Abstract
Storage media are the Maginot Line of digital preservation. To defend against the corruption of the 1s and 0s that account for most 21st-century culture, the guardians of heritage have erected a bulwark built of hard drives, flash memory, the cloud, and even futuristic technologies like DNA storage. Yet even if we manage to save our bits unchanged for eternity, obsolescence will circumvent our fixed fortifications unless we remember how to reconstruct the software, hardware, and cultural environments that originally gave these bits meaning.
To adapt to this larger threat means recognizing the limits of fixity and looking to more performative models of preservation. Drawing on themes from his 2014 book Re-collection (http://re-collection.net) co-authored with Richard Rinehart, Jon Ippolito examines how proliferative preservation has rescued a broad range of culture, from videogames to sculptures to errant spacecraft.
