Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism: preservation Archives

art . book . media . preservation

edited by Sabine Himmelsbach -  produced@

Revolver Berlin,  ISBN: 978-3868951950 256 pages, German, English, 2012 Thinking for a minute of all the books celebrating the histories of different singular institutions put together, we can then imagine a sort of heterogeneous encyclopedia, comprehensively detailing a large chunk of a specific cultural scene (in this case media art). Tracing back what a single active entity has done over the years is not self-celebrating, but rather an important act of documentation. Here Edith- ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 11:04 AM - Aug 29/2012
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

book . music . preservation

edited by Mario Côté and Brigitte Kerhervé - Archives Sonores

booklet+dvd, 44 pages, Canada, 2009, EAVM/Hexagram, ISBN: 978-2-922392-11-1, archives_sonores.jpg

booklet+dvd, 44 pages, Canada, 2009, EAVM/Hexagram, ISBN: 978-2-922392-11-1
"Sonic Architecture" is an expression used to describe very different things, from the architectural audio-reflective properties of a building to the structure of a complex piece of music. But within Archives Sonores, it faultlessly expresses architectural spaces that represent pieces of the urban collective memory, through carefully planned recordings. Côté and Kerhervé, researchers at Hexagram ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 07:15 PM - Mar 12/2012
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

book . media . preservation

edited by Annet Dekker,  archive2020, Sustainable Archiving of Born Digital Cultural Content

Virtueel Platform,  ISBN 978-94-90108-04-5 
This is the printed outcome of the archive2020 conference held in Amsterdam in May 2009. It's not a "proceedings" book (even if there's a short report about the conference), but an edited anthology of texts, involving several tactical stakeholders with different experiences in archiving strategies of "born-digital" content. To stick with the reported definition, born-digital is "digital materials that are ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Nov 5/2010
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . book . preservation

Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook - Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media 

The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262013888, English, U.S.A., 2010
After fifteen years of recurrent and animated debates about the peculiarities of new media art, it is still almost always considered as inappropriate in terms of classic museum and collector standards. There is also the undisguised frustration of being snubbed by the majority of the contemporary art world. Here is the best chance to start to definitively solve this ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 12:44 PM - Aug 4/2010
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . biotech . preservation

Modern Fossil - Fossilization now

Modern Fossil, Chistopher Locke, modern_fossil.jpg

Sometimes they have evolved. Sometimes they have only appeared briefly and then mysteriously lost all their functionality and appeal. Obsolete technological objects, once cutting-edge, turn into modern fossils in the hands of Chistopher Locke. With a special technique, a mold made of a concrete-like mixture similar to real fossil stone, the phone becomes a ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 08:00 AM - Jul 16/2010
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

floppy disk . hacking . music . preservation . sound

Floppy Drive Reverb, recycling floppy drives as tape delays

Floppy Drive Reverb, Jeri Ellsworth, Daniel McAnulty, floppy_drive_reverb.jpg

Self taught computer chip designer Jeri Ellsworth known for making an emulation of the Commodore 64 that fits into a joystick has recently found a new application for old floppy drives and diskettes. This storage technology, ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 12:00 AM - Jun 29/2010
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

book . hacking . media . net . preservation

Bill Wasik  - And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture 

Bill Wasik , And Then There's This, ISBN 978-0670020843 , Viking Adult, and_then_there_s_this.jpg

Viking Adult, ISBN 978-0670020843 , USA, 2009, English
Bill Wasik makes internet experiments on viral culture. He organized the first (pointless) flash mob in New York, and went on with other effective strategies, exploiting online trust and community building techniques. It's the good old meme resurgence in the times of social networking, tested through a ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 12:13 PM - Mar 29/2010
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . book . net . preservation . software

Dragan Espenschied, Olia Lialina - Digital Folklore: To Computer Users, with Love and Respect

Merz Akademie, ISBN-13: 978-3937982250, Germany, 2009, English
Olga Lialina and Dragan Espenschied have invested a huge amount of time in investigating something that others have simplistically dismissed as "mundane". They have been among the very few to understand the importance of a historic moment (the first years of the world wide web) and the birth of its "pop culture" - a history they appropriately define as "digital folklore". Beyond the recurrent naivete ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 11:46 AM - Feb 22/2010
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . net . preservation . software

