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Digital art may vanish as
technology changes
Prof Yash
Pal
THIS UNIVERSE
Trends |
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Digital art may vanish as
technology changes
Digital art, lovingly made with Macs and PCs over a quarter of a century, is vanishing forever as new tech pushes out the old, a digital-art guru in Germany is warning.
A lot of so-called media art from the 1980s and 1990s can no longer be shown in contemporary art museums because the display devices provided by the artist are worn out, but no replacements are on the market. Many 1980s artists welcomed the opportunity to fuse audio art, which uses creative soundtracks, and performance art. They built whole walls of video, did installations that included video images, or simply made artworks on disc. It was harder to sell than a framed canvas, but top art museums and wealthy art-lovers gladly collected
the work. Now, “data rot” is hitting many museums as CDs and DVDs containing such audiovisual art degrade. The discs’ lifetime is limited. Bernhard Serexhe, an art historian who works at the Centre for Art and Media Technology ZKM at Karlsruhe in Germany, explained one reason: the hardware used back then has vanished from the market. The software is also on the way out, as operating systems and programs evolve. Work from just 10 years back can be widely reproduced but is sometimes unplayable on the current computer operating systems. “A key promise of digital was long-term data security, but it has not been met,” said Serexhe. Museums are now desperately seeking ways to preserve the expensive assets. In the 1990s, they over-estimated the digital lifetimes of the art, and, in Serexhe’s view, failed to invest in conserving it, partly because of a lack of funds. “Often the files were already corrupted when they were put into storage,” he said. “Quite often they have either been irretrievably lost, or are only recoverable with a major investment of work and money.” Artists and collectors must now face up to a fundamental question. “What is the logical consequence if we have to assume that today’s digital artwork has a shelf life of under 10 years?” he said. The faster the technology develops, the quicker is the rate of decay, he added. The digital collector’s desire to preserve the asset contradicts the technology companies’ economic interest in constantly changing and updating the software to extend sales. “If they want to remain in the
market, they must avoid selling secure memory systems that function long-term,” said Serexhe, who argues that such a strategy is a threat to cultural heritage. “At the demand of powerful lobbies, more and more of our cultural heritage has actually been digitized in recent years,” he said. In digital form, art is easier to use commercially worldwide. But no one is responsible for preserving the work when the IT changes. Serexhe quotes as an example a file set on CD-ROM created in 1999 by the Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas. It includes pictures, as well as texts and audio interviews in three languages. “It is ideal content for an art historian covering Muntadas’ area who is looking for documentation,” he said. But Apple Macintosh computers since 2007 cannot play the CD-ROM because the new Mac OS X operating system does not include certain applications that were in the older Macs. Recent Microsoft Windows versions also refuse to play the Muntadas files. “We were a co-producer of this CD-ROM, but not even specialists from our centre can get it to play properly on the current operating systems,” he said. ZKM, which claims the world’s biggest library of digital art and has its own art museum, has been supervisor since January 2010 of a three-year European Union research project, Digitale Kunst, which is aimed at finding some answers.
— DPA
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THIS UNIVERSE
Why does resistance lose its property (of withdrawing current) at the time of a short circuit? Does it support the current by increasing its quantity?
You are being unfair to the poor resistance. It does not lose its property at the time of a short circuit. Short circuit occurs when the current is too strong for it to bear and it breaks or melts. This results in a spark that can cause a fire. The resistance is usually a martyr, sometimes causing us harm during its demolition. The fault lies with us for overloading it. Why does the sun appear red at sunrise and sunset? Amazingly, the answer to this question is connected with the fact that the sky is blue, or with the question: “What after all is the sky that we see during the day?” The story goes something like this. The earth has an atmosphere. All the light we get from the sun has to pass through this atmosphere before it gets down to us. Some of this light gets scattered by the molecules of air, even though air is by and large transparent to the band of wavelengths we call light. When we are not directly looking at the sun, we see this scattered light. It turns out that the strength of scattering depends strongly on the wavelength, or colour, of light. The blue light, which has the shortest wavelength, scatters much more than all the other colours, while the red light that has the longest wavelength scatters the least. Since our sky is nothing but scattered light, during the day the sky looks blue. Now let us come to your question about the colour of the sun at the time of sunrise or sunset. Let us remind ourselves that our earth is a large sphere of solid ground and liquid water that has a thin layer of the atmosphere. At midday the sunlight comes to us after passing vertically down through this thin layer. The amount of scattering at that time is minimal. But at sunrise or sunset, the sunlight hits the earth tangentially and, therefore, the passage through the atmosphere is much longer. This results in much greater scattering. Direct sunlight is, therefore, robbed of its shorter wavelengths. Blue is mostly gone and the longest wavelengths, the orange and the red, predominate. This results in the orange red colour of the sun at sunset and the sunrise.
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Trends
WASHINGTON: A new species of giant crayfish literally crawled out from under a rock in Tennessee, proving that large new species of animals can be found in highly populated and well-explored places, researchers said. The new crayfish should not have been easily overlooked, as it is huge—twice the size of other species, the team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Eastern Kentucky University said. Gene study may help find why bedbugs are back WASHINGTON: Researchers in the United States have sequenced the entire genetic map of the bed bug, and said they may be able to find out how and why the little pests can survive strong pesticides. The gene map has provided some prime suspects for genes that confer resistance-the ability to survive poisons, the team at Ohio State University reported recently. Spooky step towards quantum computers LONDON: Scientists have moved a step closer to creating ultra-fast quantum computers by generating 10 billion bits of quantum entanglement in silicon for the first time. The achievement in silicon, the basis of the computer chip, has important implications for integration with existing technology, according to a team from Britain, Japan, Canada and Germany whose study was published in the journal Nature. Scientists fight bugs with poo LONDON: Once a year, every year, Professor Thomas Borody receives a single-stem rose from one of his most grateful patients. She is, he says, thanking him for restoring her bowel flora. It’s a distasteful cure for a problem that’s increasingly widespread: the Clostridium difficile bug, typically caught by patients in hospitals and nursing homes, can be hard to treat with antibiotics. But Borody is one of a group of scientists who believe the answer is a faecal transplant.
— Reuters
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Digital art, lovingly made with Macs and PCs over a quarter of a century, is vanishing forever as new tech pushes out the old, a digital-art guru in Germany is warning.
A lot of so-called media art from the 1980s and 1990s can no longer be shown in contemporary art museums because the display devices provided by the artist are worn out, but no replacements are on the market.
WASHINGTON: A new species of giant crayfish literally crawled out from under a rock in Tennessee, proving that large new species of animals can be found in highly populated and well-explored places, researchers said. The new crayfish should not have been easily
overlooked.
