[-empyre-] object not found - an introduction

["::|| damien frost ||::" <damien@stickygum.com>]

Hello everyone,
apologies for my belated introduction.
I produce the Object Not Found website (www.objectnotfound.net). It's 
basically a collection of found photos, notes and other ephemera. I 
started the site in late 1997 and it was more or less a personal 
distraction that i began while working on a community web project. I 
seem to have this uncanny knack for finding discarded photos and notes 
and like a lot of other people, once i've picked up these things to 
examine in passing i find it hard to throw it away again, as if by 
finding it you have gained some sort of responsibility over the object 
and if indeed it was originally accidentally lost you feel you should by 
finding it, at least give it a good home. My good home used to be a 
mantlepiece or a shoe box, until one night while browsing the web i came 
across an "error 404 Object not found" message and it got me thinking 
about all these "lost" web pages that are not "found" and how it might 
be analogous to all these real world pages/photos that i have actually 
found.

While i may indeed be creating an archive of photographs and other 
stuff, i don't really see that as the purpose of the site as such, I'm 
not interested in the inherent value of the object itself but rather i'm 
more interested in presenting these things in a different context than 
originally intended. And i don't neccesarily mean that they are now 
these digitally presented and preserved entities, but rather their 
audience and by extension their meaning has significantly changed by 
their presentation on the web. One of the things i enjoy most about 
finding photos is attaching a personal meaning to them. I don't think we 
can help but try to do this when we look at a found image. Whether we 
are trying to determine the relationship between the subjects in the 
images of family snaps or trying to work out just why a seemingly random 
or mundane image was deemed worthy of posterity in a photo. A recent 
photo i was given just the other day shows a large room full of men all 
looking fairly despondent, arms crossed, faces frowning and i'd like to 
think that maybe it's a meeting of men looking to reclaim their male 
pride after years of failed relationships, when in fact it's probably a 
builders union meeting. But really there's no telling. And this 
fascinates me, especially in the context of art where we're often handed 
down definitive meanings especially by art critics of what's going on in 
an artwork or photo that can often leave little room for the viewer to 
attach their own meaning to a work.

I'm very interested in this talk of archiving websites too. I've often 
wondered what happens to a personal website once the person dies. in 
most cases i guess the website dies too, the payments to the server stop 
so the service gets cut which has always struck me as an awful shame 
really, though someone mentioned to me once that there was a service 
archiving deceased persons websites but i've never come across anything 
that particular targets that area itself. Just a thought.

-d





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