Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Artifacts (1 of 2)

Episode Date: January 1, 2014

Photographer Robert Burley takes pictures of the end of analog for his book The Disappearance Of Darkness. Christine Frohnert explains how conservators must care for Art with a Plug. Curator Christiane Paul tells us how the Whitney Museum of American Art restored the digital artwork “the world’s first collaborative sentence” by Douglas Davis. And TOE’s Washington D.C. corespondent ‘Chris’ tells us the truth about Edward Snowden and Snapchat. *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********    

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Artifacts. If I had to choose a picture that really kind of summed the project up, I think it would be the photograph that I did in Kodak Park in 2007. It's a crowd of people that are standing very solemnly in front of a cloud of dust because the dynamite's just been set off, the building has collapsed, and the structures are now gone. The only thing that they can see is the cloud of dust, and of course they're all documenting it

with digital cameras and cell phones and video cams of all sorts. It's this wonderful kind of irony. In 2005, the photographer and educator Robert Burley set out to document how digital technology was changing photography. Two years later, Kodak began dynamiting its international headquarters. He realized things weren't changing, they were ending. This was really a remarkable kind of event to attend because it really signaled, like, this is over.

Like, this is not just kind of winding down. This is really finished. Robert Burley is the author of The Disappearance of Darkness, a picture book slash wake for the last days of analog photography. Over the course of five years, Robert traveled around Canada and the United States taking pictures of the grand finale. He traveled to Rochester, New York when Kodak went down, and he traveled to Parsons, Kansas when Duane's Photo Lab announced it would no longer process

Kodachrome film. Everyone knows Kodachrome. It has those rich, you know, saturated colors, and it was used for everything. And it's actually Kodak's oldest product. They've been manufacturing Kodachrome film longer than any other film or paper product, 75 years. So when that happened, and Duane's announced that they were going to accept these rolls of Kodachrome 4 processing for the last time on December 30, 2010, cut-off time of 12 noon. I think people really thought, wow, this really is it. This really is kind of signaling the end of an era, the end of physical, film-based photography.

These events really signaled this paradigm shift. I don't really work in a dark room anymore. I work in front of glowing screens. Robert Burley is certainly not the first photographer to ponder the effects of digital imaging technology, but there is something really special about his project. He was not only at the right place in the right time, because it happened so fast, it's like he caught the whole thing on camera. Everyone could see that the, you know, this transition was happening, you know, it was moving along, but other technological transitions take 10 to 20 years. This one happened at such blinding speed that it was impossible to

keep up with. All the photo labs, all the camera stores that I used to hang out at, all of that's just stopped. I mean, when I started the project in 2005, if you'd told me at that time that Kodak was going to go bankrupt in six years, I would have said, you're crazy. In many ways, The Disappearance of Darkness is a story about Kodak. The company's decision to shut down its campus in Toronto, where Robert lives and teaches, is what prompts him to start taking pictures.

He wanted to understand why Kodak, a mainstay of the 20th century, was imploding. Kodak really was trying to distance itself from its history. They felt their history was a liability, that they had to redefine themselves as a company that was about the future. And I think most individuals felt that way also. I think, you know, unless you bought the latest iPhone or had the latest digital camera, you were in danger of being left behind. Now, Robert Burley isn't out to bash digital technology.

He uses digital cameras, as does pretty much every single working photographer. The disappearance of darkness is more a personal coming to terms with a way of making art and a way of seeing the world that vanished almost overnight. I mean, with digital, you're just connected all the time, even if you don't want to be. I mean, even if you have your phone on and you're not emailing or texting or talking to someone,

you're still kind of connected to the world. And it's hard for me to have that kind of solitary, conscious experience where I'm really focused on a subject in the same way that I was in the past. I used to make photographs that were really fixed in a particular time and place. That was possible because the medium that I was using, film, actually created an image in the camera when I clicked the shutter. That still happens today, but I don't end up with an object

that I can actually trace back to that time and place. I end up with, you know, a code of some kind. I find it discomforting. I find that photographs, you know, in relation to, you know, your family and the memories you have of family and loved ones, I think a manifestation of those relationships has always been photographs and the way you keep them and the way you kind of treasure them. And, you know, I haven't found a system yet in the digital world that allows me to have that same experience with pictures of my family until I make prints.

