Which of these is the oldest human record?
1. Gudea Cylinders 2. Dead Sea Scrolls 3. Rosetta Stone 4. Mapinguary
This is the oldest human record I have found: the story of the mapinguary, passed down from generation to generation among the Indians of the Amazon rainforest.
Twenty feet tall, as strong as a dozen gorillas, adorned with matted hair covering a bony carapace -- the giant ground sloth made such an impression on the tribes of the Amazon that nearly every one has a word for this creature, which most call the mapinguary.
The native accounts are detailed enough that scientists have been able to identify their protagonist as the giant ground sloth, Megatherium. In fact, when a native of Peru's Machiguenga people matter-of-factly described seeing a mapinguary at the natural history museum in Lima, ethnobiologist Glenn Shepard was able to corroborate the mapinguary's pedigree: the museum has a diorama with a model of the Megatherium.
How do I know these stories are older than the pyramids or Machu Picchu? Because the diorama in Lima depicted prehistoric mammals. The Megatherium is a creature that died out tens of thousands of years ago, yet survives in the stories of Indians of the Brazilian rainforest.
The legend of the mapinguary isn't just some stone tool or potshard from which we can infer a story about an experience long past. It is the story itself. Or rather, it is the persistence of key elements in the story, as retold over at least two thousand generations, that has kept alive accounts of human encounters with this prehistoric animal. Indigenous storytellers even "remember" features of the mapinguary that paleontologists cannot read from the bones: it had reddish fur, avoided water, and moved silently through the thick jungle. Their stories even tell us how the Megatherium smelled: the name mapinguary means fetid beast. In short, they remember it not as bones in a museum, but as a living creature with a unique behavior.
All of this is hard to understand from the perspective of museums and archives, which depend on the dedication of a staff of experts in a centralized institution to safeguard cultural memory. The proliferation of recorded media in the last century would seem to underscore the necessity of media specialists and climate-controlled warehouses to look after all those silver gelatin prints and reels of celluloid. Even performance theorists such as Peggy Phelan imply that performance cannot be stored.
Perhaps not. But storage isn't the only mode of safeguarding culture, and in this age of rapid obsolescence, storage is turning out to be the least reliable of them.
During the Conquest, imperial centers in Spain and Portugal controlled indigenous populations by prohibiting performative practices such as dance and ritual in favor of archival practices such as writing. But while books can be burned and temples destroyed, stories such as the mapinguary survived even the conquistadors' deliberate attempt to obliterate them.
Relying on preservation vigilantes may sound unprofessional, but they served culture well for tens of thousands of years before priests and preparators came along. In the battle of the proprietary versus the prolific, the historic record may be debatable, but the pre-historic is not. Euro-ethnic preservationists fool themselves into thinking that stone tablets and figurines in museums are the oldest artifacts on record. But the oldest cultural knowledge survives not in durable formats, but in social ones.
I'm going to make a radical claim: that the future of new media lurks in the pre-Columbian rainforest. Well, not only in the rainforest, but really anywhere that so-called "amateurs" thrive, because it is only by their paradigm of proliferative preservation that we will keep the rich technological culture of the present alive.
I've just suggested how well distributed memory works in indigenous practices, and in Tuesday's panel I showed how important amateur gamers have been for reanimating software through emulation. For the rest of this talk I'm going to show what institutions can learn from "free-range" amateurs and then, if they can get over our fear of working with them, how institutions can enlist them to rescue culture from oblivion.
Notwithstanding what you read in a thesaurus, nonspecialist is no longer a trustworthy synonym for amateur. To many, the word amateur may conjure up cat videos on YouTube or coffee shop reviews on Yelp; yet much of the Internet's unpaid labor force wields specialized knowledge or skill. Amateurs in the Internet age can just as easily be experts as laypersons. Look far enough into the Internet's "Long Tail" and you'll find an expert in a narrow specialty like Klingon grammar or My Little Pony episodes--or the cosmos.
In recent years nonprofessionals have made notable contributions to our knowledge of the skies. Armed with little more than an English degree and a backyard telescope, amateur David Levy discovered no less than nine comets--and eleven more once professionals let him play with their equipment.
