The connection between tacit knowledge (eg: Khmer classical dance) and formal encoding, in relation to preservation strategies, is an interesting one. A couple of decades ago we had a PhD candidate (Nicola Wood) working on the digital preservation and communication of a tacit knowledge-set (traditional hand wood-working skills in rural Derbyshire). I don’t know what’s happened to the dataset and associated documentation from the project but I imagine that the substrate it was recorded on had the sustainability of a Maine winter snowflake in the Australian summer sun, compared with the tacit knowledge socio-technical assemblage that was the source of the material.

Tacit knowledge has proved to be a highly durable knowledge system. The indigenous Australian dream-time has survived the best part of 50,000 years, including through a pretty effective genocide. None of it was written down. Yes, there are graphical records associated with the knowledge involved, but to a great extent the information has been passed down orally from generation to generation - over 2,000 generations. One assumes the knowledge has gained patina as a result of this process but it hasn’t broken or become illegible. It remains living knowledge.

This raises questions about how we value knowledge in Western culture and the instrumentality of how we preserve it. The two are intrinsically linked, as we see in the continuing socio-cultural power of the written word and in our knowledge institutions (museums and libraries). But it would seem this might be a misconstrued value system.

I had been wondering whether the key to digital preservation, specifically in relation to executable code, might lie in something like Z-Code - high level code descriptors for executables - and Z-machines (high level virtual machine descriptors that Z-Code can run on). However, subsequent to considering the efficacy of tacit knowledge, I wonder whether the most likely means by which such knowledge will be sustained is through the ongoing activities of a community of practitioners (which in this case tends to be well networked), sharing their knowledge as they do (including here on CRUMB)?

Of course, this doesn’t account for scenarios where a community no longer exists - and I doubt new media artists are as likely to survive into the future as Australia’s indigenous peoples have. But such a techno-social assemblage does seem to offer a more efficacious model for knowledge preservation than any of the strictly technical means we have discussed.

best

Simon


Simon Biggs
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> On 2 Jan 2018, at 11:12, Jon Ippolito <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Despite Sara Diamond's request, I don't have the willpower to steer this discussion completely away from the siren of media preservation. I can, however, try to relate preservation to the issue of what it means to make art in public in the 21st century. 
> 
> Although I find Johannes Goebel's distinction between documents and performances interesting, I have little confidence that storage innovations like M-disks will be of much value in storing either. Let's forget for the moment that M-disks are a proprietary system untested by outside experts and focus instead on the bits themselves. Diego Mellado points in the right direction when he hopes for a digital version of the Rosetta Stone, which of course is a translation matrix among Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. It's the poster child for perseverance through durability.
> 
> Unfortunately, the Rosetta Stone is the exception, not the rule. Most ancient artifacts contain only one language, and without context or historical continuity, there's little basis to figure out what those languages mean. Take Linear A, the script used for 1000 years on ancient Minoan tablets. The characters of Linear A are all clearly legible; they've even been added to Unicode for chrissake. But archeologists have only wild guesses as to what those beautifully preserved documents could mean.
> 
> To be sure, pulling an M-disk out of storage after 50 years is certainly different from pulling a Phaistos disk out of an archeological dig after 5000 years. So, assuming the next 50 years doesn't involve us dying in a climate catastrophe or nuclear hellfire, it's tempting to assume cultural continuity will allow us to trace back the roots of whatever language was stored on the M-disk. Tempting, until you realize that there is almost no cultural continuity between the digital languages on the documents stored in your attic. When WordStar gave way to WordPerfect in the 1990s, and then WordPerfect gave way to Microsoft Word in the 2000s, it's not like each company demurely gave their source code to the next in the name of cultural continuity; most take their proprietary source to the grave. 
> 
> The open-source transcoder FFmpeg is probably as close as we have to a digital Rosetta Stone, and it has to translate between a hundred different languages, all of which cropped up in only the past couple decades. And that's just for linear, audiovisual recordings--there is nothing comparable for interactive artifacts. It's hard enough to translate among the dozen metadata standards used by archives and museums--and those standards were introduced explicitly for access and preservation!
> 
> Perhaps more relevant than decipherability for this month's topic is the loss of context that accompanies archiving a recording on a disk. The biggest innovation in the moving image in the last decade has not been in formats, but in networks. Hollywood films are screened less in individual theaters and binge-watched more in Netflix and Hulu streams. Home movies have shrunk to six-second bursts, and their value is no longer self-contained but lies in their reverberation across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, where they gather references, remixes, and sometimes political clout.
> 
> The information in a network, unlike a hierarchy, grows exponentially as the networks scales up--and today's networks are planet-sized. That's one reason the library of Congress decided this month to archive tweets selectively instead of exhaustively. But the information is still out there, on the cloud servers of the providers themselves, and digital sociologists with access to those data troves could reconstruct chains of creative reuse that would require years of a painstaking research by art historians to do manually. As recent US court cases attest, the Internet is increasingly where public events take place, and it may serve both as the stage for performing them and matrix for preserving them.
> 
> Sadly, I know very few preservation initiatives designed to capture network context. Some ventures, such as the Preserving Virtual Worlds consortium, have settled for documenting MMORPGs rather than re-creating them as a multi-user experience. As is often the case, however, new media artists have leapt forward where archivists fear to tread. For his "collider" website Jackpot [1], Maciej Wisniewski appeared to search the Web randomly but in fact drew on a predefined pool of websites, a strategy that with some modification could allow the work to be re-animated today. Olia Lialina's Last Real Net Art Museum [2], meanwhile, envisions a preservation model closer to performance, in which a key work of net art, My Boyfriend Came Home from the War, perseveres by being reinterpreted by subsequent "performers" in new media with new inflections.
> 
> Re-collection, my book with Richard Rinehart [3], is full of examples of cultures that have survived by networks of re-interpreters. I just learned another from Prumsodun Ok's TED talk about Khmer classical dance [4]. Like most dance traditions, Cambodia's native choreography is passed person to person, by apprenticeship and reinterpretation. In the 1970s the Khmer Rouge systematically murdered every Cambodian who could speak more than one language or wore classes because they represented the pre-communist cultural order. According to Ok, Khmer classical dancers were among those targeted, and 90 percent of its practitioners were exterminated inside of a few years. Yet the resilience of proliferative preservation is strong enough that those who did survive succeeded in training a new generation of performers to keep Khmer dance alive.
> 
> It's not the first time indigenous art has survived the onslaught of a powerful force bent on cultural genocide, and it probably won't be the last. The secret to these success stories of preserving complex cultural artifacts isn't M-discs, MPEGs, or Mini-DVs--and as much as I long for an officially funded infrastructure, it's not that either. The secret is protocols that ensure that a dedicated community has access to and permission to re-create their cultural heritage, so that each generation acts like a human Rosetta Stone.
> 
> I'm curious if any of the younger folks on this list (Diego? Anne-Sarah?) have any thoughts on this. In the meantime, cheers from the arctic blast, where it's cold even for Maine.
> 
> jon
> ________________
> Study Digital Curation online
> http://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu
> 
> [1] http://www.adaweb.com/context/jackpot
> [2] http://myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru
> [3] http://re-collection.net
> [4] https://www.ted.com/talks/prumsodun_ok_the_magic_of_khmer_classical_dance