Interesting Links for 02-02-2020

[andrewducker]

Archiving digital art is really really hard

(tags:art technology )

It is ok not to feel bad about feeling this way

(tags:emotion comic )

Cutting corners cost Boeing $19Bn. I wonder how much it saved them.

(tags:business safety epicfail )

What do you do if a rhino walks straight up to you while you're filming and wants a belly scratch?🦏

(tags:rhino video cute )

A thread of the Brexiter interviews from last night. Lovely people, all of them.

(tags:Europe UK society OhForFucksSake )

Not All Routines Can Become Habits: What You Need To Know

(tags:behaviour habits viaFrancescaElston )

Brexit trade talks: EU to back Spain over Gibraltar

(tags:Gibraltar UK Europe Spain )

The Crown will end after season five, with Imelda Staunton as Queen

(tags:royalty TV Queen UK )

An indigenous community in Mexico finds its voice — and its strength (they kicked out the corrupt politicians and loggers and rebuilt their lives)

(tags:Mexico corruption )

A parole board sent a convicted wife-murderer to a sex worker *because* they knew he was a danger to women but wanted to make sure he got his "sexual needs" met. The guy murdered the 22-year-old sex worker.

(tags:Canada murder sexwork OhForFucksSake )

Finally, proof that procrastination is good (on Tolkien and Chaucer)

(tags:Tolkien procrastination writing )

Comments

[andrewducker]

Emojis work!

(And I haven't seen the mess that I used to from dollar signs and pound signs in a while. I wonder if the newer version of PowerShell on Azure supports that kind of thing better.)

[cmcmck]

With reference to the dear Brexiteers, there's a link on my latest that might interest you.

Depressing about covers it.

[dewline]

SO many who want to be the death of those around them...

On the premature death of a sex worker

[dewline]

What the Hell were the specific and relevant people at the National Parole Board thinking here?

[cmcmck]

Given my own background, don't I know it? :o(

Re: On the premature death of a sex worker

[cmcmck]

She was just a sex worker so what does it matter?

Sigh :o(

[rangifer]

It's hardly my place to comment, but I'm really not looking forward to the trade negotiations. I think sections of the UK press are going to treat them as if they're the Battle of Britain, this... great big national struggle against an implacable foe, with various elements of Brexit itself mind-bogglingly reframed as irrational EU plots to punish the UK.

[andrewducker]

That's basically what I'm expecting.

I sound more negative here than I mean to - but I genuinely am curious/don't understand...

[symbioid]

The digital art thing confused me. I mean at first I thought they were just referring to visual then realized they were referring multimedia. So I can understand that, like - a windows 3.1 application isn't gonna run nicely on modern hardware.

Why is that the artists fault.

Paper decays. Tablets break.

Unfortunately that's a consequence of technology. Maybe I'm too head up my ass in entropy... Not that I don't appreciate preservation and archival labor, I absolutely do. But I imagine most of these artists didn't conceive that what they did was worth preserving.

Admittedly any art I make is rendered down into a standardized format and non-hardware reliant.

It seems this is more about software/hardware? I don't know the answer to that. Even if you wanna talk about engineering, by demanding bespoke hardware (a la the "handmade brushes" you're requiring a much harder discipline than programming something in Processing/P5 for example).

What does it mean when your art is inextricably wound up inside a system that changes. When licenses fail.

I feel like this archiver is complaining about the artists, but it seems to me it's the overall flow of technology. If it's just a static presentation then exporting a standard data file is fine, but once the boundaries between hardware/OS/software/data become blurred, there is no escape.

All is decay. It's not the artists job to do the archiving, it's the archivists. It's not the artists fault they used paper that was acid. Now that there's acid-free paper, for example, yes it'd be foolish to use acidic paper unless that's your goal.

But the nature of this type of work requires limits.

Is it a shame? Absolutely. I remember watching a video about an elderly artist, she got started with an Amiga in the 80s and still has an Amiga 500 to do her art. Can you do stuff like that in emulation? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But once again - is it really the artists job? What if the artist doesn't care?

Maybe these are things someone I, as a non-archivist, don't understand because it's not my job. I don't envy this guy.

My friend worked at Walker Art Center for a decade+ doing their websites and digital installations/kiosks type things. I am gonna share this with him and see what he thinks about it. He wasn't an archivist so he may or may not feel the way the twitter person things. I'm def curious though.

Re: I sound more negative here than I mean to - but I genuinely am curious/don't understand...

[alithea]

Presumably at least part of the issue is that whatever organisation he works for has paid money for said art installation and doesn't want to have nothing to show for it in the future... I suspect he finds his bosses struggle to understand his inability to 'just make it work'.

Re: On the premature death of a sex worker

[nancylebov]

I expect they had a rule about making sex available to prisoners and *didn't* have a rule about being careful about the safety of sex workers.