RE: [-empyre-] authenticity

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

Dear Luciana

> to know whether they can trust their sources, and any spectator wants to 
> know whether is looking at the real thing or some forgery, imitation, or 
> surrogate.

By way of an excuse to tell another story, I?m just a little puzzled about 
the strength of your concern for authenticity of digital forms. Sometimes 
one of useful qualities of digital material is its ability to be free of its 
container and change form. In a previous posting I think that I also 
suggested that a lack of contextual residue might also be a weakness.

At the risk of being scorned, your posting made me recall a message sent to 
me in on 28th April 2003 12:18 PM from the (then) Research Director of the 
Strehlow Research Centre in Australia?s centre (message contained in link 
below). The Strehlow Research Centre had published an out of print book on 
its website that I had (without guilt) immediately appropriated. I had done 
this not just because I was a hunter-gatherer-collector but because it had 
been badly marked up and was full of character encoding anomalies. Playing 
the archival role, I re-marked it up into a pristine version with 
appropriate metadata and allowed it to join the rest of the Strehlow related 
material on its journey into the future via The Flight of Ducks.

http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD1020.html

Anyone searching for an authentic version of the content of the book would 
have been better served by my appropriated version than by the official 
sanctioned version. If you go to this link and press the [removed] link, you 
will see yet another example of the action of cultural values. My solution 
was to use comments (see source of FOD1020.html).

As it turned out, this story became far murkier than I had imagined, but 
this is not the place to go into that. If nothing else, this illustrates how 
the residue of its stewards can indeed encrust or contaminate digital 
material depending on how you see it.

Best wishes

Simon

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