Temporary.cc, interaction is destruction 

Temporary.cc, Zach Gage, temporary_cc.jpg

Digital data has a paradoxical status. Immaterial by definition, it nonetheless has a need for a physical substance (hardware) to manifest itself. Eternal and not subject to decay, it is forced to bond its life to the hosting support, inheriting fragility and a tendency to degenerate. Furthermore, data legibility is ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 11:51 AM - Jan 28/2010
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . book . music . preservation . sound

edited by Arjen Mulder, Joke Brouwer - Dick Raaymakers: A Monograph

NAi Publishers, ISBN 978-9056626006, The Netherlands, 2009, English
The slow and almost unavoidable disintegration of pieces of early electronic art is part of a broader problem that involves the preservation of both their materials and their historical documentation. This task can be accomplished only by trying to systematize the rescued documents, in order to ease the ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 12:49 PM - Dec 5/2009
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . book . media . preservation

Hannes Leopoldseder, Christine Schopf, Gerfried Stocker - Ars Electronica 1979-2009 the First 30 Years: The Network for Art Technology and Society

Hatje Cantz, ISBN 978-3775725231, Germany, 2009, English, German
Condensing thirty years of the Ars Electronica festival history into six hundred pages is the challenge of this book. It's a tough task to make a selection and to deal with the inevitable incompleteness and redundancy, as the author's disclaimer suggests: "the selection... by no means reflects any sort of ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 10:40 PM - Nov 30/2009
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . book . media . performance . preservation . sound

Edward A. Shanken - Art and Electronic Media

Phaidon Press, ISBN-13: 978-0714847825, UK, 2009, English
The size of a book is often influencing the reader. The so called "coffee table" size is either meant to entertain the casual reader in a usually public reading space, or to enhance the publisher's effort on the chosen topic, giving it the physical status of a referential book. "Art and Electronic Media" is a coffee ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 09:24 PM - Nov 15/2009
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . literature . media . mobile . preservation

Embroidered text messages, stitching virtual memory

Ginger Anyhow, Embroidered text messages, embroidered_text_messages.jpg

Are we in danger of losing our memory? Lynne Brindley, Head of the British Library, has warned that as websites come and go, the memory of the nation may disappear too, leaving historians and citizens of the future with a "black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century". On a more personal level, ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 12:16 PM - Nov 4/2009
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . media . preservation . video

Tim Tate's Reliquaries, video/glass fragility

Tim Tate, Reliquaries, tim_tate_reliquaries.jpg

Tim Tate could truly be described as a mixed-media artist. His glass reliquaries are formed from combining glass cases, objects and electronic circuitry, such as speakers, with a small video screen. The screen displays a short piece of work that plays from a DVD player housed in the bottom of the glass case. The DVD ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 06:15 PM - Aug 31/2009
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . book . media . preservation . video

edited by Woody Vasulka, Peter Weibel - Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973-1990

Woody Vasulka, Peter Weibel, Buffalo Heads, Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973, 1990, Routledge, ISBN 9780415961325, vasulka_weibel_buffalo_heads.jpg

Routledge, ISBN 9780415961325, U.S.A., 2008, English
The "gargantuan book about media art" seems to be trademark ZKM. This new tome is 840 pages and weights 3.5 kilos, and is similar to "Future Cinema" and "CTRL-SPACE", two other massive books about video art history (from different perspectives). All these books are co-edited by Peter Weibel (ZKM's ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 08:13 PM - Feb 2/2009
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

book . hacking . literature . media . preservation . software

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination

The MIT Press, ISBN 9780262113113, U.S.A., 2008, English
The cover of Mechanisms shows a hard drive recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Centre, a scorched and partially destroyed ‘black box’ from which data was nevertheless successfully recovered in the aftermath of the terrorist disaster. A haunted artifact, this unsettling image speaks volumes of the ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 07:52 PM - Dec 12/2008
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

hacktivism . media . preservation . radio . sound

Tantalum Memorial, honoring those who died in coltan wars

Tantalum Memorial, Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji, tantalum_memorial.jpg

