Re: <nettime> Data archiving for artists?

[nettime's_dusty_archivist <nettime@kein.org>]

Re: <nettime> Data archiving for artists?
     John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>
     temp <voyd@voyd.com>

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Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 22:29:06 -0700
From: John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Data archiving for artists?

Ei FLick...

> How do you all save your data for your personal archives?

Through a more-or-less constant energy input :: life-time and life-energy.

> I'm just not sure how stable all my old films and videos are.  I use BluRay
> disks to backup raw footage from more recent projects, but a lot of my stuff
> is just on redundant hard drives that I copy once in a while. A few major
> things are in regional library collections and distribution where they are
> safer.

Multiple redundancy of particular information storage systems is necessary. A 
record of those redundant copies is necessary as is some modicum of control over 
them. If they are not subject to your control, then you should not consider them 
in your redundancy count. (or you have to make a statistical guesstimate as to 
the efficacy of your control over remote situations -- as well as your local 
situation)...

> Older projects are on tape, which has a longer shelf life than SD cards, USB
> sticks or HDD, but still dubious in the very long term.

Nothing is 'permanent' so look around to see what persists best! (chiseled 
granite has a pretty long half-life depending on environmental exposure -- the 
Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde has done quite well over 3000 
years)... How old are you? DO you have children? DO you have money? Are you a 
member of the social elite of your nation-state? These are also factors as they 
will affect the chances of your life information persistence.

> Does anyone have efficient / affordable strategies for keeping their life's
> work safe?  I'm talking many gigabytes of raw footage, video masters, project
> files, etc.

Propagation and persistence of information (knowledge) requires consistent 
energy input. (Another words, the archive is about continuously creating entropy 
in the surroundings of the archive while maintaining/increasing the order of the 
archive itself.

Speaking for myself, at one point a decade ago, I had 32 formats of magnetic 
tapes in my archive. I finally said f*#k this, this's ridiculous, so I started 
to digitized as much as possible. and continued that at the highest resolution 
that I can afford to store. But my digitizing optinos are nothing like those of 
a major corporation or specialist operation. Five years, ten years down the 
road, whatever is in your archive will be considered 'retro' in appearance or 
style anyway.  Ask all the artists who jumped on the 'multi-media CD' bandwagon 
in the mid-90s to see their work!

I just contributed to Lori Emerson's media archaeology lab 
(http://loriemerson.net/media-archaeology-lab/) a 20-year-old Apple 8500 A/V 
machine with a lot of peripherals. She is really happy as it will be able 
(should be able!) to deal with much of that said multi-media stuff...

I currently have a digital archive of around 200,000 'objects' -- audio, video, 
text, image -- and I spend a bit of time each day maintaining it (meta-tagging, 
for example, is insanely life-time intensive, yet without meta-data, the archive 
is much less useful to anyone but yourself).

I also have a rather large analog archive still, as well, and I pay to store it 
(silver prints in archival cases, tapes, correspondence, negatives), but without 
climate-controlled storage, the lifetime of 'normal' paper is measured in a 
couple decades, silver film, can be a few hundred years, so far some objects I 
have created are pushing 40 years old ... they persist, but who knows how long 
these relatively contemporary substances will maintain their internal order.

I scan everything I can that is scannable, but unless you want to take a chunk 
of living time away from yourself and you enjoy being an archivist, it's a 
hopeless process.

At some point post-hydrocarbon, the human species will no longer know how to 
retrieve or make sense of your life information, no matter what you do. And even 
if you concentrate on using DNA as your information propagation medium, it will 
persist only somewhat less long as the solar system at the very best ...

CHeers,
JOhn


-- 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
photographer, media artist, archivist
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 05:19:50 -0600
Subject: Re: <nettime> Data archiving for artists?
From: temp <voyd@voyd.com>

I've been learning from my late-career friends in NYC who are making their
archives.
I've been making an indexical archive (http://www.voyd.com) - if you
notice, it has the highest points, but is seriously full of holes - this
is a long-term project.
All media works are bring stored on redundant flash drives and catalogued
in a notebook.  So far, flash drives are less fugitive than DVD-ROM, but
are also dependent on USB being in use.  I am also placing them on a
redundant hard drive system - honestly, this seems the most reliable
method of use, as I have been able to migrate from floppy to hard drive
forward from 1992.

Except for about one or two pieces, I have also stayed away from
company-specific codecs and technologies, as I learned my lesson with The
Brain and Real Player.
QTVR aldo proved to be a bit of a problem for my Sprawl piece.

Another lesson I learned - you have much more leisure, and the work is
more fresh in your mind if you begin your archive at 50.



On 1/15/14 11:52 PM, "nettime's_dusty_archivist" <nettime@kein.org> wrote:

>Re: Data archiving for artists?
>     Rob Myers <rob@robmyers.org>
>Data archiving for artists?
>     Tracey P. Lauriault <tlauriau@gmail.com>
>
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>
>Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 14:24:34 -0800
>From: Rob Myers <rob@robmyers.org>
>Subject: Re: <nettime> Data archiving for artists?
>
>On 14/01/14 04:35 PM, Flick Harrison wrote:
>
>> How do you all save your data for your personal archives?
>
>I publish everything on gitorious or keep it in private repos on
>bitbucket, I keep copies on multiple USB hard disks, I backup offsite
>via rsync and OwnCloud, and I keep multiple DVD backups at different
>locations with family members.
 <...>

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