Day 4: DISCUSSION AFTER BREAK-OUT GROUPS

DISCUSSION AFTER BREAK-OUT GROUPS George Lewis: “Eugenics is a project of preservation.” [Lewis says this as a cautionary reminder.] We need to look at communities who may vary considerably or be diametrically opposed to one another when we are thinking about what should or should not be preserved. He is worried about American habit to worry about process but not care about intent. He finds better preservation of African American jazz archives in France than in US. Abby Smith: The history of collections is that they are usually begun by fans and then, later, someone comes along and preserves it later, takes it over. Analogue: comes to us as unbroken waves. Digital: comes to us as bits, on and off. What represents reality best? They both do. Even brain is both analogue and digital. Science and engineering are “probabilistic,” not one way or another. Media flatten and racists or others can misuse statistics for ideological purposes. George: Often policy, though, is based on those probabilities, though, and then comes down to us, in our lives, as a “reality” that we have to confront and deal with. Some people would rather risk that their work will not survive rather than trust it to institutions which may preserve it in a format they do not want. Abby: Not everything needs metadata. Maybe even not everything needs complex cataloguing---for some things, key word searches are fine. In the future, there may be technologies that allow us to see patterns, for example, in music or other ways, that will allow us to do new kinds of research. Audience member: What is relationship between preservation and forgetting? Digital media in the future is a question in the science fiction mode? How can we anticipate the future technologies that allow future generationsl to access the future? Herman Gray: As a public policy matter, can we ever have a discussion about willful forgetting? In Foucauld’s sense, though, don’t we need to think about the archive not taken as an indication of power? What is the unarchived archive? Commodity-based culture roots in obsolescence, but the system of value of preservation is already inscribed in an issue of commodities. Audience Member: Is plethora of cultural narrative the liberating thing? George Lewis: Uses example of Sachiko M----she always says she has no history. That is one of the hoariest, modernist histories around. Akio artist. Audience Member: Late capitalism, Eurocentricism: important new terms. Need to think culture, politics, identity, together with categories of preservation, from the ground up, not as an add on and after thought. Yesterday, social scientists were taken to task for not participating in scientific research. AM wants to emphasize that scientists must be taken to taks for not participating with humanists, artists, and social scientists in research. [HASTAC’s Motive and raison d’etre!] Audienced Member: Why just data? What about office furniture? Machines? What are the perils of not collecting data and material objects together? Abby: Hardware, software must be preserved too but it is hard to get it out of proprietary private hands. Anne: Museum of Computation in Menlo Psrk first collects only hardware. Realizes they need to collect software. There is so much that they have to make the “Top 100” pieces and because the are computational scientists, they collect top 100 most elegant code . . . but not use. Many of those could not ever run again because they were on print-outs and could not be run. Then the next question is how to archive their collecting principles---algorithmic elegance not use, adaptation, etc. Now trying to make emulations to make them come alive to the very small set of people who can read what they have (ie punchcards, etc). Abby: Digital Paleographers. Who can actually read those old machines? Computational scientists may well want to collect what is important to them but it doesn’t stop historians of science from collecting what they want, what is important to them. Herman: Curator of Experience Music Project, was able to bankroll his notion of collection while others could not. Museum populated by vernacular artifacts. By capacity to write the check. What is the relationship to public museums of this private collection? Audience Member: But EMP no longer is in good financial health. No more capacity to “throw money” at this project, apparently . . . Audience Member: Isn’t EMP indicative of large shift to privatize cultural services, armies, roads, hospitals, schools, etc etc. Audience Member: Copyright issues, negotiating for long years to be able to use footage. Anne: Taxonomies are not innocent taxonomies. On the one hand, this is a deeply colonialist project: how to map the knowledge of my era and preserve it for my progeny. And at the same time, the opposite is the radical aboriginal move of erasure---when I leave this earth, I shall leave no traces. These are tensions and are also conditions by which the subjects of the future will arrive on the scene. Every time we replicate and preserve ourselves, we are replicating the histories of the futures that do not yet exist and ever do. Our Charge: when we capture this discussion today, think about howyou can capture and communicate to scientists the way that everhything they do is profoundly cultural and political. George: Any time we think of the future, death is not far. But what of now. How do living bodies, in real time, make real and use what is around them in the world? At the moment of apprehension, the improvisative move of everything and now. We are talking about production as if we are there at the moment of creation but we are not. We are building on what is already there. Immediacy may be lost in the immediacy of killing it first in order to study it. Yet the tools are still in their intimacy. Our hermeneutical tools need to be shifting as fast as our physical tools. Herman: Part of the immediacy of a presentist is also about our histories of control and management and our histories of putting this stuff to bad uses. We need some checks, some checks on human capacities to misuse and abuse. Ethical issues need to enter in or otherwise we are bound by the bad stuff of the past. The Tuskeegee project stands as our memory of bad ethics, bad politics, and bad technology.