NYT article on the issues of preserving digital archival data @ Emory University. One interesting thing to me was that they recreate what an author saw on a screen (a draft, including applications that would allow annotation).
The first digital forensics lab also opened last summer at Stanford's library:
Michael Olson, the digital collections project manager at Stanford University, said that the only people who really had experience with excavating digital information were in law enforcement. “There aren’t a lot of archives out there capturing born-digital material,” he said, referring to the process of extracting all data accurately from a device.
I was at the UNMA (Utrechtse Nieuwe Media Avond) yesterday. The theme was "computer-brain-interfaces", which was quite interesting and scary at the same time. Besides the mostly medical possibilites (for example: deep brain stimulation, or mind controlled wheelchairs), there was also a Belgian artist, Chritoph De Boeck, who made a huge interactive sound installation. The steel pins that hammer on steel plates respond to your (EEG) brain activity, which is measured by the quite small and lightweight device on your head. The sounds eventually construct a rythem if you focus your attention on certain things, for example by constantly doing small mathematical calculations in your head. I tested the device myself after the presentation, unfortunately not in the installation, but i saw my brain activity on a screen, which was kind of weird too.
As you can see in the video, De Boeck uses the headset by IMEC Holst Centre. There's another company that created one especially for games: the Emotiv Epoc. Maybe this could be an interesting way to access an archive???
An archival project by Art+Com conceptualized in the mid nineties. It has only ben realized partly. The project relates VR and archives, and something that is more common now, web2.0 concepts, like video and image contributions of the audience to the archive.
Update from my end on the research. Some notes from Erik Davis's "TechGnosis" that apply to the Ritual category:
The speed & mutability of current technoscience times evokes supernatural qualities.
Technology has "demystified" the world, but this mysticism is actually hiding in cultural, psychological, and mythological areas. It comes back as well, perhaps without our knowing (ex: how Christian myths have framed technological/economic growth)
ICT shapes the human self by encoding thought & experience. Partially reconstructing this self and world leads to new interpretation. These constructions of our reality consist of (1) form (medium, crafted/constructed) and (2) content (transmission of mind & meaning). This content can be further divided into two parts: soul and spirit. Soul is analog, continuous, and entrenched in social context. Spirit is characterized by clarity and discrete signals (digital).
People are now cut off from their analog souls by science & technology, and try to recreate it with these digital versions - technology is not a mere tool.
The "Great Divide" from Latour's "We Have Never Been Modern" is also mentioned: nature and culture were once interwoven and indistinguishable (ex: how an Inuit experiences his dreams and hunting the following day), but the Modern Wall has wedged itself in between. Now culture is struggling to develop independently of nature, through new technologies, even though these spiritual needs are re-manifesting themselves.
Also starting to read up on Debord's "Society of the Spectacle," and the Situationists, don't know exactly where this will lead.
Yesterday our clustering session yielded several research directions that we will dig deeper into this week. The topic I will address is power and the archive. The IT revolution has changed the way we think about information and accordingly, the archive. The result has been a shift in power from traditional, controlled archives towards information created, curated/edited and distributed through a participatory culture, in a sense democratizing these processes.
I started by looking into the V2_/NAi publication, Information is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, for some insight. The book is a collection of essays, projects, and interviews from different art/design disciplines. The most inspiring article I read was Archive and Aspiration, by Arjun Appadurai. I over simplify and paraphrase below.
Appadurai discusses how the digitalization of the archive has led to a return to the archive's traditional role as a deliberate site for recording anticipated memories for collectives, freeing the archive from the exclusive realm of state control, policing or from the tomb of the trace. The IT revolution has had the effect of increasing the accessibility and extended the function and possibilities for the archive. The digital archive becomes the site for the deliberate production of anticipated memories by communities. Appadurai gives the example of the digital migrant archive; the archive for disposessed people whose histories do not correspond with "official" memory. This intensified form of archive acts as a highly interactive forum giving voice, agency and debate, as a site for creating/negotiating collective memory and aspiration, mediating between the past and present locations.
"Rather, the migrant archive is a continuous and conscious work of the imagination, seeking in collective memory an ethical basis for the sustainable reproduction of cultural identities in the new society."
The archive is the map of how to interact within uncertainty and a tool to link between memory, desire and hope. For me, the notion of archive lending agency and location to grassroots, subversive or other groups confronting, breaking down or transforming the powers that be, is very fascinating...the tools of the oppressors become the tools of the suppressed.
