dear crumb list,

a quick report from transmediale festival in berlin as it relates to 
the theme...
this afternoon Peter Cornwell from ZKM held a panel (which he had to 
abandon because of his flu) about "sustainable information technologies 
for cultural applications"

some notes follow:

Peter began with stating a need for a sustainable computing strategy - 
because we’ve come to the end of video lifespan - and with a quote from 
mcluhan about the great blackout of 1965, and how, had it continued, it 
might have further influenced how electric technology shapes our lives.

He argued that we’ve entered this century with all media in 
programmable memory, whereas last century it was mechanical 
reproduction. Change from inscription on physical materials to 
re-useable semi-cnductor memory. This is the paradigm that marks media 
art. With digital representation (unlike analogue media of magnetics 
tapes) information is generated. We can use math to protect info that 
is stored in digital memory. We can make clones for instance. This has 
fundamental affects but allows specific changes.

Video, films have direct access – not random access in the way 
semiconductor memory does. They play, they are time-based. An archive 
of video tape can only be cloned if you load each tape into a machine 
and play it. If you digitize that information then the archive is held 
on the computer and can be read and written randomly and so then it is 
possible to clone it and carry it over fast datacommunications networks 
as opposed to the real time of conventional play out.

[this is what the variable media initiative calls Migration and is 
essentially the only preservation strategy Peter is addressing]

Before abandoning the talk Peter did show an example from the ZKM: the 
CD jukebox machine which drives the video archive project (2064 cds) -- 
artists videos which have been digitised onto CD. The works have 
therefore all been compressed. MP1-2 encoding, done in the early 1990s. 
He indicated this is not as good as today's DVD, but nevertheless is a 
unique preservation project. There is still an issue of space. audio is 
small – 10-20mb per minute. Video is bigger 100mb per minute when 
compressed. Uncompressed it is 3gb or thereabouts. however, storage has 
advanced so much that the 5 meter long jukebox is unnecessary - the 
entire contents of those cds can be copied onto a single computer. So 
now the motivation behind the archive project at ZKM is to build large 
scale disc based storage machines (although one issue is that gb are 
still expensive). But then they can both make a simple copy of already 
digitised material (or new material made digitally) but also intend to 
go back and re-digitise analogue material to create new master files.

Peter also discussed the metaplex project from the ZKM's future cinema 
exhibition, but his talk was pretty well clouded by his headache/flu.

more soon,
sarah

Sarah Cook, New Media Curator / Research
School of Arts, Design, Media and Culture, University of Sunderland
CRUMB web resource for new media art curators
http://www.crumbweb.org