On Archiving, Ephemera, and Analog Distortion
According to Carrie Bickner, New York Public Library Assistant
Director for Digital Information and System Design (
http://www.roguelibrarian.com ), digital archivists have two main
concerns. The concern is not just with "bit integrity" (the
integrity of the actual media being preserved); there exists the
equally troublesome task of preserving the technology used to read
the media. For example, my MS Word 2.0 document may be perfectly
intact, but this does me no good if I no longer have any software
that can read it.
Imagineer Danny Hillis looked into the problems of making a clock
that would still be telling time thousands of years from now, and his
best solution was to build a non-digital clock, trusting in the
continuity of human culture to wind it physically as needed.
http://www.longnow.com
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.05/hillis.html
But what if one relies on the peculiar quirks of a particular
technology to create his signature art? Where would Jimi Hendrix be
without Marshall tube amp distortion? AmpFarm currently makes a
digital Plug-In for Pro Tools that simulates the Hendrix amp set up,
and the results are close, but no cigar.
Recently, Microsoft announced that it will no longer support Internet
Explorer for the Mac. This means that all the Mac surfers currently
using IE (a huge majority) will eventually migrate to something else,
most likely Safari. And (as Nick Barker [ http://www.nickbarker.org
] recently pointed out) Safari does not support tiling animated gifs.
To hardcore conceptual net artists and ActionScript/Lingo/Java net
artists this is no big deal, but to a lo-fi dhtml net artist like
myself, this failure is of some concern. It means that, for a
potentially increasing number of visitors, the technology used to
create some of the "art" of my "art" no longer functions desirably.
Not that Netscape 6 for Mac ever displayed tiling animated gifs
"properly." It actually chokes on them, but in an interesting way
(surf http://www.playdamage.org on Mac N6 for examples). But Safari
doesn't even attempt to animate them. This is akin to the difference
between analog and digital distortion. Analog distortion is messed
up, but in a warm, gradual way that remains in dialogue with its
source signal. It's a good thing. Digital distortion is binary.
You either have a clear non-distorted signal, or a boring monotone
clip that in no way resembles its source signal. Safari not
animating the gifs at all is equivalent to this monotone clip.
To a hardcore conceptual artist to whom aesthetic craft is tangential
fluff, my animated gif concerns are insipid. To a hardcore
programmer coding abstract interactive vector shape environments, my
animated gif concerns are obsolete. To a W3C-aware software
developer at Safari, my concerns are ridiculous. But to a net.art
archivist, my concerns are of potential interest. [cf:
http://rhizome.org/artbase/policy.htm , "appendix D: artist's
intent"].
There is a legendary story about Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page
that seems applicable. A rock journalist once asked Jimmy Page what
rig he used (guitar, foot pedals, amp head, speakers) to get his
signature tone. Page said, "I no longer answer that question
publicly." Page went on to explain that he uses vintage equipment
that's no longer newly manufactured. One time a few years ago, Page
named the specific make and model of the equipment he used in an
interview that was widely circulated in a major British publication.
The next time Page's vintage equipment needed replacement parts, he
went shopping around to vintage equipment dealers and pawn shops for
the parts he needed, only to find that they were unaccountably sold
out. Tons of young British guitarists had read the article and
snatched up the remaining vintage equipment. Now their hero was no
longer able to continue creating the original tone his fans were
trying so hard to emulate.
This tale is usually told as a cautionary moral regarding fame and
mass media, but it also speaks of the ephemera of the technology to
which we develop our personal symbiotic relationships. Auriea Harvey
[ http://www.e8z.org ] confided to me a couple of years ago that she
was feeling like all the work she had done on the web was in vain and
lost. At the time, I thought she was over-reacting, temporarily
burned out on the medium. Now, as browser companies crumble and the
ephemera of my early work becomes more apparent, I begin to
understand a bit of what she was feeling.
The "solution" in commercial web design is, "code to standards." But
if part of your art involves using non-standards code to
"overdrive/break" standard browser rendering practices, then coding
to standards is not always possible.
Perhaps the solution is to embrace the ephemerality and just keep
making new stuff. If that's the case, it could be argued that
pimping one's own work becomes more important than ever. If people
don't see it now, they won't be able to see it four years from now.
The focus then shifts to the artist as public figure, and away from
any single work itself. How many web designers revere Josh Davis
without ever having seen early versions of
http://www.once-upon-a-forest.com ? How many net artists revere jodi
without ever having seen any of the early iterations of
http://www.jodi.org ? Thus the net artists who "succeed" are those
good at PR, good at branding themselves, good at coming up with
projects that spin well and are viral, good at peppering the press
with ongoing small projects instead of working for extended periods
of time on larger, more meaningful projects. (Have I just described
the contemporary gallery world in general?)
Perhaps the solution is to pull an entropy8zuper – abandon the net
as an artistic medium altogether, go into hibernation for a year, and
develop a grand narrative entertainment game that is neither net nor
art.
Or perhaps the solution is to keep working in the medium, dare to
take on larger projects (perhaps making them modular, like
http://www.worldofawe.com or http://www.marrowmonkey.com ), and then
just not really give a crap about what lasts or who sees it.
Personally, I think I'm over the "who sees it" part (as much as any
artist can be), but I'm surprised at how much the "what lasts" part
is goading me.
peace,
curt
cf:
http://www.afsnitp.dk/onoff/Texts/tribearchivingne.html
http://www.afsnitp.dk/onoff/Texts/dietzcuratingont.html
http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No1_curation_schleiner.html
http://www.deepyoung.org
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on archiving, ephemera, and analog distortion
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Type: discussion