One of the most extraordinary exploits of amateur stargazing--not to mention restoring a technological artifact--involved breathing new life into a crippled spacecraft. In 1978 NASA and the European Space Agency launched the satellite ISEE-3 into an orbit around the sun, after which it became the first spacecraft to visit a comet. Although ISEE-3 once again approached the Earth in 2014, it received no hero's welcome, for NASA had abandoned the satellite in 1997 and had neither the budget nor time to recover a connection based on outdated software protocols.
That gap of budget and time led Randall Monroe, creator of the XKCD comic, to suggest that amateur astronomers might be able to reverse-engineer the signal processor on their own and re-establish contact with the errant spacecraft. As if in response to Monroe's appeal to the crowd, on May 29, 2014, a team of unofficial astrophysicists sent one of the most astonishing tweets in the world of amateur science:
@agentGav: We Are Now In Command of the ISEE-3 Spacecraft
By July 2 the team announced they had successfully fired the thrusters for the first time since 1987. Digital conservators may take heart in the example of this unofficial team of space Samaritans, who crowdfunded time on dish antennas to reach across a million miles of emptiness and reanimate a 36-year-old software protocol. Suddenly saving a Flash-based work of Internet art doesn't sound so hard.
As I argued on Tuesday, when it comes to preservation, the paragons of new media art are getting their butts kicked by an Italian plumber. While professional conservators have only managed to future-proof a tiny sliver of new media artworks created since 1980 in any systematic and extensible way, a global community of dispersed amateurs has safeguarded the lion's share of video games. Fortunately, we can learn from their flexible and open approach to collaboration.
Take, for example, the FCEUX emulator, at one time the top-ranked emulator on the prominent site Emulator Zone for the enormously popular Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). FCEUX can trace its genealogy back to an early emulator called Family Computer Emulator, or FCE, so called because Nintendo released the NES in Asia as "Family Computer." By the late 2000s, NES fans merged four of the "forks," or versions modified by other users, to produce FCEUX, a cross-platform and cross-standard emulator released under the GPL open-source license.
The amateur preservationists responsible for the FCE emulator stream aren't laboring away in some government-funded think tank or corporate software lab. They are banging out code in an Internet café, or in a university computer club, or in their underwear in the basement of their mother's house. But I cannot think of a single instance of software created by the professional preservation community in this supple way, passed from hand to hand over decades, diverging, re-converging, and constantly improving without a single institution or copyright holder at the wheel.
Now, it's all very well to recognize that game fanatics have built an incredible stockpile of emulators to preserve their favorite passtime, but how do the diversions of a dispersed fanbase translate into preservation tactics that can be used immediately by professionals in libraries and conservation labs? These communities are already out there, waiting for an enterprising museum to collaborate with them. Let's look at some ways to collaborate with them.
I understand that INAL accepts 25 students per year into its conservation program, and a fraction of these graduate after five years. So there's no way this handful of conservators can be present to document new media works being exhibited in museums and galleries across the nation. So how can we accomplish the documentation we know is critical to preserving these works?
Yesterday I mentioned the Variable Media Questionnaire, which tracks opinions about how artworks may change in the future when their current media expire. When we first built the Questionnaire, we only asked the artists themselves to choose the most appropriate strategy for dealing with obsolescence, from storage to emulation to migration to reinterpretation. But by the end of the 2000s my colleague John Bell had revised it to gather feedback from many sources, from experts such as the artist's technicians or curators to members of the lay public, so as leave a broader historical record as the basis for future decisions about the best way to preserve a work.
Even living artists can benefit from crowdsourcing opinions about their work for future preservation. The project Botaniq (2011) by media artist Gabriel Vanegas offers "diaries of an observer and interactor...to be able to look at the work of art more than in its materiality, as an artefact that narrates stories of a cultural moment, an unique journey, particular and unrepeatable." When comparing the first-hand experiences with art documented in Botaniq to the often inert documentation captured by museums, Vanegas offers an analogy to conquistadores marveling at beautiful species they found in America, only to return to Europe after the long transatlantic voyage with "dissected bodies, without movement, smell, color or flavor."
