featured Christiane Paul speaking about the Douglas Davis case profiled this month in The New York Times. Since we're talking about the historical role of a particular email list, we shouldn't forget the threat of academic myopia. Don't get me wrong: books and articles have a long shelf life and have made important contributions to the understanding of our emerging field over the last three decades. I myself am co-authoring the book Re-collection with Richard Rinehart this coming year (http://re-collection.net). But it's critical not to forget the role that listservs and other informal networks of communication have played in this field. One arena where this plays out is in academic promotion and tenure guidelines, which until recently tended to ignore the Internet altogether. At the University of Maine, we explicitly wrote ours to embrace contributions to online discussions and other dialogic forms of scholarly communication and artistic intervention. These New Criteria for New Media became one of the most downloaded articles of Leonardo magazine: http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/275.php Re-collection argues that museums and textbooks aren't yet very good at reconstructing the historical context for creative work. Fortunately, a few universities and archives have given communication networks like empyre the weight they deserve. When I consulted the prestigious Langlois Foundation's research database in 2005 I was pleased to find numerous citations from email lists and Web sites. For example, although Alex Galloway has authored journal articles and books from prestigious publishers like MIT, the two documents that represented his writing in the Langlois database were both from email lists. Since then, the Internet archive's Jason Scott has done important work rescuing historic BBSs. I hope this time capsule of empyre's can draw further attention to the role of electronic dialogue in shaping creative and critical expression. jon @jonippolito ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Beatriz da Costa (1974-2012)
I attended a conference on digital education where a self-important keynote speaker publicly chastised his fellow presenters, mostly female, for not knowing how to work their Macintoshes. When it was her turn to speak, Beatriz addressed him directly, saying it was probably just because they were a bit nervous. The comment out of anyone else's mouth might have seemed condescending, but coming from Beatriz it had the effect of putting the everyone at ease--with the exception of the Grand Poobah, who was visibly shamed by how brightly her generosity of spirit outshined his own. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman / Kosuth
Hi Simon, As I'm sure you know, Kosuth's essay Art After Philosophy seemed to imply a platonic solution to that conundrum. His essay claims what's important about chairs (and art) is the unique idea conveyed to us by their varying manifestations, whether dictionary definition, photo, or wooden furniture. I had the opposite impression standing in front of One and Three Chairs. What struck me--and indeed seemed highlighted by the work's presentation--was how different each of the versions were, and how ludicrous it seemed to pretend details like the smell of wood, the pale black-and-white print, and the dictionary typeface were just incidental projections of the same higher concept into our reality. When I mentioned the disparity between what I saw in his work and what he wrote in Art After Philosophy, Kosuth told me to forgive the immature proclamations of a 23-year-old or something to that effect. Occasionally people view the variable media paradigm as similarly platonic--an approach to preservation that only applies to conceptual art. But just as One and Three Chairs is about the differences that inevitably emerge among difference instances of the same concept, so media and performative artworks are never the same from one viewing to another. I think Euro-ethnic culture needs more practice accepting difference. One of the few useful nuggets I've gleaned from Jacques Lacan (via Joline Blais) is his division of the world into theory (Lacan's symbolic), what we take for real (Lacan's imaginary), and what we don't realize we are leaving out (Lacan's real). I like to lob this self-damning formulation at philosophers who busy themselves nailing down ontologies in their head instead of nailing down shingles on an ecovillage home somewhere. OK, back to building my own ecovillage on the coast of Maine. jon http://MaineCohousing.org Simon wrote: Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Variable Media Questionnaire
Thanks to all for sharing your questions and insights in the past month on ephemerality and sustainability. I'm looking forward to reading more about the next topic, Making Sense, and its attendant colloquium. In the meantime, in the hopes that the moderators will indulge me, I'll try to catch up on some loose ends from last month: On Oct 9, 2010, at 7:40 PM, FILE_Arquivo wrote: I’m very interesting in the Variable Media Questionnaire. I was wondering to apply in some artworks here. Gabriela, I'm glad to hear it! We just launched the third-generation Variable Media Questionnaire a few months ago and are keen to get folks to use it. This Questionnaire has been completely rebuilt from the bottom up to make it easier for more people to use. Most importantly, the Questionnaire is no longer a standalone database template