"Tantalum Memorial", by the artists Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji is a telephony-based memorial built from a 1938 telephone exchange rescued from the old Alumix factory in Bolzano, Italy which is meant to address the people who have died in the "coltan wars" in the Congo. The project was built from a series of electromagnetic ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 08:26 PM - Nov 19/2008
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . book . media . preservation

Francis Hunger - Setun, An inquiry into the Soviet Ternary Computer

book - Institut Für Buchkunst Leipzig - ISBN 3932865480
Looking back at the mysterious early computer research from beyond the Iron Curtain (and its "aura"), with special focus on the Soviet Union, this in-depth investigation unveils the unique Setun project – the first computer to make use of ternary logic (-1, 0, 1). A dead-end innovation, with a life-span of just ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 11:31 AM - Sep 10/2008
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

book . hacktivism . media . net . preservation

Fred Turner - From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

book - University Of Chicago Press - ISBN 0226817415
The necessity of putting historical facts on paper concerns the need of having a first hand review of recent events with a contemporary perspective and also the need to fix them, before the long term memory begin to fault. Furthermore researching connections on recent facts benefits from the ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:07 PM - Jun 23/2007
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . media . preservation . science

edited by Eric Kluitenberg - Book of Imaginary Media, excavating the dream of the ultimate communication medium

book+dvd - debalie / NAi Publishers - ISBN 905662539X
From the oral tradition on, the power of communication was strictly connected to control, memory and imaginary. The latter was and still is the most powerful engine behind any new technology and device (physical or incorporeal) and the imaginary of media is also grounded on its immateriality. The ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 11:02 PM - Feb 9/2007
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . book . media . preservation

(edited by) Rotraut Pape - Sixcon_Lost Media

book - Verlag Hochschule ür Gestaltung Offenbach - ISBN 3921997410
The perishability of electronic informations is one of the most ticklish questions of the digital era. New media are strongly tied to the availability of the hardware necessary to enjoy them, and the problem of data conservation is still unresolved and still needs a complex combination ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 03:49 PM - Sep 27/2005
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . media . net . preservation

History of Networked Art conference

History of Networked Art, historyofnetworkedart.jpg

In the networked art the artwork 's boundaries dissolve in the intertwined relationships between subjects, objects, strategies and theories. This process not only modifies artistic, political and commercial models, but it transforms the culture, the languages and the logic ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 03:49 PM - Jul 29/2005
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

art . media . preservation

Art in Output, the appeal of lost data

Art in Output, an international biennial on the intersection of art, technology and society, opened a few days ago at the Technische Universiteit of Eindhoven (The Netherlands). It's one of the few exhibitions aimed at university ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 03:49 PM - Feb 20/2003
email this | + facebook | + twitter | TrackBacks (0)

edited by Sabine Himmelsbach - produced@

edited by Mario Côté and Brigitte Kerhervé - Archives Sonores

edited by Annet Dekker, archive2020, Sustainable Archiving of Born Digital Cultural Content

Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook - Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media

Modern Fossil - Fossilization now

Floppy Drive Reverb, recycling floppy drives as tape delays

Bill Wasik - And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture

Dragan Espenschied, Olia Lialina - Digital Folklore: To Computer Users, with Love and Respect

Temporary.cc, interaction is destruction

edited by Arjen Mulder, Joke Brouwer - Dick Raaymakers: A Monograph

Hannes Leopoldseder, Christine Schopf, Gerfried Stocker - Ars Electronica 1979-2009 the First 30 Years: The Network for Art Technology and Society

Edward A. Shanken - Art and Electronic Media

Embroidered text messages, stitching virtual memory

Tim Tate's Reliquaries, video/glass fragility

edited by Woody Vasulka, Peter Weibel - Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973-1990

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination

Tantalum Memorial, honoring those who died in coltan wars

Francis Hunger - Setun, An inquiry into the Soviet Ternary Computer

Fred Turner - From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

edited by Eric Kluitenberg - Book of Imaginary Media, excavating the dream of the ultimate communication medium

(edited by) Rotraut Pape - Sixcon_Lost Media

History of Networked Art conference

Art in Output, the appeal of lost data

edited by Sabine Himmelsbach -  produced@

edited by Annet Dekker,  archive2020, Sustainable Archiving of Born Digital Cultural Content

Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook - Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media 

Bill Wasik  - And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture 

Temporary.cc, interaction is destruction 