----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
I wanted to take up John's notion of the impermanence of "The Cloud." This
puts me in mind of an art project that I believe speaks to this
intersection of issues. Last year, my writing partner Rob Wittig and I ran
a netprov on this topic. (A netprov is an online improvised narrative.) (
http://robwit.net/?p=223)
Mem-Eraze http://memeraze.tumblr.com/
We ran this project with about 60 undergraduates over the course of a week.
The premise was simple: A popular photo-sharing site goes down, all the
images are lost, and its user base, a collection of six families, is
devastated. Their reaction is to try to recover something of what was
lost, so they try to recreate all of the lost photos and to share those
again online with descriptions. However, rather than using people or
images of people, they use everyday small-scale objects:bottles and pens,
lipstick and pills.
The project was a meditation on the collective delusion that the Internet
can preserve memories but also the way the Internet has become a kind of
default site for shared narrations of memory. In recreating images of
pivotal or iconic moments, the students learned that the punctum of each
photo, as Barthes would have it, arose not from its indexicality but from
somewhere between the scene and the desire to share across the network.
The detritus of digital memory are these shared uploads that will soon
enough be separated from their contexts. Their images become grist for the
mill of machine reading (as Facebook knows how to tag people in your photos
before you tag them). Yet the emotional memory in these traces lies not in
their data -- or at least not in a place that can yet be automatically
mapped or recovered.
Best,
Mark
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 10:30:25 -0700
> From: John Hopkins <jhopk...@neoscenes.net>
> To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] technological and human dis/remembering
> Message-ID: <544fd2b1.30...@neoscenes.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> hall? folks
>
> I think the use in recent few posts of a word like "permanent" regarding a
> digital record seems to merit some discussion. Imho it is a hang-over from
> the
> hubris-laced techno-utopianism (and, for example, sci-fi) of the Cold War
> --
> where technology was primarily an absolute monument to the success of the
> human
> species. There persists a presumptive hubris that very much tags along
> behind
> this word within the developed world. "The Cloud" and any other
> manifestation of
> 'external' memory is definitely *not* permanent and will definitely *not*
> persist "forever." Ever. From a humanities (and theoretical/philosophical)
> pov
> it may seem this way, but from a systems pov, it is not the case. It may
> perhaps
> be a useful concept in thought-experiments. But the data will persist
> precisely
> as long as the techno-social system has the energy to maintain the orderly
> arrangement of magnetic dipoles on a disk. This is no magic, but rather a
> simple
> case of the wider system deciding that the information has a value that
> justifies the energy expenditure. When the point comes (when "The Cloud" is
> choking us with it's hydrocarbon emitting power source), you can be sure
> there
> will be wide-scaled 'forgetting.' The powerful illusion of 'permanence'
> probably
> preceded great forgettings of the past: the fire at the Library of
> Alexandria
> comes to mind, they relaxed their control over their information.
>
> Also apropos: the concept of standards and protocols in a techno-social
> system.
> These words frame a field of intense and very real conflict with very real
> consequences. There is a constant struggle within the structure of a
> 'technological' society as to who controls (creates, polices) the
> standards by
> which the technological infrastructure is constructed. These struggles
> take on
> moumental proportions that ultimately determine what is remembered and
> what is
> forgotten. Ever face the problem of opening an old file for which you do
> not
> have the software platform? This is a simple example. The winners of the
> conflict dictate what is forgotten by who they have vanquished. Large
> swathes of
> digital memory are lost every time there is a (digital) protocol change.
> This is
> the same concept where a language is used by a small tribe?when the last
> of that
> tribe dies, there is a huge forgetting.
>
> Cheers,
> JH
>
> --
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
> grounded on a granite batholith
> twitter: @neoscenes
> http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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>
> End of empyre Digest, Vol 119, Issue 24
> ***************************************
>
--
Writing Program
University of Southern California
http://markcmarino.com
http://haccslab.com
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