but now a free Web service, making it easy for creators and their associates to register their opinions on a work's future, whether or not they are connected to an institution. We've already seen the Questionnaire in use by a broader audience, including a recent entry by architects Diller Scofidio. The new Questionnaire looks at artworks as ensembles of components, because we thought that would be more intuitive for registrars, conservators, and other arts specialists. In so doing, our purpose is less to track sundry gadgets like cables or disk drives than to understand the key elements of a work that are critical to its function, such as source code or media display. Acknowledging the relational character of much contemporary art, these parts extend beyond hardware to include environments, user interactions, motivating ideas, and external references. You can play around with a demo version of the Variable Media Questionnaire at the link below. http://variablemediaquestionnaire.net/ Anything you add in the demo version of the Questionnaire will be erased periodically, so you can experiment with the interface by creating fake works and interviews to this sandbox. The best way to start is probably to browse through artworks using the search box at left, then double-click on anything that interests you. Along the way you'll probably open a number of panels, which operate much like the windows you see on your normal computer desktop. You can open new panels, move them, minimize, or close them. If you get lost at any point, just click on the exclamation point to bring up an FAQ that should help. If any empyreans would like a real account or a personal tour via phone or chat, just let me know off-list. We'd love to help you document the works under your care! jon __ Forging the Future: Free tools for variable media preservation http://forging-the-future.net/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Culturally specific archives
Hi Johannes, Thanks for the provocative questions--forgive me if it takes more ink to answer than to ask them! On Oct 7, 2010, at 5:52 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote: am I correct I reading you as making a direct analogy between embodied cultural practices/techniques and digital media practices/machining architectures? Yep. Of course, analogies are never true--they are only useful for what they reveal or inspire us to do. And it's a stretch to say that machines are bodies, because they aren't organic, don't evolve, or have feelings (at least most don't yet). But the important part of the analogy for me is that digital media endure by execution rather than storage. Much as we'd like to believe, conditioned by concepts like the Universal Turing Machine, that a digital file will run the same way on every computer, anyone who's actually tried to write once run everywhere knows how much execution varies with context. (Mention the phrase Internet Explorer to a Web designer and watch her grimace in pain.) Of course, it's daunting to think that typing Command-S doesn't really save a file--that we have to keep it alive by migration, emulation, sometimes even apprenticeship. It's also unnerving to imagine entrusting preservation to people from the future who will remake it, many of whom are even not part of traditional collecting institutions. Yet much as professional conservators might fear an army of amateurs, such unreliable archivists have kept cultures alive over decades (by rescripting Nintendo emulators) or millennia (by retelling Aboriginal Dreamings). Meanwhile our wonderfully highbrow electronic artworks are decaying into inert assemblages of wire and plastic in their climate-controlled crates. My analogy is meant to remind the custodians of culture of a truth that many find hard to stomach: we need to fund more than conservation labs and climate-controlled vaults. Artists' studios, Usenet groups, and remote villages are where culture is birthed and resurrected by its indigenous producers. Permanent exhibitions nourish art less than temporary exhibitions, where works are upgraded and displayed before being routed to their next venue. Conservators need to understand strategies such as emulation, migration, and reinterpretation and make sure the artists they work with understand them too. And museums need to allocate less of their budgets to renting storage space and more to funding the process of creating, and re-creating, art. Thankfully, several have begun to do just that. could you please expand on this idea of recombinatorial digital repertoire ? Though all media change over time, some are more unstable than others. Take online culture. In the late 1990s the San Francisco Museum of Art's design department acquired a handful of artsy Web sites in a procedure that amounted to burning screenshots to a CD. To me, that's the equivalent of Merce Cunningham taking a few stills of a dance in his repertoire and then saying, There, the work is preserved for posterity. A typical Web page consists of separate snippets of text, code, and images that get chopped up into minuscule packets, cloned into multiple copies, and then routed through Duluth and Des Moines and wherever only to be reassembled in a page rendered on your home browser. To make matters worse, this page can look and act completely different depending on the browser, scale, resolution, processor speed...for me, this variable activity, not a screenshot of one of its temporary guises, is what