Disclaimer
This post is a little bit off-piste from what I normally cover, but I figured if the ABC can pump out an article on all of the properties owned by politicians in Australia (with much hand-wringing prompted by the Prime Minister buying himself a nice house during a cost of living crisis), then I can write about stuff that isn’t directly related to data centres or my day job.
TL;DR I’ve gotten older and realised that things don’t last forever. A random podcast episode and some dying machinery reminded me of that this week.
What is Time-based Media Art?
I recently came across a podcast from The Met called Immaterial: 5,000 Years of Art, One Material at a Time. I follow a few different “retro” technology accounts on the Internet, and someone posted a link to this particular episode. You can find it on Apple Podcasts here. The reason I listened to this one in particular was that it covered some of the challenges associated with time-based media art conservation. So what’s that exactly? To quote the National Gallery of Australia, it’s “works of art that are dependent on time, duration, or function. This includes: video, film and audio artworks that have a duration; installation artworks; and artworks that function only for the duration of their time on display, such as computer-based and mechanical works of art.” In one of the examples used in the Immaterial episode, the artists had used VideoCD as the primary medium for a piece of art based on Starsky and Hutch episodes. I’m as big a fan of Starsky and Hutch as anyone, but I’m probably not qualified to decide whether something like that is art or not. But the point is more that they’ve used a format to display their art that is now, ostensibly, obsolete. Does that mean it still qualifies as the original art piece? At what point does it fundamentally change?
Is It a Problem?
The thing that struck me most about podcast episode and subsequent reading I did on the impermanence of various art media was the way we consume art (in galleries and at home) is changing as well. To wit, one of my MiniDisc recorders had recently stopped working and it was such a strange coincidence and strong reminder of the way our enjoyment of art can be directly impacted by technology progression (or the lack thereof). Fortunately, I have a small, portable unit as a backup, but what happens when that one gives up the ghost? I have boxes of LaserDiscs that I can no longer view because both of my players have stopped working. And countless video tapes in a variety of form factors that can’t be viewed anymore because the playback mechanisms are no longer manufactured and getting people who can fix them is becoming more and more difficult. Thankfully my Zip drive still works but I can tell you that SCSI to USB adapters are pretty hard to find so my Jaz drive is all but useless now. At least in my household. It’s become such a problem in the art world that the Met has put together a “Time-Based Media Working Group” to look into ways of dealing with it. And it’s not just hardware that can impact an artwork’s existence, software can have a big impact on its ability to continue into the future as well. Remember all of those early music services with special encryption that relied on the service being around and contactable over the Internet forever?
Is It an Easy Fix?
Not really (and there are plenty of people who know a lot more about this than I do). There are a few different approaches you can take to combat time-based media obsolescence (and I’m thinking more about this in terms of the everyday consumer’s relationship with media rather than media as a piece of art). One approach is to migrate the content from one platform to another. For example, I’ve spent years helping folks progress through various iterations of media lifecycle management by helping them migrate bits and bytes from one storage array to another without losing the data that they treasure so much. From a software / content perspective, some of this is a simple and well understood process, but there are plenty of organisations struggling with moving from one version of critical software to something more modern, particularly when what they had probably worked just fine. And it’s a problem at home too. Thankfully, vinyl records have experienced something of a resurgence, and so there are turntables to be had and the technology is understood and easy enough to procure. I anticipate I’ll be able to play my records for some years to come. The same can’t be said for MiniDisc players, cassette decks (although they’re starting to appear again), and even Blu-ray players and DVD players are becoming harder to come by. Is it the same experience consuming the content on a different format? Does a movie you love from your childhood need to be played back on a video tape? Or is it fine as a digital file on your laptop or consumed via a streaming service? It’s arguably better to watch upgraded versions of content, particularly when it comes to major Hollywood films. Listening to music on cassette sucked, but some of the compressed dross that Spotify serves up is even worse. I have a rack full of Sony Playstation consoles in my home office because I’d rather play the games on the original machines than use emulators. But eventually those consoles will stop working, and then I’ll just be stuck with shelves of dead media after I’ve exhausted my repair options and the secondhand marketplaces. And that can be a tough thing to deal with – the loss of something that you’ve been using for years. I still have people contact me on this weblog to try and help them resurrect or revive dying EMC CLARiiON and VNX arrays because EMC is no longer interested in helping to keep them alive. Why not just get some cheaper, more efficient storage or put your stuff in the cloud? Is “Every Shot, Every Episode” going to look different if it’s not on Video CD? Not so much, because nowadays it’s running with a different media player and the original Video CD player is purely cosmetic. But there’s something about the particular piece of equipment on display that puts that piece of art in a certain time period. And the same might be said for everyday technology too.
Final Thoughts
Can you count on things being around forever? Probably not, particularly when it comes to media playback technology, and particularly when media studios are pushing for more and more content to be controlled by them, rather than existing free in the world for punters to consume as they see fit. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t thousands of people focussed on conserving not only digital art, but also everyday digital items that might otherwise get lost forever. I sometimes think we’re in a better position than ever to conserve media in its original format and be able to do meaningful things with it years after it was useful. At the same time I think there’s a chance that much of the content getting generated this century may not be retrievable in the next one if we’re not more careful with how we store it. If Keeping Up With the Kardashians disappears it’s probably not a bad thing, but I’m sure there’s a lot of art and media out there that is worthy of our attention.
