These gaps suggest that no amount of hard drive space can defy mortality. Via a single-channel desktop screencast, informatic elements ebb and flow-creating and relating interface absences. It explores problems in our archival urges.
Part software demo, part documentary- Big_Sleep™ concerns itself with archival impulses, molecular instability, and numbers counting down to zero. Combining this material, interviews with many of the MIRC team members, and computational augmentation from the ORNL lab, we produced Big_Sleep™, a web and cinema project that looks towards the end of archivism.
Working with the team at MIRC and utilizing their metadata systems, we were able to explore the archive in much the same way that Bill Morrison had done a decade ago when he used MIRC footage to create his masterpiece, Decasia. We were able to secure footage from the early days of nitrate film, materials concerning the first experiments with digital transfer processes, and subsequently express the lineage of content as it became increasingly virtual. It turns out that all of those threads led us to the same place: Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) at the University of South Carolina. But first, we needed an archive-one with a collection that dated back to the early days of the moving image, one with a lot of material in all states of image integrity, and one with smart and dedicated curators and staff who could speak to the process of preservation. We wanted to look at the protocological nature of decay and archivism and, if we were lucky, make a piece of artwork that connected the aesthetic, social, and computational sides of that issue. Amy Szczepanski using grant-time we had left at the supercomputing facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 2013, I began a project with my colleague Dr. The archivist’s persistence-in-the-face-of-non-existence is a kind of bravery and dedication that affects much today and will affect even more in the days to come. We focus on creation in the present and hope the future will just work out. If we focused on distant, sparse endpoints, it would be difficult to get out of bed in the morning, let alone make our beds once we’ve left them. We’re proud of these efforts, ignoring the notion that bridges will fall, cakes will sour, art will fade, and on and on until there’s not much left. We mediate our intentions and produce bridges, cakes, and artwork. Human beings create things in the present for the future. There will, most likely, be several tomorrows. Those people who tell you to live like there’s no tomorrow do not have your best interest at heart. They face the very things humans work hard to avoid facing. Tough, because they try to preserve meaning and value of materials in decline. He was kind enough to share his thoughts on his experience working with MIRC below.Īrchivists, like hospice workers or chaplains, have a tough job. The project screened publicly for the first time in November at the Association of Moving Image Archivists annual conference in Portland, OR. His recently completed project, Big_Sleep™ draws heavily from the digitized materials at MIRC and includes interviews with MIRC staff. Those technologies, as embodied in specific media, are only useful in so far as they can be taken apart and studied. Professor Meaney’s work centers around the belief that the aspirations and possibilities of art are bound to the technologies that support them. This guest post was written by Evan Meaney, Assistant Professor of Media Arts in the University of South Carolina’s School of Visual Art and Design.