the work *is*. In 1998 curator Steve Dietz invited Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and me to create a work on the occasion of the archiving of the well known artist site ada'web at the Walker. We decided to take the (re)combinatorial dynamic of Web pages to an extreme by creating an interface that made no presumptions about a single way the components should be put together. Instead this Unreliable Archivist offered viewers an array of sliders that let them reassemble its aspects according to criteria that range from plain to preposterous. Depending on their choices, images from one artwork might be promiscuously recombined with texts from a second, styles from a third, layouts from a fourth, and so on. The most notorious aspect of the Unreliable Archivist, however, was not how it worked but how it failed. Like a number of 20th-century works that pushed the boundaries of net art, the Unreliable Archivist died a few years after its launch, the victim of a moribund Web format called the layer tag. This irony was not lost on commentators like Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand, for whom The Unreliable Archivist became a symbol of the very obsolescence implied by its title. Until now. The Walker never actually acquired the files necessary to run the work, because as artists we wanted to keep tinkering with it and petitioned to leave the work on our server for just a short while after the launch. A short
Re: [-empyre-] Culturally specific archives | law
Thanks, Ben, for this informed and important excursion into the dangers that copyright holds for preserving culture. I also much appreciated your larger conclusion that software is a form of culture. One of the chapters of the book Rick Rinehart and I are writing is called Death By Law--it surveys some of the genres of new media art devastated by intellectual property (VR has been particularly hard-hit). I know your question below was in part philosophical, but here are some practical answers (some of which you may already know): On Oct 9, 2010, at 11:54 AM, B. Bogart wrote: When I pass on, to whom will I entrust the software that makes up my artworks? To archive off-the-shelf programs, the Internet Archive maintains a software archive. To do so required them to lobby for an exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. To archive custom software in executable form, Rhizome's ArtBase allows artists to archive their own projects. I believe Rhizome had also started a software archive for browser plugins and the like before the Internet Archive, though I'm not sure where it stands today. To archive custom software source code...well, this was a battle when I was at the Guggenheim because some artists didn't want to release their source code because they thought it could make them money while they were still kicking. In response the Open Art Network proposed a third-party code escrow, comparable to the practice in commercial software development, whereby an artist would agree to let the museum have its paws on the code once it is no longer of (commercial) use to the artist. At last March's DOCAM conference, MoMA conservator Glenn Wharton confirmed this strategy seems to be getting some consideration today, at least at his museum. Cheers, jon __ Forging the Future: New tools for variable media preservation http://forging-the-future.net/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Culturally specific archives
, and other indigenous methods of preservation survived the attempts by Conquistadors and the Church to stamp them out. Books can be burned, the many divergent old testaments ramrodded into a single King John edition, but the performative traditions of indigenous people from Oaxaca to Okinawa live on. Taylor's repertoire is emphatically embodied rather than written, with explicit contrast to print and implied contrast to scripted media such as radio and television. Yet it is less broadcast media's dependence on *scripts* than its dependence on *hierarchy* that ties it to the conservative view of the archive as regulating adherence to the original. Open software programmers, Wikipedia contributors, and YouTube mashup filmmakers constantly script and re-script the digital repertoire; new media writing escapes the centralized control characteristic of broadcast because it is editable. Furthermore, new media are not exactly disembodied in the way that a pre-recorded show playing on a screen is disembodied. New media may be non-geographic, but they network people into active producers rather than passive consumers, and even when mediated by machines, they execute rather than represent. This means that many of the bodies that perform new media--a browser running JavaScript, a Playstation running C++, an Intel CPU running machine language--can be modified and distributed inside emulators and other virtual environments. If anything, the fact that the digital repertoire can propagate by a dispersed populace using DIY tools makes digital media even more uncontrolled than the analog repertoire. Excerpt from the chapter Unreliable Archivists, in Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, New Media and Social Memory (MIT Press, forthcoming) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Archiving New Media Art: Ephemerality, and/or Sustainability. philosophical approach