I have to make prints, but I have to sort of force myself to make prints because it's no longer a natural part of the process. Photography used to be a very conscious act. You had to decide to take a photograph because it cost money. So people were very careful about the photographs that they made and when they decided to pull their camera out and take a picture. And the result of that act was a physical print that came back from some lab a few days later. And they kept it. They even kept the bad ones. We are moving away from preserving only the materiality because we also have to preserve the functionality. Christina Frohnert is a conservator of electronic art.

Art was a plug. That's the title of the class she recently taught at NYU as a visiting professor. In order to care for electronic art, you need to study a lot more than just art history. Imagine you are a conservator at a museum receiving a loan request from another institution. And the loan request is about work that is not currently installed. So you walk down into the storage facility and you look at the painting and you identify a tear. So with a visual examination, you should be able to determine whether or not this work can be sent on loan. But if you walk into the storage facility and received a loan request, let's say for Robert Rauschenberg's sounding, the light kinetic sculpture, you open boxes with

cables, with microphones, with playback device, with amplifiers. If you don't put it together, if you don't perform the work, you know nothing about the work. The electronic arts conservator must be able to deal with both cutting-edge and primitive technology. An inability to deal with antiquated components or out-of-date electronics leads to obsolescence. Artworks can even be harmed if they sit in a storage facility and do nothing, because the surrounding environment changes. Think of an artwork like, for example, Earl Ryback. He modified the inside of CRT monitors and applied some fluorescent paint

before he applied a vacuum again with argon gas. And he mounted shields within the tube that picked up the analog signal. Analog broadcasting signal was discontinued in 2009. So even with the artwork sitting in the storage facilities, the surrounding environment that had changed can harm the artwork significantly. I mean, I'm personally under the impression that 95% of all the electronic media works under unknown conditions. But just as the switch from analog to digital puts that piece by Earl Rybick at risk. Upgrading from, say, a 2004 iBook to a 2012 MacBook Air can be just as dangerous for computer artwork.

Work that is still sitting on a hard drive from 2001 today is extremely tricky to access. You can damage it just by opening the files. So you have to access them all the time. You have to make sure they are not corrupted on the bit level, which will translate into image errors that can be significant, even just one bit. So it's getting more and more complex as we face younger artworks. According to Christina Frohnert, though, museums and collectors are only beginning to see the dangers that threaten their digital masterpieces. A digital work can be dead within a few years.

Files degrade a little bit through the copying process. I mean, we always talk about identical copies, but they're not. Okay, your mind isn't playing tricks on you. There are actually two art world professionals of German descent in this podcast. Christiana Paul, adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Christiana Paul recently found herself

dealing with some of the issues Christina Fröner just outlined when the Whitney decided to mount a piece of web art from 1994, the world's first collaborative sentence by Douglas Davis. It was simply a sentence that people around the world could work on collaboratively over the time, a sentence that would never end. So the one and only rule is nobody could put in a period. And of course, you already have a picture of what the web as a microcosm is like. Nonsensical things, garbage, you know, things that really fluidly cross the boundaries from the ridiculous to the sublime.

And it really became a microcosm of the web at that certain time and already pointed to what the web would become in terms of social media. Davis's sentence was basically an HTML form. But when it arrived at the Whitney in 1995, no one knew exactly where to put it, or even how to store it. What it was filed as was actually the floppy disk that Douglas had also given to the museum, which recorded the first day of the sentence. But what we got was actually much, much larger. And then over time, the work became dysfunctional. The CGI script that made the sentence run and allowed you to contribute to it got lost at some point during a transfer.

And that's a really admittedly dumb mistake. But you also can't blame anyone because there wasn't a real system set up for doing that. But in order to restore the piece, the Whitney was faced with a serious dilemma. There are deeply philosophical questions about it, such as all the rotten links within the sentence. Do you keep that as a testament to the ephemeral nature of the web? Yeah, links break and go away. Or do you actually try to reconstruct those pages?

Because we also have the internet archive that has been archiving pages. So we had long, long discussions about that. In the end, Christiana Paul and her colleagues simply couldn't choose between the two options. So if you take a visit to the page for the Douglas Davis piece on the Whitney website, you will find both versions. You cannot come to a conclusion, really, of what is more natural here or what is the way of handling it. And that's why we decided to do a historic and a life version but what to me is very interesting is to have a version that is more historically focused and that really investigates

evolution over time and to have a version that is the eternal now. Whatever happens, whatever breaks, whatever changes, a lot of things may become dysfunctional over time. So this is what survives and degrades over time. And the other one is a snapshot of history over time. And to me, it's incredibly interesting to see these two and highlight these two aspects of a work. And that's what conservators of a painting or sculpture usually do not get to do, because doing a replica is a highly problematic solution to the problem and creates all kinds of legal issues.

