Home SEMINARS 2008 Seminar History of technology and presentation of DOCAM’s Timeline

History of technology and presentation of DOCAM’s Timeline

January 14, 2008

Will Straw, McGill University
Will Straw © DOCAM 2008

1) Introduction; “Archiving is not where you look for it”.
2) “The criteria of ‘perfect’ reproduction is not an absolute one”; “The migration of cultural content from one media to another can serve to diminish or to magnify it”; “Every cultural object faces the tension between physical and semiotic decay”.
3) “Every new media has, as on of its principal effects, the renewed availability of older media content”; “In the preservation of media artworks, is it possible to avoid magnifying or diminishing them?”; “If every media-based art works has, encoded within it, a way of seeing or hearing, is every artwork, at some level, a ‘storage’ device?”; “Which works best as means of ensuring the survival of cultural artefacts: their free, uncontrolled circulation in the world (or in the marketplace?), or their controlled preservation in optimum conditions?”.