Richard Moores is Digital Collections Specialist for the Science Museum Group. He attended the NTTW8 Conference last year with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.
It was at the Gare de L'Est in Paris, I felt an unexpected twinge of nostalgia for the era of cinema scale public information displays. I was travelling to the 8th edition of the No Time to Wait (NTTW) Conference in Karlsrühe, contemplating obsolescence - my own included, given how fast the intervening years had suddenly passed since the last visit to this station. I'd deliberately eschewed the banks of screens, and the mobile app and headed off to consult that old oracle of train truths in panoramic overview, the Departure Board, its fluttering voice like the furious wings of tiny mechanical birds taking flight. The big display was, of course, long gone.
But what had foreclosed its fate? Maintenance costs, difficulty finding replacement parts and the skilled labour to fit them, the rise of cheaper more versatile display technologies and maybe imaginaries of what a contemporary train station should look like. Without its ecosystem that display couldn't survive; it was part of a distributed assemblage including trains, humans, cables, codes, contracts, lexicons and language behaviours. Its nerves, the telegraph and telex circuits that had linked distant nodes of the rail network to its control centres were falling silent, and the human interpreters of ticker-tape mnemonics factored out of an increasingly non-human data exchange. Its demise aligns with that period of dramatic technological convergence - around the early 1990s? - when boundaries between telecoms, media, network infrastructure, mobile, broadcast and audiovisual technologies began to dissolve.
No Time to Wait is described as a conference about digital audio-visual preservation, and organised and lead by the MediaArea team, developers and practitioners who contribute many key open-source tools for media analysis and preservation, techniques and standards, it brings together a great deal of expertise in that field. It is also concerned, in its own words, with 'exploring open media, open standards' and the scope of the presentations in the 8th edition, extended to topics like linked open data and the semantic web, net-art, complex digital objects and preservation of live performance, as well as techniques for the rescue of information from magnetic media in its varied circular forms. It was an extremely generous and welcoming space with hands-on ethos; this practical emphasis was invaluable to me as a newcomer to the field, even with a fair amount of preservation adjacent experience. Presenters shared their journeys through hardware and software options, shedding light on what preservation workflows might look like, and their relation to, or divergence from theoretical frameworks. Even a year into a preservation role, I found it was not straightforward to define digital preservation: what emerged at NTTW was a picture of the field as a set of inter-related practices and concerns with shared principles, not only specific technical solutions, thinking more in terms of what it is people are doing, when they are doing preservation work.
No Time to Wait is not a large conference: in UK festival terms, if iPres were Glastonbury, NTTW might be 'End of the Road'. Aside from workshops and tours, presentations were on a single track, adding to sense of a shared experience. The host venue, ZKM (Centre for Art and Media), about which I am ashamed to admit I knew very little, does amazing work in the conservation of electronic and digital art, and is home to the Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems, the largest collection of functional magnetic tape machines I have ever seen.
One of the conferences theme which has stuck with me, which in some ways echoes the integrated approach to conservation and exhibition at ZKM, is the practice of 'Regenerative Curation': the title for a round table discussing the challenges of preserving and presenting Net-Art in a gallery context, but which was equally relevant to the lifecycles and access strategies of complex digital objects in general. If Net-art is arguably the origin of the 'born-digital', the term tends to obscure the materiality of data, precisely that aspect which the passage of time is most revealing of. Obsolescence brings into focus the ecosystem around digital objects, and the need for a substitute life-support system, the notion of Regenerative Curation seemed to offer a wide range of responses to that loss.
What emerged also from the discussion were responses to the challenge of reconciling the volatile, generative, distributed and playful nature of net-art with the stabilizing forces of the bounded gallery environment. One of Auriea Harvey's web-based works was re-staged in a gallery (by Rhizome) with period Apple computer as a visual prop, whilst emulating the site in its original browser onto the functioning original CRT, as well as embedding site links in their original context through web-proxies to the nineties internet. The modern PC running the emulator was as much part of the scene as the vintage hardware and fully acknowledged as part of the evolving material support for the piece.
Another example was JODI's website, which had been re-imagined (at Karlsrühe Institute of Technology) as a 3D game space which presented, across several zones a dissection and close reading of the JODI website, including an exploration of the code and network interactions. This was not emulation but a new companion work, designed in parts to re-create the affective, disorientating experience of the original work. The Thing was a BBS style message board dating back to the 1990s, but rather than emulating the 'terrible MSDOS interface' a modern web interface was made, drawing out features and relationships of the online conversations, alongside the original text. I found this collaborative mix of preservation, exhibition, design and research a compelling approach and an inspiring approach to the puzzle of providing access to those lively objects which might otherwise be DAMned to an undead existence in storage for digital eternity.
I returned to the UK by the same route, and glancing up again at the Gare de L'Est realized this time the Departure Board was in fact still there, in the gloom behind the LCD screens, matt whale-skin hulk silent, jealous eyes shuttered against the glare.
Acknowledgements
The Career Development Fund is sponsored by the DPC’s Supporters who recognize the benefit and seek to support a connected and trained digital preservation workforce. We gratefully acknowledge their financial support to this programme and ask applicants to acknowledge that support in any communications that result. At the time of writing, the Career Development Fund is supported by Arkivum, Artefactual Systems Inc., boxxe, Cerabyte, Evolved Binary, Ex Libris, Iron Mountain, Libnova, Max Communications, Preferred Media, Preservica and Simon P Wilson. A full list of supporters is online here.