And this is something that is really unique to digital art or web-based art in particular. Do you use Pinterest? Uh, no. I've been trying to figure it out. But I'm having a real problem with it. Why are you using Pinterest? Just this drone thing I'm having a real problem with it. Why are you using Pinterest? Just this drone thing I'm working on. Well, I would like to see that.

Typing your name into Pinterest here, but nothing's coming up. Are you using your real name? Well, it's not the regular Pinterest. What do you mean? Well, it's like a private invite only. Oh, my God. The CIA has its own Pinterest?

Well, yeah, it's not just for the CIA. Wow. Wow. Because, you know, people have talked about the CIA's private Twitter. Well, again, it's not just the CIA. It's the entire intelligence community. And yeah, they have their own suite of web apps. We have Twitter.

There's a Facebook. And now, just a couple of weeks ago, the IC launched their own Pinterest. Don't they, like, have tech support?'t they have tech support? They do have tech support, but when I called this woman up who's the system administrator for the program, she just wasn't very helpful.

Wait, wait, wait. Back up here. Walk me through this. I'm very curious. I would like to know what the tech support is like when you call for help using the CIA's PIN arrest. Okay. Here's how it works. You call up tech support using the IC version of Skype.

Is that actually what it's called? No. So I see Skype in the tech support, and this woman answers. And, you know, she's got me on one computer. I can see a bunch of other computers in the background. And I tell her that I'm having some difficulty working with IC Pinterest. But she just really seems pissed off. And she slams her fist down on the table and says,

I am sick and tired of all this discrimination. What did you do? Nothing. I mean, I'm just trying to get help here. I'm just shocked. I don't know what to say, it's it's not me she's upset at okay she she points at one of the other screens and says time magazine just announced the person of the year and it's the pope not edward snowden they didn't give it to Snowden because they looked

down on IT administrators. It is discrimination. And with that she just disconnected from IC Skype. I was cut off, so I didn't get any support. I'm so confused

here. Snowden did IT at the NSA, right uh yeah he he had a job similar to this woman that i'm talking to like doing what well you know as i said earlier this intelligence community has their own version of all the programs that people use. And Snowden was the administrator for IC Snapchat. What? Why would the CIA make their own Snapchat? Dude, IC Snapchat was like the most popular web app in the intelligence community. That's how he got all the documents.

Hold on, hold on. Why would the CIA even want its own Snapchat? Well, back in the day, spies would get their instructions and then they would burn them after reading okay snapchat became like the burn after reading app and the brass loved it because they didn't have to worry about things not getting burned they just send out instructions like we need you to watch this guy or we need you to take out that village. And then the field agents would get the instructions on Snapchat, and then the evidence would disappear after five seconds as soon as they read it.

But what does this have to do with all the spying documents that Snowden released? Well, there was a lot of abuse. You mean like nude CIA selfies? Oh yeah, there was tons of that. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem was the sex snapping. Sex snapping? No, sex snapping.

S-E-C. What is that? Okay, a sex snap is a shot of a top secret document or PowerPoint slide that one agent would send to another. Why the hell would someone do that? Why the hell do people take photos of themselves? People like to show off. You know, it's part of human nature. And in the IC, when you sent out a sexnap, it was like broadcasting what projects you were working on what access you had you know what info you had seen it you know it's a status

thing and snowden being the it guy for ic snapchat had access to every single sex snap that was ever sent out. And obviously he saved them all. And eventually, this is what he told Glenn Greenwald, he believed it was his duty to inform American people about what was in these sex snaps. Unbelievable. I knew we weren't getting the whole story. But what happened to I see Snapchat after Snowden went public with everything? Well, obviously they shut it down.

But I've heard from a number of guys now that some of the worst offenders, the agents that were using IC Snapchat to brag about their jobs at the NSA, well, supposedly many of these guys got so hooked that they're still doing the same thing using civilian Snapchat. No. Yeah. I mean, you saw that Facebook offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion, right? Sure. But the founders turned down the offer.

Yeah. They know what they've got there is worth way more than $3 billion. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Artifacts. It featured Robert Burley, Christine Frohnert, Christiana Paul and TOE's Washington, D.C. correspondent, Chris. The sound design was done by Bill Bowen. For more information, including links and images, visit

us at theory.prx.org. This is where you can subscribe to the Theory of Everything podcast, and you can find Benjamin Walker on Twitter at TMIBb.walker. Radiotopia. From PRX.