Hi all,
I just finished revamping http://playdamage.org (a site I have been adding to since 2000) in order to remove all the Flash elements.
Most of the flash had been used to seamlessly loop audio, but some was used to make visuals. The main decision to upgrade in the first place, and then the microdecisions about what aspects to upgrade and how specifically to upgrade, were driven by nostalgia, aesthetics, my threshold for tedium, my endurance performance practice, and my ethic of futility. I want to keep adding to the site, but I have been less excited to add new things to the site knowing that the early parts of the site were running on deprecated tech. So part of the upgrade was to keep me excited about being an artist in the present.
Rhizome used to have that checklist you filled out for their artwork databse where you answered your preferences for the ways in which you would like your work to be maintained in the future (via stand-alone simulation, via translation from software to video documentation, etc.). It was all more or less a hypothetical exercise, because I don’t think any of the work in that archive has been upgraded in any of those ways. When you are your own archivist, the criteria for the maintenace of your work is less idealistic and more pragmatic. It is less about the integrity of that single piece of work (per se) and more about the trajectory of your overall practice.
Playdamage was always meant to be a place where I could experiment with code in unorthodox ways and make the browser do things it wasn’t suppsed to do. It is the perfect candidate for a site to put out to pasture once its stupid tricks are no longer supported. But I can’t do it.
Just some thoughts.
I’ve thought about all this before:
http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No2_radical_cloninger.html
That was 2003.
It is kind of surprising (disturbing? telling?) that I am still maintaining this site.
Best,
Curt
Curt Cloninger
Associate Professor of New Media
University of North Carolina Asheville
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Home: http://lab404.com
Garden: http://playdamage.org
Archive: http://deepyoung.org
Portfolio: http://lab404.com/art/
School: http://nm.unca.edu
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