Digital_Heirloom

Our communication methods have improved over time, from stone tablets, papyrus, and vellum through to the printing press and the World Wide Web. But while the web has democratised publishing, allowing anyone to share ideas with a global audience, it doesn’t appear to be the best medium for preserving our cultural resources: websites and documents disappear down the digital memory hole every day. This presentation will look at the scale of the problem and propose methods for tackling our collective data loss.

Jeremy Keith

BBC series that looks at maps in incredible detail to highlight their artistic attributions and reveal the stories that they tell. The hour and a half film is broken up into 12 parts. You can watch them all here.

Photographs do more than document history — they make it. At TED University, Jonathan Klein of Getty Images shows some of the most iconic, and talks about what happens when a generation sees an image so powerful it can’t look away — or back.

Last week, the Library of Congress decided to store the complete archives of Twitter. Starting six months from now, every last tweet—currently produced at a rate of 50 million a day—will be saved on an LoC hard drive and will presumably be accessible to historians for … well, forever.

The question is, does the preservation of digital content, from tweets to Facebook updates to blog comments, make the job of historians easier or harder?

How Future Historians will use the Twitter Archives

A shadowy, masked New Yorker relieves people of painful remnants of their pasts: love letters, photos, even underwear. To the man under the giant bear head, it’s performance art.

Death Bear was ready for his mission.

A man in the second-floor unit of a nearby apartment building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn was desperate to get rid of something that was too torturous to keep but impossible to discard.

The anguished individual had turned to Death Bear, a macabre performance artist who silently walks the city streets in a one-man quest to relieve people of painful remnants of the past: love letters, photos, gifts, dog tags, underwear — a lot of underwear, it seems — anything that might reduce an otherwise well-functioning person to a sniffling wreck.

LA Times Link

Long Now Digital Research Director Kurt Bollacker was recently published in New Scientist discussing the challenges in maintaining data for the long haul:

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, an increasing proportion of the information we create and use has been in the form of digital data. Many (most?) of us have given up writing messages on paper, instead adopting electronic formats, and have exchanged film-based photographic cameras for digital ones. Will those precious family photographs and letters—that is, email messages—created today survive for future generations, or will they suffer a sad fate like my backup floppy disks? It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the “digital dark age.” This is the idea—or fear!—that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us.

This film is amazing.  One of the most original and comprehensive stories I’ve ever seen. It not only tells the story of a boy’s transformative life, but also that of America’s transformation.  

Description:

Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck first met Sean while living as a graduate student in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood at the height of the 1960s.

The city was awash with the trappings of America’s cultural revolution-the San Francisco State University campus flooded with cops in riot gear, the Haight filled with drifters and idealists, and, on the third floor of Arlyck’s building, a come-one-come-all crashpad apartment.   It was from this top floor commune that the precocious 4-year-old Sean would occasionally wander downstairs to visit and talk-and one day Arlyck turned on his camera.

Sean’s casual commentary on everything from smoking pot to living with speed freaks was delivered in simple sincerity throughout the soon-to-be famous 15-minute film.   This First Child of the notorious decade may have shaken the audience with his simple sentence- “Sure, I smoke pot”-but it was his barefoot impishness which would encapsulate the hope that lay in front of the nation: a promise of infinite possibility.

Thirty years, three generations, and a lifetime later, Arlyck has returned to San Francisco in search of who the adult Sean might have become.   And what he finds, to his surprise, tells him as much about his own east-coast migration as it does about the Californian life he left behind-that the choices we’re handed and the choices we make are, very often,   quite odd bedfellows.

Following Sean

A 1944 Nazi propaganda poster titled “LIBERATORS,” published in 1944 by the Dutch SS-Storm magazine that then belonged to a radical SS wing of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands.

Despite the ridiculously boring into, this interview with Leonard Shlain is still worth a watch.  This man is brilliant.  An honest to god modern day renaissance man. His book The Alphabet vs the Godess has been a major influence.

In this presentation Shlain contrasts the feminine right-brained oral teachings of Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus with the masculine creeds that evolved when their spoken words were committed to writing. The first book written in an alphabet was the Old Testament and its most important passage was the Ten Commandments. The first two reject of any goddess influence and ban any form of representative art. Presented at The Distinguished Lecture Series Pepperdine University Malibu, California November, 2006.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

An entertaining and cheeky music video for “70 Million”, hit song by Franco-American band, Hold Your Horses!, offers a wink at art history as band members playfully reconstruct famous paintings in an off the wall lyrical interpretation all their own.

Here is the presentation Richard Banks did at the PSFK Conference in London last year.

He spoke about what he refers to as “digital heirlooms” and discussed the histories we are creating about ourselves through digital media and how future generations will interact with the artifacts we leave behind.

Richard considered the current products of our technology, such as the thousands of digital photos taken by people each year, and discussed their endurance over time. While previous generations left tangible objects, our current generation has digital ones– and multitudes more. Our digital objects (physical or virtual) are rarely thought of in the long term. Instead, they are instantly consumed and then disposed of.

Richard also discusses the ‘breadcrumbs’ that we are leaving behind and how future generations will find them. He questions the existing customs and rituals involved with inheritances and how these mores could be applied to our technological heirlooms.

Here’s Bruce Sterling’s speech at Transmediale, a talk on “atemporality for the creative artist,” which explains what the net and technology have done to the idea of the history and the future.  This shit is deep…