Preserving the Creative Culture of the Web
For over 20 years the web has provided continuous deluge of cultural production. Digital artifacts such as websites, images, and videos have much to communicate about our social and cultural evolution, and yet their messages or moments can be fleeting or quickly lost. Both the accessibility and longevity of digital content are subject to a wide range of risks, from technological obsolescence to outright deletion by their creator or host. So what is being done to preserve these cultural objects for the long term? Approaching web content from a cultural and artistic perspective, this panel will convene leading writers, archivists, thinkers and technologists to discuss to the questions, challenges, and imperatives involving preserving the creative culture of the web. We'll cover topics like "what is the long-term significance of a website, and why would it be worth preserving?", "should web sites and artifacts be treated like works of art or architecture?", and "how do we go about archiving digital content to ensure its accessibility and longevity?". Example initiatives to be discussed will be the Archive Team's various projects (such as the Geocities torrent), the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, Internet Archeology, and the Rhizome ArtBase. This panel will be presented by Rhizome, an organization dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.
Presenters
Computer Historian, Documentary Filmmaker, Archivist, Preservation Activist, Man about Town, Rascal.
Kari Kraus is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies and the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching interests focus on digital preservation, Alternate Reality Games and transmedia storytelling, and the transmission of cultural information. Kraus is a Co-Principal Investigator on an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant for preserving virtual worlds; a Co-PI on an IMLS Digital Humanities Internship grant; and the co-Principal Investigator of an NSF grant to study Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and transmedia fiction in the service of education and design. Her work has been published or received coverage in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Baltimore Public Radio, and the Long Now Foundation. In addition to the University of Maryland, she has taught at the University of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music, and in the Art and Visual Technology program at George Mason University.
Nick Hasty is an artist, programmer, writer & musician. He currently serves as Director of Technology for Rhizome, where he reengineered the site's archive of New Media Art, the ArtBase, and the entire site as a whole. He recently collaborated with Ryan Trecartin in building the user-generated video art platform riverthe.net, and plays drums and electronics in the Brooklyn-based band Source of Yellow. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Georgia, and holds a Master's degree from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts.
Sunday, March 11
