Re: [-empyre-] emulation and multiple nodes as archive method
On Feb 4, 2005, at 6:08 AM, Jason Nelson wrote:
>To begin: a brief antidote: Those children of the
>eighties, who so loved cartridge Atari and the first
>Nintendo and couldn't find reliable old machines,
>programmed emulators to play them and now these games
>live on and continue expanding their cultural imprint.
another notable approach is hardware specific, such as the
[current/commercial] Atari® Flashback™ Classic Game Console that
combines games from the Atari 2600™ + Atari 7800™ platforms as well as
a previously [unreleased/unearthed] “classic” (postmodern quotes
provided by Atari copy writers) game called Saboteur™.
which reminds me of the time criticalartware core.dvrs met @ the home
of jon.satrom before launching the beta version the criticalartware
applat in 2003 + played E.T. on the Atari 2600, discussing archiving,
logging + capturing, collecting + preserving artware, video + new
media. we played E.T. (which jon.satrom is very good @ btw) + discussed
how the game is [blamed/faulted] for ruining the Atari b/c of it's
economic failure. gameplay in E.T. involves reconstructing the E.T.
Phone by searching for + finding [pieces/components] of the device
while navigating pits that E.T. falls into. this gameplay is especially
relevant b/c millions of copies of the E.T. game cartridges were buried
in a giant cement covered pit in Alamogordo, NM .US. the cartridges
were buried towards the end of September 1983 when the E.T. game failed
to sell as well as expected + Atari itself was failing economically. we
discussed this broken (cartridges were crushed before the cement was
laid) + buried archive as a kind of model failure + romantic fantasy
for us as "children of the eighties".
E.T.'s "Phone Home!" mantra of nostalgic yearning for {return|reunion}
interbreed w/conspiratorialHystories, early July 1947, Roswell NM .US,
UFOs + extraterrestrials creating the possibility of an alien discovery
of the Atari E.T. archive. if this discovery were to occur after the
end of human life on earth, reconstructions of the game could provide a
unintended [recording/messaging] system of human hystories. or @ least
these were among our playful speculations + became a part of our
decision to focus on creating discursive [spaces/possibilities] w/in
criticalartware via Liken + only archive directly in relation to those
discursive [functions/features].
this also reminds me of a recent conversation the criticalartware
core.dvrs had wherein we were talking about the all-in-one
joystick-based systems that are available now + BenSyverson noted the
activity surrounding the work of Jeri Ellsworth. Jeri Ellsworth (also
a "child of the eighties") has recreated the entire Commodore 64 on a
chip encased in a joystick w/the standard all-in-one approach of
audio-video outputs but also allowing for keyboard, disk drive +
monitor to be attached in order to encourage development on this
compacted version of the C-64 platform. her approach enables new
generations to begin to {play|program} w/the C-64 + opens the system to
wider uses + more [flexible/portable] applications.
>It seems the most powerful archiving tool is people
>loving and owning whatever work it is you want saved.
abs == yes.
>If there are fifty thousand copies of something
>floating around and the devices used to view/play it
>are obsolete, then at least a few of those people will
>create an emulator. Then that emulator and the work it
>plays will be passed around again.
very true.
this also raises the issue of the legality of emulation, specifically
in regards to ROMs, backups as archives, licensing vs. ownership,
reverse engineering, etc... often these lovingly made + shared
emulators + ROMs involve vaguely if not directly extralegal activity.
this is (of course) 01 of the reasons companies such as Atari are
offering commercial products of classic bygone platforms. the
corporations have realized that a market has been created by the aging
generations of gamers + younger gamers who run emulators. Nintendo has
been particularly aggressive in stopping the development + distribution
of emulators for obsoleted games + platforms as well as the sale of
materials that can be used for development on those platforms.
aggressive + heavy handed corporate [strategies/policies] limit the
ability of [artists/developers] in the home-brew or hobbyist
communities to easily access the [technologies/systems] needed to
develop [uses/applications] of these commercially obsoleted
{hard|soft}wares. confronting a paradigm of control such as this can
put [artists/developers] in hazily defined or clearly extralegal
situations, however, this activity is required if 01 is to confront
planned obsolescence + to {creatively misuse|hack} devices +
applications that are in our shared cultural experience.
>So perhaps what should be done, at least in the case
>of areas such as digital music, net art, software art,
>web page archiving is that we should offer the work
>for free. Give people the chance to download work,
>make it their own. Also provide people with space to
>set up their own archives of work, or support those
>digital communities which would create emulators. A
>multi-nodal archive would be much healthier and
>dynamic.
abs == yes!
offering the work for free or under various open licensing schemes
(such as Creative Commons) [artists/developers] can encourage
experimentation, assist archival projects, avoid the limitations +
economics created by corporate models of ownership + address
consumption, capitalism + control structures that operate
governmentally (i.e. the DMCA in the .US) + socially (i.e. the artworld
[models/economics] of artificial scarcity + perceived value]).
it seems to me that decentralized multi-nodal vasty tingleTangles could
create self-supporting safety.nets that would also connect
w/institutional projects + endeavors functioning as nodes + allowing
for varied approaches to sustain each other.
as the discussion has already clarified in the last few days, archival
approaches to the same digital worlds create very different world
views, as is to be expected. the coexistence of these worlds as
construct parallel hystories that can healthily
[complicate/problematize] illusions of totality, objectivity or
absolute validity in hystorical projects such as [these/ours].
[talk/type] soon...
// jonCates
edu: http://www.artic.edu/~jcates
collab: http://www.criticalartware.net
projs: http://www.systemsapproach.net
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