For her oral history of The Giver of Names, Lizzie Muller and collaborator Caitlin Jones interviewed artist David Rokeby but also random audience participants and museum attendants, whose reactions portray a side of the work that even the artist didn't anticipate. With enough eyeballs, an accurate portrayal of the new species may emerge.
Calling itself "an active archive of computer art," the ReCode project invites volunteer programmers to reverse-engineer the images illustrated in the magazine Computer Graphics and Art published from 1976-78, releasing them as Processing sketches released under the open MIT license. The digital artists of Re-programmed Art, meanwhile, re-create with Arduinos and other contemporary technologies the sculptures and installations of Gruppo T, an Italian collective of artists that pioneered an algorithmic approach to artmaking in the 1960s.
Rather than map crowdsourced images onto a shape, some applications perform the reverse reconstruction by deriving a shape from crowdsourced images of its surface. Like the replicators featured in Star Trek, 123D Catch (2009) compiles multiple photos of a physical object taken with a smartphone into a virtual model that can be printed out using a 3D printer. It isn't hard to imagine an architectural historian using Photosynth to reconstruct, say, how Times Square has changed over the decades, or imagining a conservator using 123D Catch to preserve replicas of endangered three-dimensional objects, whether at risk of theft (the solid gold Mask of Agamemnon, 1500 B.C.) or of degradation (artist Matthew Barney's vaseline DRILL TEAM dumbbells, 1991). As hybrid examples of proliferative preservation, these applications employ software written by experts to collocate images taken by lay photographers.
Image: 123D Catch capturing a historical artifact.
123D Catch (formerly Photofly) tutorials (scroll down): http://www.123dapp.com/catch
Some forward-thinking museums have already begun to incorporate this kind of curatorial crowdsourcing. The San Francisco Museum of Asian Art invited the creators of 123D Catch to capture a handful of sculptures from their collection, and made all of the digital files freely available for anyone to download and even print using 3D printers. While the invited public could scan any sculpture that interested them, the curators selected five they believed to be of especially historical interest. All of the digital files from this "scanathon" were freely available for anyone to download and print on the online 3-D object repository Thingiverse.
But what if the object is too large or complex to be scanned, or in fact has been lost or destroyed?
Photosynth (2008), a project by Microsoft and the University of Washington, attaches the hundreds of amateur photographs tagged "Notre Dame" from the photo-sharing site Flickr to a pre-existing CAD model of Paris' Notre Dame cathedral, which otherwise would show just the geometry, without any visual texture. By automatically mapping each photo onto the correct vantage point and angle using a computer vision algorithm, Photosynth lets viewers explore a virtual Notre Dame at virtually any range of detail, from distant views of its skyline to detailed closeups of its façade.
Image: Photosynth applied to Notre Dame
Photosynth video: http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html
Image: Picasso's Trois Femmes
Of course there are downsides to trusting amateur preservationists to do the job of professionals. The most common complaint is the loss of artistic integrity through deviation from a work's original intent. Here are three examples:
• Art investors tried to cut up Picasso's Trois Femmes (1959) into one-inch squares to sell as "original Picassos."
• Ted Turner tried to make older movies more palatable to contemporary audiences by colorizing them or editing smoking scenes out of classic cartoons.
• George Lucas added updated special effects to the first three Star Wars movies of the 1970s, so they would stand up technically alongside the prequels from the 2000s, as well as seemingly minor alterations that changed important aspects of character development. Most infamously, Lucas added a blast effect behind the head of actor Harrison Ford, to show that his character only shot the space villain Greedo in self defense; in the eyes of hardcore Star Wars fans, this whitewashing of the formerly unsavory Han Solo diminished his return to grace at the end of the film, and they responded with a vigorous online campaign to protest that "Han Shot First."
These examples are all pretty clearly deviations from the spirit of the original, even when perpetrated by the original creator (as in the case of George Lucas). That said, there is only a problem if we assume the "either/or" logic of analog media: either you have the original Picasso or you have a bunch of fragments in its place; either television shows the black-and-white Asphalt Jungle or the colorized version.
