Re: [-empyre-] Who decides and what to preserve

["949Simon Pockley" <simonpockley@hotmail.com>]

By way of reply to Kominos and Sharmin

Maybe you've come across Bruce Sterling's Dead media project:

http://www.sterneck.net/cybertribe/cyber/bruce-sterling-dead-media/index.php

Actually, there are many who subscribe to the values associated with living 
in a perpetual present. In many respects to preserve or not to preserve is a 
cultural value often associated with control. In central Australia the old 
men used to exert control over the young men by metering out secrets and 
insisting on authority when it came to history. A story was only ?true? if 
it was told by someone who had the authority to tell it. In death, authority 
was passed on. Names of the dead were not mentioned and all evidence of the 
past was destroyed. This meant that there was only one story and one person 
with the authority to tell it.

Eric Michaels eloquently noted that...a capacity for oral truths to respond 
to change without ever appearing to be changing. One means by which this is 
accomplished is by refusing to externalise inscription except in social 
discourses and performance. From within the oral system which stores 
information in specified authorities and reproduces it in socially regulated 
ritual, there is no contradiction possible to claim that Dreaming Law is and 
always was, as it is, external. From outside the system, we may observe that 
the law can change, without ever appearing to do so.

Michaels, Eric, Aboriginal Content: Who's Got it - Who Needs it? Art & Text 
23/4 P.61.

I value pluralism (many stories). This has sometimes led to a collision of 
values when it comes to documenting (online) a past involving aboriginal 
contact. Unfortunately, not all values can accommodate each other and I'm as 
sure of mine as they are of theirs.

I've encountered digital artists with similar non-pluralist values. They 
have no interest at all in preservation and some actively challenge the 
pluralist archival view by using bespoke programming and other 
non-archivable strategies. Many digital installations are actually 
performances and probably need to be respected as events in time. The Booth 
on the ground floor of ACMI is a great example of a non-archivable 
installation with a very short life expectancy.

http://www.acmi.net.au/permanentworks_booth.jsp

The notion that everything is simply an event in time is one approach that I 
think was alluded to by Melinda in her original posting where she 
mentions...the critical distinction between object and events based 
archiving.

BTW. Apologies that all my postings to this list from hotmail appear to have 
character encoding glitch that turns apostrophes into question marks.

best wishes

Simon

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