As Beryl and Sarah have left the door open for a continued discussion on collecting new media art this week, I thought we could turn to another angle from the world of electronic literature.
The perseverance of digital narrative is a central theme of Matthew Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. This well researched book makes a convincing case for a perspective that is diametrically opposed to the variable media paradigm: that bits can hide away in material substrates much longer than the conventional wisdom would imply.
Kirschenbaum cites some provocative examples, such as the forensic recovery of data from hard drives buried under rubble at the bottom of the World Trade Center after 9/11. Interestingly for our purposes, one of his chapters offers another answer to Beryl's request for "good examples of crowdsourced preservation or documentation." William Gibson and Dennis Ashbaugh's digital project Agrippa was supposed to be a lesson in ephemerality, a poem that erased itself when read. The press release claimed,
"The Collector/Reader, when encountering this new object, will be forced to make a radical choice; between 'possessing' the story and images, by activating the disc and opening the pages of the book, ending up with only a relic or memory of its content, or keeping the story and etchings 'intact', but never actually experiencing what each contains...at least until some super-bright Hacker cracks the original virus, penetrates the form and retrieves the text."
Turns out it took only days for the text to show up in news groups, and it has been preserved online ever since. You can even view an emulated run of the poem based on a bit-level copy of an original diskette made possible by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Digital Forensics Lab at University of Maryland:
http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/category/the-book-subcategories/the-poem-running-in-emulation
Open-source champion Eric Raymond once claimed that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Perhaps there's an analogous axiom for preservation?
jon
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Forging the Future:
New tools for variable media preservation
http://forging-the-future.net/
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