Re: <nettime> Proposition on Peak Data (Barbara Lattanzi, Sean Cubitt)

Hi Barbara, Sean, nettimers:

Just a brief piece of anecdotal evidence regarding the idea of leaving artefacts in the ground, "maybe the best scientific depository," as Barbara wrote.

Last summer I had a few hours to kill in Trieste, and wandered up the San Giusto Hill past the Roman amphitheater to the J. J. Winckelmann Antiquities Museum, which occupies three floors of a neoclassical palace. It's named after one of the 'founding fathers' (sorry, we're indubitably talking about a dead white male here, albeit openly gay) of archeology and art history, who was murdered in Trieste in 1768. It has a surprisingly good collection of Ancient Egyptian artifacts, Trieste having once been a booming port and not so very far from Egypt, but what really occupied my attention were the early Iron Age artifacts excavated in Most na Soci, the Upper Isonzo river in Italian, now in contemporary Slovenia, in the late 19th Century and first quarter of the 20th. Mostly objects recovered from graves of the Halstattian culture of the period.

Apart from the actual objects on display, an entire glass wall of a top floor gallery opened onto a set of storage shelves. These were jammed with Halstattian objects that nobody had gotten around to unwrapping since their excavation from what was about to become a heavily contested area during the First World War: the Isonzo Front in the Alps. And they were wrapped in layers of Corriere della Sera newspapers from a time directly before the war broke out (if I remember correctly, and I think I do). This wrapping was held in place by twine.

I found myself looking at this display in fascination. I was mesmerized, because of course it was a palimpsest. The archeologists who had wrapped the artifacts had most likely been drafted and sent straight back to the Alps to die. Half of the Italian casualties of WW1 were on the Isonzo front: 300,000 on the Italian side alone, to say nothing of the approximately 200,000 Austro-Hungarian losses. Not surprisingly, nobody was left to complete the job of studying the results of their dig, so the objects remained in the museum, waiting for researchers who never returned. Or that's my interpretation, anyway. And the protective shell of newspapers around them provided what was in effect two orders of time capsule. Because they were filled with headlines documenting the rise in tensions that would destroy the long peace between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the start of the Great War in 1914.

Do I agree that they should have been left in the ground? Not necessarily. Do I think they should be unwrapped and studied? No. It would destroy a key layer of meaning.

(Incidentally the only longer European peace was the one between 1945 and 2022, or 77 years versus 43. But given the wars associated with the breakup of Yugoslavia, I think the more accurate number is actually the 47 years between 1945 and the start of the Bosnian War in 1992.)

Best,

Michael

On Mon, 11 Apr 2022 at 06:00, <nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org> wrote:

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Proposition on Peak Data (John Preston) (Sean Cubitt)

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Subject: Re: <nettime> Proposition on Peak Data (John Preston)
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hi John and nettimers

just a small corrective: you describe data as 'intentionally gathered', which seems okay, and not inapprpriately extended to non-human intentions as in the case of the fuel gauge. My car-driving knowledge is limited (the equivalent is probably how much I crave a coffee after ten kms on the bike) but the gauges I remember were analog pointers. There are differences with numerical counters but we can overlook.

The problem is not with the indication of how much fuel is left in the tank when I glance at the gauge. The first problem lies with storage: gathering and keeping every reading the gauge has ever made. This is the initial problem of 'peak data': how much of this captured and stored? data is of value and to whom or, more broadly, to what. (My answer is - to the corporate cyborgs of the oil industry but that's another marginal issue for this discussion - it may be over-simplifying to say it is 'presented to the driver' if the indicator is not just pointing but gathering)

The second problem is that the stored data (let's call it information at this stage in its life) isn't in ert: it is actively processed in relation to other data. That might be a surveillance issue, again not something that worries me unduly in the peak data discussion. It's the new problem of information produced by processing stored data to produce more information for further processing ....

two issues here: (a) that the second, third, fourth etcetera order information is less and less close to the world the first data gathering touched and (b) there is more and more information produced from the first dataset, far more than the entire population could look at if it spent 8 hours a day in heavy rotation looking at it, and with no end in sight.

I was discussing the previous post on indigenous artefacts piled in storage - in their case not generating information; perhaps generating ignorance; or perhaps - they warn me - being made available to people who should never see them. That post ended with the suggestion that those artefacts should be left in the ground. I'm told that many traditional owners have contacted collections to request that the artefacts they house should be destroyed.

that's a terrible thing for an archivist. But perhaps it is time to start destroying the insane Borgesian archives of adta and information

[I made some proposals about the capture, storage and processing of social media imaging in my book Anecdotal Evidence which I recommend everyone goes out and buys at least two copies of]

________________________________

For example, we may consider the fuel gauge in a car. The tank contains fuel, and we install a system which can measure the volume of fuel in the tank, and connect this to a dial on the dashboard, and so the data on the current fuel availablity of the car is generated by the interaction of the fuel tank, fuel in the tank, and the measurement system, and it is presented to the driver via the dial.

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End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 175, Issue 14
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Michael Benson

Kinetikon Pictures

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