[-empyre-] Media, Mutation, Migration and Decay

["Clare Stewart" <cstewart@acmi.net.au>]

Greetings, and welcome to a week of dialogue about my favourite p-word: preservation.

Participating in this forum are: Damien Frost, web artist and designer for Eyeline and Spinach7 magazines whose work <Object not found> appears in 2004 networked; Paul Koerbin who works in the Digital Archiving Section of the National Library on Pandora, Australia's web archive; Tom Nicholson, an artist whose recent work consists of actions inserted into public spaces, generating residual forms for exhibition and whose work appears in 2004 NGV; Margaret Phillips, Director of the Digital Archiving Branch at the National Library who has managed the Library's activities in archiving Australian online resources since 1996; Tim Plaisted, new media artist whose most recent work <Surface browser> appears in 2004 networked; David Wadelton, whose paintings and digital prints focus on contemporary pop culture and whose works <Paradise> and <More real than real> feature in 2004 NGV and yours truly, Clare Stewart, Cinema Programmer at ACMI.

Media, Mutation, Migration and Decay

Star Spangled to Death, the most recent work by avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, was forty-six years in the making and uses archival and found footage to present a social critique of "a dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict". Jacobs' powerful collage film connects the Cold War era with current global politics using footage from the former period to make a strong political statement about our own time. It is the kind of cultural project that institutional and personal archives exist to enable: contemporary reality illuminated by the ephemera of the past.

With the proliferation and mutation of media forms, and technical advances in digital archiving, questions of how and what to preserve threaten to take up more collective thinking space than physical and virtual archives themselves.

Some of these questions include: How do we archive networks and who is responsible for archiving what on the internet? Does the digital restoration of a film print alter something integral about its original form? Is the decay of a painting, photographic print or garment essential to its form, or should steps be taken to prevent it? Should we migrate all existing analogue media into digital storage forms, or is it better to simply concentrate on working out how to store new forms? Is digital media stable enough to cope with these demands, and given the rapidity with which formats upgrade, how can we be sure we are choosing the right archival medium?

Perhaps the big question is, given the speed and flurry of contemporary living, is there really any value in archiving things at all? Do we honestly expect that our colleagues of the future will have the time and inclination to revisit our collections, to digest and make new things with the ever-expanding stuff we produce and store every day? 




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