Hi Gabriela, On Sep 30, 2010, at 8:53 AM, FILE_Arquivo wrote: This made way to organize this amount of information; it’s facing the instabilities, errors and ephemeralilties as inherent part of the complex electronic/digital art archive ambiancesThis is a philosophical point of view, which we are trying to put in practice, working hard on interface design and in the database structure. Intriguing. Can you give us any more of a glimpse--via a prototype or just textual description--of how this ephemerality-friendly interface and database might work? jon __ Forging the Future: New tools for variable media preservation http://forging-the-future.net/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Archives that trespass
Thanks to Tim and Renate for inviting me and to everyone who's contributed to this discussion so far. My background in the subject comes from working with the Variable Media Network, first under the auspices of the Guggenheim and then now under Still Water in its new incarnation as the Forging the Future alliance. I'm intrigued by the two seemingly conflicting ideals for an archive I've seen emerge from empyre this past week. Claudia Kozak proposed that a weak archive could be a good thing, while Lynn Hershman wrote that trespassing geographies is very much what this is about, on every level. Isn't the problem now facing preservationists of all sorts--but especially those distant from capitals of colonial culture--that our archives are too weak to trespass boundaries? Our precious magnetic tape is too fragile, our financial backing is too flimsy, our archivists are too exhausted by the monumental task in front of them. Yet we have come to expect more of archivists than simply filing negatives in solander boxes. We expect them to transcend the bounds of time and medium, safeguarding flammable film canisters and precarious video codecs from the ravages of climate and fashion, translating them when necessary into new formats to survive the onslaught of obsolescence. To judge from this discussion, we also expect them to cross boundaries of culture and prejudice, attracting deserved recognition to the works they painstakingly preserve, not just from their own backyards but from New York, Linz, Beijing, and everywhere art history books are written. Don't get me wrong: I think these undertakings are more valuable than filing negatives in solander boxes, and I'm glad folks on this list seem to agree. But I think anyone running a small archive or museum needs a boost, and this is where some of the networking tools Still Water's Craig Dietrich and John Bell built for Forging the Future can help. Because a lot of small things can network more effectively than a few big things. And as Cildo Meireles said, the further you are from the center the faster you move. Sure, the big museums and archives in North America and Europe have databases that can be searched via their Web sites. So a curator who wants to search for television can consult the comprehensive databases of the Langlois Foundation, MedienKunstNetz, or the Database of Virtual Art. What a researcher currently cannot do, however, is to search for the theme television across all, or even a handful, of such databases. For efficiency, such online databases are typically accessed via server-side scripts that take the form index.php?theme=television, a formula that Google et al. cannot spider. As a result, millions of dollars and countless hours of staff time and expertise are spent squirreling data away in private silos inaccessible to a broader public, in idiosyncratic formats that can't and don't talk to each other. Enter the weak archive. What if instead of trying to jam every culturally distinct artifact from across the globe into a single union database, we set ourselves the goal of making weak ties between disparate archives that respected their differences? Then a researcher could take the minimum required information to specify an artist--Cildo Meireles, say--and find every record in other archives (no matter what size or location) holding another work by that artist. This approach describes the Metaserver, a sort of ISBN for art devised by John Bell to generate unique, portable ids for people, works, and vocabulary. Any database with access to the Internet--even a desktop application like Filemaker--can hook into the Metaserver through an open API, at which point a registrar adding records to that database could simultaneously view or add to related data from every other database on the system. As co-developer Craig Dietrich likes to say, the Metaserver isn't an archive, but rather an inverse archive, that archives pointers to records in other folk's archives. Of course, the Semantic Web has promised this for some time, but there are plenty of doubts about when, and whether, it will ever arrive. The good news is that registries like the Metaserver are lightweight and easy to build with practical techniques we have right now. So far the Metaserver team has prototyped the API and is working on testbed implementations with external databases like the Rhizome's Artbase, Franklin Furnace's VocabWiki, The Pool, and the 3rd-generation Variable Media Questionnaire (an independent Forging the Future project). If you're interested in hooking up your archive to the Metaserver or just learning more, give me a shout on- or off-list. In the meantime, you can learn more about Forging the Future at http://forging-the-future.net. There's a presentation with a section on the Metaserver at http://forging-the-future.net/presentation/. Looking forward to a stimulating discussion! jon
