#Thomas Walskaar | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nullarysources · 1 year

Text

We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business

Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar for Eye on Design:

Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed "last man standing in the floppy disk business." He is the time-honored founder of floppydisk.com, a US-based company dedicated to the selling and recycling of floppy disks. Other services include disk transfers, a recycling program, and selling used and/or broken floppy disks to artists around the world. All of this makes floppydisk.com a key player in the small yet profitable contemporary floppy scene.

While putting together the manuscript for our new book, Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, we met with Tom to discuss the current state of the floppy disk industry and the perks and challenges of running a business like his in the 2020s. What has changed in this era, and what remains the same?

Guy owns

#computers #preservation #1980s #1990s

0 notes

maryhosey-blog · 6 years

Text

Response to The Serving Library, Troll Thread, and p-DPA archive.

I think both publications are very much concerned with the issue of access. They remedy this by granting access to their publications to the public. Whether or not ‘publication’ is the right word to describe the collectives is unclear, but both The Serving Library and Troll Thread create a space for work that wouldn’t be published elsewhere.

The Serving Library defines themselves as “a composite printed/electronic publication.” Whereas Troll Thread doesn’t feel 100% positive that they themselves are. Troll Thread said they barely sell any books at all, most people just browse through the pds available on the tumblr. Unlike The Serving Library, which is a non-profit journal that publishes “bulletins” (pdfs) that are collected and put into the journal for print each fall. The randomness managed by Holly from Troll Thread appears in contrast to The Serving Library’s intentionality when deciding on a theme for each printed issue. I believe the main difference between the two has to do with $$$ money. The Serving Library depends on donation and sales to keep running. It appears that a lot of time and care goes into organizing all the ‘library’ does. They hold events and exhibits for their collections, and seminars for art students. Troll Thread does receive some care, but the participants have all said that this is just something they do on the side, that doesn’t need to be perfect or anything really. They just want the work to exist and a tumblr is the easiest way for them to aid in that existence. TT is very experimental in itself - the way it functions, though both publications promote the free distribution of content - availability - access for the public.

Something that really stood out to me in the Troll Thread interview having to do with the future of publishing is the idea of literature as “post-medium.” What constitutes literature today has been blurred by the rapid advancement of technology and availability of an astounding number of platforms for people to post “content.” Holly from Troll Thread says that they “provide homes for orphan poems that otherwise would have no publishable outlet in lieu of their technological and social incompatibilities with other distribution networks and means of productions.” It’s not about other publications not wanting the content being offered, Troll Thread is more concerned with how the literature/content must be housed due to their digital qualities. Holly continues, “But more than anything else, I just hate throwing things away that someone else might value and I don’t think I’m the only one. TT could be critiquing the digital textual condition, but it could also just be exhibiting its symptoms: the hoarding tendencies that form as a compensation for loss.” I think this interview sheds light on the way people interact with the internet and digital media. Joseph said about the sites viewers that “It might be more accurate to call them TT tourists or browsers, rather than readers?” This prompts me, as a reader, to think about the way people consume digitized texts and materials.

p-DPA archive - very cool - very helpful for thinking about design and the future of publishing. I was drawn to Thomas Walskaar’s My Hard-Drive Died Along With My Heart. http://p-dpa.net/work/my-hard-drive-died-along-with-my-heart/ This book published in 2016 is described as “A book containing tweets and forum posts on the topic of hard-drive failure.” I think its cool how this project combined three different storage containers: tweets/twitter feed, a book, hard-drives. Tweets contain words, sentences, sentiments (the feed is the collection of tweets). A book can contain whatever one wants to put in it. Hard-drives (are supposed to) contain everything (except for when they die... along with our hearts). I really admire how Walskaar formatted the tweets included in the book. They look so clean and elevated - taken more seriously than if he were to include images of the actual tweets. I think that changing the way something looks can make all the difference. His decision prompts me to think about how I am going to present the content in my final project.

0 notes