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

[Barrie <barriec@optusnet.com.au>]

Komninos,

I have an old Apple II that I keep to run some of my old graphics
aplications/artworks on. My experiences with the Apple II were valuable to
me at the time, over 25 years ago. The basic concepts that I explored in my
programming then are still relevant today.

A couple of books that I've purchased in recent years also came with CDs.
These were 1. The New Media Reader which had a CD that archived some early
digital material some of which runs in emulation and 2. The Art of
Experimental Interaction Design from IdN magazine, the disk with this book
contained most of the projects as examples in quicktime form.

These are a great ref resource. As the years pass I find myself going back
to this kind of resource again and again. And yes it is important to retain
some of the earlier technology, not everything can be made to run in
emulation.

Some of the stuff I have in my library is really insightful when seen in
today's context, and some is pretty banal - graphics that were called art
but are in fact just scientific doodles. But they were the seed for a lot of
what was to come and some of the people who made this stuff are still
around, Jaron Lanier, John Warnock etc. While these people are still with us
it is also important to get their stories.

On another front, it is easily possible now to download the texts of
historically important authors, ie from the Guttenberg project and textz. As
I am doing a lot of writing now I find this very useful. An online archive
of digital artwork will also be a useful resource particularly if it is
given meaningful structure.

It doesn't matter what the medium is there is work that is important to
archive, we have lost too many important early films for instance.


Barrie, on 7.2.05 08:46 PM, Komninos Zervos at k.zervos@griffith.edu.au
wrote:

> 
> what is wrong with the rhizome.org method of letting the artists apply to
> be included in the artbase, ensure that the cloned art project is
> translated into the future technologies and charge people to use the
> artbase for research/entertainment/recreation?
> 
> also is there somebody, library? collecting all the versions of all the
> software that has been released?
> 
> and for that matter is there a physical repository of outdated technology,
> gramophones, record players, tapedecks, beta video machines, early
> computers, etc ?
> 
> 
> 
> komninos zervos
> http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/k_zervos
> http://users.bigpond.net.au/mangolegs
> http://spokenword.blog-city.com
> 
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