EMPAC Director Johannes Goebel to speak on Eternity and Megalomania: The Politics and Mechanics of Archiving

Thursday, November 5 / 7:00 PM /110 8th Street, Troy, NY

TROY, NY  The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (110 8th St., Troy) was built to develop multimedia projects at the frontier of what it technologically possible. But one question has always stymied experts within and beyond EMPACs production team: What to do with all that digital stuff once its been created. On Thursday, November 5, at 7 PM, EMPAC director Johannes Goebel will give a perspective on present preservation strategies in the digital domain and present the concrete solution found for EMPAC in a talk titled Eternity and Megalomania: The Politics and Mechanics of Archiving. Admission is free and open to the public.

Most everyone in our society has an ever-increasing amount of digitally encoded documents, from selfies and family pictures, videos and music, to scientific and financial data. EMPAC, for one, has hundreds of hours of video and audio documenting performances and events. While technology continues to change more rapidly than ever, attempts to standardize digital formats are undermined by an industry that has to meet shareholders expectations with new gear, new formats and protocols, and ever-new methods for distribution and storage. Obsolescence and incompatibility guarantee rising sales.

An immense effort has been underway for the past decades to cope with this battle between constant change in the name of improvement and the desire to pass things on from generation to generation. Goebels talk will track some fundamental aspects of archiving that have been around ever since we started writing our thoughts and preserving the fruit of our labor beyond the life-span of an individual: Who has the power to determine what is to be kept? Who has the money to pay for keeping what is to be kept? Whose bits will survive the longest? Some answers can be found by considering older and more recent technologies like clay tablets, pyramids, monks copying manuscripts by hand, the printing press, acid-free paper, acetate film  and the care that is currently taken to destroy cultural artifacts, as in the Islamic world (a non-first and non-last in human history and common to all cultures).

In considering the present challenge of archiving digital materials, EMPAC has found a relatively simple and cheap strategy that may ensure that we can access our stuff as long as we may live and maybe pass it on. Interestingly enough, a similar strategy is currently being developed by big data collectors like Facebook and Google.

Johannes Goebel has been involved with the archiving and restoration of digitally created music since the mid 80s, when the issue was already problematic. He created and mastered the first audio CD series dedicated to distribute music created with computers in a digital form, and established the first international digital archive of electronic music with colleagues from Stanford University and ZKM Germany between 1989 and 1995. As director of EMPAC, he has been collaborating with the EMPAC team to archive the work done here, resulting in a video chair, a 688-page printed book (also available online), and a strategy to back-up video and audio data in a cheap and hopefully longer-lasting way.

For more info, visit empac.rpi.edu. For press inquiries, please contact Josh Potter at pottej2@rpi.edu.

Join  NYLA-ASLS (Academic and Special Libraries Section) for an after-lecture reception, hosted by EMPAC,  to discuss the topic with your fellow librarians and the speaker.