This is Rhizome Today for Tuesday, January 13, 2015. This post will be deleted on January 14.
In preparation for my upcoming (Dragan Espenschied-inspired) class "Storage Wars and Data Dumps: Narrating Digital Archives," which will run over seven sessions at NYU's ITP program, I've been catching up on my digital preservation reading. In particular, I finally cracked open Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito's Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory, which looks at digital preservation primarily as a social process, and argues that digital objects should not be fixed in a specific historical state but allowed to be re-used and re-made. Only through the variability that attends social use and circulation can digital objects be expected to survive.
In its emphasis on the social, the book forms an interesting counterpoint to Matthew Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, which focuses on digital preservation as a material process--opposed to the common rhetoric around new media as an "immaterial" or "ephemeral" medium. Kirschenbaum discusses social processes in depth as well, but subsumes these as components in a larger materialist perspective.
I found it striking that there was so little reference to Kirschenbaum in Re-collection, and I wanted to think about the relationships between their respective approaches in more depth. Luckily, Annet Dekker already made a start on this. Writing in the Journal of Computational Culture, she pointed out that even the concept of "variability" versus "fixity" in digital preservation--characterized by, say, the perfect copy versus the recreation--breaks down on a material level:
As Matthew Kirschenbaum explains: "One can, in a very literal sense, never access the "same" electronic file twice, since each and every access constitutes a distinct instance of the file that will be addressed and stored in a unique location in computer memory. [1]"
Thus, as argued by Kirschenbaum in the same article, "preservation is creation – and recreation." In other words, the distinction between creation and preservation collapses. The copy is seen as the result of a process of copying. In this case, the notion of variability may not be very helpful because it is questionable whether the copy is an instantiation of the original or if it is something new.
Even the process of making a digital copy, then, enacts a certain transformation. I enjoyed this perceptive analysis, but I wonder if it, in fact, highlights common ground rather than philosophical distinctions. The term variability is, I think, intended less as a technical description than as a guideline for institutions to rethink their institutional practices. In this context, Kirschenbaum's argument that each digital copy of a file is, in a way, a recreation, only reinforces this point.
In other words: "Everything inside the computer is a performance."