Artifacts (1 of 2)
Photographer Robert Burley takes pictures of the end of analog for his book The Disappearance Of Darkness. Christine Frohnert explains how conservators must care for Art with a Plug. Curator Christiane Paul tells us how the Whitney Museum of American Art restored the digital artwork “the world’s first collaborative sentence” by Douglas Davis. And TOE’s Washington D.C. corespondent ‘Chris’ tells us the truth about Edward Snowden and Snapchat.
In 2005 the photographer and educator Robert Burley set out to document how digital technology was changing photography. Two years later when Kodak began dynamiting its international headquarters he realized things weren’t changing — they were ending.
Robert Burley is the author of The Disappearance of Darkness — a picture book / wake for the last days of analog photography. Over the course of five years Robert travelled around Canada and the United States taking pictures of the grand finale. He travelled to Rochester, New York when Kodak imploded and he travelled to Parsons, Kansas when Dwayne’s Photo-lab announced it would no longer process Kodachrome film.
The world’s first collaborative sentence entered the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1995. When the staff decided to put the work back up for display last year, they were faced with a philosophical dilemma: use the old version with the dead links, or create an updated version, one users could interact with. Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney, tells us what the Museum did and why. You can find the sentence here
Digital works, like the Sentence, are posing new challenges to Arts Conservators. Christine Frohnet (yes, this episode has TWO Art World professionals of German Descent) explains to us why “Art with a Plug” is so difficult to care for and why so many Electronic Artworks are in danger.
And wrapping up this installment: a chat with our D.C. correspondent “Chris” who tells us the TRUTH about Edward Snowden and Snapchat.
And wrapping up this installment: a chat with our D.C. correspondent “Chris” who tells us the TRUTH about Edward Snowden and Snapchat.
4 comments on Artifacts (1 of 2)
Great as always.
I was reminded of this project that is attempting to preserve video games and their virtual worlds.
https://lib.stanford.edu/pvw2
Keep up the great work
I enjoyed this episode. Listeners might find my own (academic but accessible) article relevant. It’s “Digital dirt and the entropic artifact: Exploring damage in visual media” at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15551390802620910
The abstract: “The transition from photochemical to digital imagery presents an exceptional opportunity to re-examine damage and the “entropic artifact” (one that reveals its interactions with time) as well as how technology mediates our visual experiences. This article compares entropic cues in photochemical and digital images and discusses their processes and outcomes. For example, photochemical media gradually decay, while digital media experience glitches that often lead to sudden image destruction. In photochemical media, damage provides intuitively understood cues about the passage of time, value of the artifact, and its handling. As digital media are adopted, decisions about content encoding, how damage is visually represented, and what contextual metadata is stored influence the inevitable process of damage in digital images”
Regards,
–JK