[-empyre-] Taxonomedia: Resolution for Digital Futures

[Jim Andrews]

Dear Taxonomedia,

I read your post about digital obsolesence. Yes, yes. But here is an example 
of how work can actually be preserved.

ja

FIRST SCREENING
bpNichol
http://vispo.com/bp

In 1983 and 1984, bpNichol used an Apple IIe computer and the Apple BASIC 
programming language to create First Screening, a suite of a dozen 
programmed, kinetic poems. He distributed First Screening through 
Underwhich, an imprint he started in 1979 with a small group of poets. The 
Underwhich edition of First Screening consisted of 100 numbered and signed 
copies distributed on 5.25" floppies along with printed matter.

However, the Apple IIe soon became obsolete and the poems became essentially 
inaccessible. But in 1992, four years after the death of bpNichol, J. B. 
Hohm, a student at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, began 
creating a HyperCard version of First Screening with the approval of Ellie 
Nichol, bp's widow, and with assistance from Dennis Johnson and Fred Wah. In 
1993, Red Deer College Press published it on a 3.5" floppy disk for the 
Macintosh computer.

The HyperCard version of First Screening was a careful re-creation and 
recoding of the original, and it extended the life of First Screening a few 
more years. Still, HyperCard eventually died, leaving the poems unavailable 
to all but the few who owned a functioning old Mac or an even older Apple 
IIe and a readable diskette (unlikely, since the usual lifetime of a 
diskette is approximately five years). In 2004, Apple stopped selling 
HyperCard, and OSX's Classic mode was the last Mac operating system on which 
it was possible to view HyperCard works.

So we are very happy to present to you four different versions of First 
Screening.

1. The original DSK file of the Underwhich edition with a freely 
downloadable Apple IIe emulator (available for PCs and (maybe) Macs), along 
with scanned images of the printed matter distributed with the Underwhich 
edition. This version is closest to the original.

2. An online JavaScript version of First Screening created by Marko Niemi 
and Jim Andrews.

3. A streaming Quicktime movie of the emulated version.

4. The original HyperCard version, which may, perhaps, become easier to view 
in the future via a HyperCard Player emulator or some other means. We've 
also included scans of the printed matter of this version.

This project has taken us almost three years. We've learned much about 
bpNichol's First Screening and how the destiny of digital writing usually 
remains the responsibility of the digital writers themselves. As a group and 
individually. This project illustrates that work can indeed survive the 
obsolescence of technologies if others are still interested in the work and 
the artist has provided what is required to implement the work using later 
technologies. bpNichol originally created 100 copies of First Screening and 
distributed them widely, which was important to the propagation of the 
bitstream. Fortunately, the source code was relatively easy to extract and 
fairly simple to understand. First Screening is some of the earliest 
programmed, kinetic poetry. This historical significance, together with the 
quality of the work itself and bpNichol's literary stature (he was awarded 
Canada's highest literary honour in 1970), have also motivated us to 
complete this project.

The recovery started in 2004 when Lionel Kearns showed Jim Andrews the 
HyperCard version on an old Mac. Lionel also had three 5.25" floppy disks 
bpNichol had given him. Jim took those floppies to Information Services at 
the University of Victoria, Canada, where Jeff Rivett, a data analyst, 
recovered the data using his own functioning Apple IIe at home.

That version of First Screening turned out to be incomplete; Barrie Nichol 
must have given Lionel these disks while still writing the piece. Geof Huth 
[1] recognized that the disk was missing some of the poems in the published 
version and that Lionel's disk presented the remaining poems in a different 
order. In an attempt to preserve these poems, Geof had stored his 5.25" 
floppy of the Underwhich edition carefully, made a silent videotape of the 
poems as they played on the Apple IIe, and printed out the source code. He 
could no longer view his floppy, since he no longer had an Apple II series 
computer, but the printout and the video indicated that three poems were 
missing from Lionel's draft copy: "Reverie," "Any of Your Lip," and 
"Off-Screen Romance," along with some initial and final bibliographic 
matter.

Following unsuccessful efforts by the University of Albany to recover the 
data from Geof's 5.25" floppy of the Underwhich edition, Geof shipped the 
floppy from New York to Dan Waber and Jason Pimble in Pennsylvania. Dan and 
Jason were able to recover the full version from Geof's 22-year-old floppy 
using a functioning Apple IIe computer and a range of open source software.

O ye digital poets: the past of the art is in your hands and it is you who 
must recover and maintain it. Although the history of digital archiving is 
more than two decades old, most professional archivists have little interest 
or training in the process of preserving and ensuring functional access to 
digital materials. For instance, although bpNichol's work is archived at 
Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, no one there had or could copy the 
data from the Underwhich edition floppy to contemporary media. They were not 
uninterested, however, and many thanks to Tony Power for trying.

The secret to this project has been a combination of passion and knowledge. 
None of us understood the entirety of the situation facing us at the outset. 
Each of us brought a different set of skills to the task, and all of us 
brought our love of Nichol's work and our desire to make sure that others 
could once again see these early digital poems. We hope our efforts prove 
worth it for those who visit these pages now and into the future.

Jim Andrews
Geof Huth
Lionel Kearns
Marko Niemi
Dan Waber
March 2007