Image: Marilyn Monroe (colorized)
Image: Marilyn Monroe in Asphalt Jungle (original)
But digital artifacts operate not by a logic of either/or but one of both/and. As most digital files can be cloned without loss, a preservator can migrate a work without affecting its original version. Conservators bent on rescuing an equine sculpture from Athen's smoggy skies might move it to the British Museum, but this has the unfortunate side effect of leaving a gaping hole in the Parthenon. Migrating an audio file from WAV to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis, by contrast, does not require removing the original file.
Removing analog artifacts can hurt the artifacts as well as the context. In the 1600s, Venetians keen on "rescuing" the chariot horses of Athena and Poseidon from the Turk-controlled Parthenon succeeded only in shattering them when the pulleys slipped. In the 1800s, Lord Elgin's ship carrying his first shipment of marbles sank off the island of Cythera.
If the effect of analog preserving is often fragmentation, the effect of digital preservation can be proliferation: the act of preserving becomes a palimpsest, writing new versions into the cultural niche formerly occupied only by a single version. The original lingers, but is joined in the same space by other renditions.
Indeed, one of the main complaints that Star Wars fans have with George Lucas is his attempt to squelch access to the original versions of the movies -- a completely artificial erasure of history that isn't necessary given the both/and logic of digital video.
Take the case of museum artifacts 3d-printed by museumgoers who have photographed them. The same company that makes 123D Catch, Autodesk, also makes MeshMixer, software that makes it easy to tweak, warp, and otherwise remix 3D designs. One of the participants in the Asian Art Scanathon used MeshMixer to create an iPhone case based on a stone relief of Kumbhakarna battling the monkeys, and contemplated building an Arduino-powered LED lamp from his 3D model of an 13th-century Seated Ganesha sculpture. Phone cases and lamps hardly sound like the ideal vehicles for preserving Ramayana stone reliefs or elephant deities, but such proliferative preservation has been the norm rather than the exception for the tens of thousands of years that indigenous peoples kept culture alive through refashioning and retelling.
In a recent example of 3D scanning as preservation, anthropologists at the Smithsonian were in talks with an Alaskan tribal leader who needed to pass on the ritual duties associated with an orca-shaped hat that had ended up in their collection. Unfortunately the leader's health was failing too quickly to wait for the full repatriation process. So the museum arranged for a 3D replica of the killer-whale hat to be scanned from the original. The stand-in was milled, repainted by an artist, and sent to the tribe to be used in the ceremony. Since then, elders have brought in other hats to be scanned, and have danced with originals and duplicates in the same ceremony. The Smithsonian reports hearing from some native communities that would prefer to use the replica and keep the original in a museum.
Some who fear the inevitable transformations that proliferative preservation will wreak put their trust in the promises of today's tech companies of an eternal future for digital data. In 2005 Microsoft actually applied for a patent for "immortal computing," evoking a vision of human heritage living forever in the immaterial "cloud."
As sunny as this forecast sounds, Microsoft doesn't have a great track record in keeping your data safe. Customers depending on Microsoft to backup T-Mobile's Sidekick phone lost thousands of their contacts' phone numbers and addresses when the software giant's inauspiciously named "Danger" cloud crashed.
Rather than resorting to denial about the inevitable death of every digital medium, we can look to amateurs in the rainforest and on the Internet for an alternative attitude toward death--one in which we don't expect others to fix what is dying, but accept the inevitable transformation of the ephemeral into something else.
La Dia de los Muertos is still a few days away, but already the streets and homes of this city are filled with offrendas--food and flowers designed to attract and sustain the souls of the dead in their time travel back to the world of today.
There's a reason this 3000-year-old indigenous ritual of rebirth is distributed across every family in every town. Keeping social memory alive is too exhausting--and too important--to consign to a handful of priests in elite cathedrals. The best chance for the survival of digital culture, as in indigenous culture, is not for us to lay the job entirely on professionals, but for us all to take responsibility for its future.