digitaldustcollecting

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Glitch is a sudden occurrence of reinterpretation in a moment of time. The architectural outcome at this point stands as a static interpretation of glitch. Cloninger concludes that 

computer code (like human language) may theoretically exist in a timeless transcendental realm, but for it to intersect being, it has to be read by and run on something – a person or a computer. The glitch foregrounds and problematizes this myth of pure transcendental data, of the pure and perfect signal. The glitch is a perpetual reminder of the immanent, real-time embodiment of executed code.

Marc Aurel Schnabel and Blaire Haslop, “Glitch architecture,” International Journal of Architectural Computing 2018, Vol. 16(3) 183–198. 

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knitted net, 2021

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Mystery has always surrounded the life of the Swiss ­photographer Ernst Moiré (1857–1929). Not least because, though frequently photographed throughout his life, it is almost impossible to see him. Indeed, the blurry photographs of Moiré possibly point to the origin of (and certainly exemplify) the technical problem of two dot matrices misaligning during printing and resulting in a flawed reproduction­, now commonly know as “the moiré effect.” Or, perhaps, these photographs do not index the first human to produce the moiré effect at all, since we cannot be sure who they depict. What we do know, first, is the Swiss government’s account: that a photographer named Moiré was regarded, in the Switzerland of the 1920s, as impervious to photography; second, that this bizarre disappearance became a source of nationalist pride (Moiré was applauded for his technological Ludditism by anti-modernist elements within Swiss folk culture, just as his supposed visual “neutrality” was seen, more generally, as socially exemplary); and third, that a collection of photographs—ostensibly of Moiré, and always with one illegible figure—is housed in Zurich’s municipal archives. Opposing this position stands a counter-testimony from Moiré’s relatives (embarrassed, perhaps, to have their name still associated with this famous photographic failure), which may implicate the Swiss government itself in Moiré’s photographic illegibility. It was to investigate this case of meta-failure that the editors at Cabinet sent me to Zurich. There I would document a documentary abyss.

Lytle Shaw, “THE LIFE OF ERNST MOIRÉ: Bringing the illegible into focus,” Cabinet Magazine (summer 2002).

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Á. Birna Björnsdóttir, “how rocks move? they don’t move. the rocks don’t move”

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Á. Birna Björnsdóttir, “how rocks move? they don’t move. the rocks don’t move”

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leno-woven net, april 2022

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leno-woven net / double weave, april 2022

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“good vibrations storage cabinet,” designed by ferruccio laviani 

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dust conjures a vivid sense of the ruin, of the past made inaccessible and minute, but it has also been seen as “a medium of transference and change” (connor).

in what ways might dust offer an avenue towards rearrangement? what futures might it propose?

interested in dust as a pivot point between ruin and renewal, past and present--a material spectre!

what might be found on the other side of digital decay? will there always be things that must be discarded -- what of these immaterial spectres?

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leno-woven net / double weave sample, april 2022

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In his keynote address at the 11th European Conference on Digital Libraries in 2007 entitled “Digital Preservation, Archival Science and Methodological Foundations for Digital Libraries,” Seamus Ross analyzes the challenges confronting digital preservation, including technological obsolescence. He observes: 

Digital objects break. Digital materials occur in a rich array of types and representations. They are bound to varying degrees to the specific application packages (or hardware) that were used to create or manage them. They are prone to corruption. They are easily misidentified. They are generally poorly described or annotated; they often have insufficient metadata attached to them to avoid their gradual susceptibility to syntactical and semantic glaucoma. Where they do have sufficient ancillary data, these data are frequently time constrained. Beyond maintaining the intactness of the bit stream (which is fairly straightforward), the long-term curation and preservation of digital materials is for the most part…a labor-intensive artisan or craft activity.

[...]

Cerf notes, “We digitize things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitized.” 

Bit rot, in other words, can render our supposedly preserved information unreadable or unintelligible, thereby erasing ourselves and our history – our digital artefacts, happenings, and memories – from future generations.

[...] 

[Cerf] explains that digital vellum would involve a process of taking “an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. And that digital snapshot will recreate the past, in the future.” This X-ray snapshot “should be transportable from one place to another. So I should be able to move it from the Google cloud to some other cloud, or move it into a machine I have.” 

Cerf continues, “No matter what the medium is in which digital bits are recorded, how long will we be able to read them, and how long will we make sense out of them? So the issue here is not just the physical bits, but what do they mean. If you use a program, for example, to create a spreadsheet, you have a complex file. You store the file away and you hold onto it for twenty or thirty years. And even pretending you can read the disc again, do you have the software that knows what the bits mean? So the digital vellum idea is not just physical medium, but an ecosystem which is able to remember what bits mean over long periods of time.”

Marc Kosciejew, “Digital Vellum and Other Cures for Bit Rot,” The Information Management Journal 49, no. 3 (2015): 20-25. 

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i. Julie Mehretu, Fragment (2009) 

ii. / iii. Fragment mistranslated via Google Images

iv. Brian Dillon, “An Archaeology of the Air,” in Julie Mehretu: Grey Area (Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim, 2009). Excerpted in Documents of Contemporary Art: Ruins (Whitechapel Gallery, 2011). 

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hito steyerl, “too much world: is the internet dead?” in the internet doesnt exist (e-flux/sternberg press, 2015), 18.

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4295 rue st. richelieu, 2009-2020, via google maps

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steven connor, “pulverulence,” in cabinet no. 35 (fall 2009)

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dust as:

powder

detritus

archive

gathered information

data

excess

seams

net

body

memory

absence 

presence 

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julieta aranda, brian kuan wood, anton vidokle, “introduction,” in “the internet does not exist, e-flux journal, 2015