Lost media preservation efforts should focus less on pop culture and more on the constantly-uploaded, constantly-fading art and music by independent webizens. YouTube videos with barely any audience, teenage artists recording demos in their bedrooms, anonymous postings and chatroom ephemera have been close to my heart my entire life and I have yet to find a symphony or classic film or critically acclaimed piece of core pop culture that makes me feel half as much as the kind of things I've heard coming from the hands and voices and keyboard and internet connections of absolute nobodies. I admit, I find it very difficult to imagine a coherent strategy to actually document the lesser known corners of the inherently disintegrating internet (beautiful vent blogs that rarely last a year before getting deleted, hundreds of broken bandcamp links in my bookmarks, "unavailable videos are hidden for this playlist," etc.) beyond what Archive.org (God bless their hearts) is already doing and what people like myself are doing on a small scale. I think on this front you just have to do what you can for what you care about; CTRL+S everything that feels special, carry it with you, keep backups, and share what you have with likeminded individuals.
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Lost media preservation efforts should focus less on pop culture and more on the constantly-uploaded, constantly-fading art and music by ind...
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I know I overestimate the value of some art and music, but I would much rather overvalue or read/misread too much beauty or meaning into thi...
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In the late 2000s and early 2010s, a vaguely defined cluster of largely online art scenes coagulated themselves out of the rapidly evolving ...
sorry for replying again (insofar as not sure if engagement is what you are looking for). i'll say first that i once more feel an affinity for what you lament here. i have previously written wistfully about the ephemerality of hentai images (that so often i find archives of these to be shattered and cleft of context; though, to be clear, my attention to this type of image was less to do with their beauty than what other nexuses they may be situated in). but even of beauty, it is that i relate; i'm eternally not diligent enough in keeping backups of things i come across and thus it is that my youtube playlists rattle indeed with this sort of saddening statement, "Unavailable videos are hidden".
ReplyDeletemore recently, though, i've been reflecting on what it is that makes something beautiful to begin with. of course there are many models for this and fragility and the inevitability of death-- these sorts of things-- are common descriptors. but yes, i guess i've been wondering that, insofar as the want is for things to be beautiful (and thus thru archiving to make this beauty extended in access to others), how do you move to make that happen? and then too, insofar as it's difficult to make happen, why is that the case? you're identifying an issue with regard to strategy of, individual archivers can only do so much. i wonder if it can be useful to develop infrastructure to teach archiving or make this too more accessible (eh, i don't think this is quite right; too plain and a known fact for sure). and then i think another part of this can be a reflection about, why is it that things bend and twist and break into broken links and dust when and as they do? a surge of shame eats out an alt acct or a new vent page. it's too that people may lose interest or shift so in their mood. or people may die (i suppose). or sites close or...
but i think this is to say that there's an issue undergirding all of this that is i think to do with who owns the internet? who has the power to develop or sanction this capacity? why is it that things are set up so swings that hurt can tear all of it to shreds? this is sort of a question about community, but i'm trying to also articulate that i think there's something here about power- about the means of production (of which this is not only the archivers and artists but also, again, the infrastructure; the power companies; the internet companies; the data conglomerates; or whatever else). what are the limits of the ownership of these means? how to develop an alternate infrastructure, or a nested, secured one, or something else?
there can always be other questions and more precision in my purpose, but this can be thus for now-
cut away ant farm: that's visible from the side