Colloquium: Johannes Goebel - The Politics and Mechanics of Archiving - Moving Parts, the Cloud, Magnetic Fields and Stone
Abstract: Most everyone in our society has an ever-increasing amount of digitally encoded documents and data, be they a private person or an institution. While technology continues to change more rapidly than ever, attempts to standardize digital formats are undermined by an industry that has to meet shareholders’ expectations with new gear, protocols, and ever-new methods for distribution and storage.
An immense effort has been underway for the past decades to cope with this battle between constant change in the name of improvement and the desire to pass “things” on from generation to generation. We like to believe what we are told, that we have conquered eternity by digitizing everything in a “universal code.”
Some fundamental aspects of archiving have been around ever since we started writing our thoughts and preserving “the fruit of our labor” beyond the life-span of an individual: Who has the power to determine what is to be kept? Who has the money to pay for keeping what is to be kept? Whose bits will survive the longest? Some answers can be found by considering clay tablets, pyramids, monks copying manuscripts by hand, the printing press, acid-free paper, acetate film – and the care that is currently taken to destroy cultural artifacts, as in the Islamic world (a non-first and non-last in human history).
The talk will give an overview of present preservation strategies in the digital domain and present the concrete solution, which is both cheap and pragmatic and which is currently used to create an archive of hundreds of hours of high-res video. This approach may be of interest to anyone in the scientific world, in industry, or at home.
Biography:
Johannes Goebel has been involved with the archiving and restoration of digitally created music since the mid ’80s. He created and mastered in a collaboration between CCRMA and the German record label WERGO the first audio CD series dedicated to distribute music created with computers in a digital form, and “moved things forward” in the first international digital archive of electronic music IDEAMA with colleagues from Stanford University and ZKM Germany between 1989 and 1995. – He started in the field of computer music at CCRMA in 1977. He was the founding director of the Institute for Music and Acoustics at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (1990 to 2002). Since then he has been the founding director of EMPAC, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.