Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Artifacts (redux)

Episode Date: August 12, 2015

Photographer Robert Burley takes pictures of the end of analog for his book The Disappearance Of Darkness. Christine Frohnert and Christiane Paul explain why it is difficult to care for digital artworks and Social Media theorist Nathan Jurgenson wants us to understand what is truly revolutionary about ephemeral photographs and platforms like Snapchat. Sponsors: Hellofresh.com (offer code: theory )and Souverain.com

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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. There'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 for processing for the last time on December 30th, 2010, cut-off time of 12 noon. I think people really thought, wow, this really is it, you know,

this really is kind of signalling the end of an era, the end of, you know, physical film-based photography. These events really signalled 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 with 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 a 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 facility,

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 are in 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 Fröhnert 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 crossed 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' 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 live 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. We have so many photos. People are just taking so many to Instagram, to Facebook, wherever.

They're piling up. I mean, yeah, technically they exist forever, but nobody's looking at them the next day. They might as well be temporary. You know, let's face it, most photography was becoming Snapchat. Nathan Jergensen is a social media theorist. As an academic, he studies how we use services like Facebook and Twitter. But currently, he's also doing research for one of these companies, Snapchat, the fast-growing platform for ephemeral photographs. So these are photos that you take

that are going to self-destruct. You put a timer on it, and as you're viewing it, you're viewing them with the knowledge that they are gonna disappear, they're gonna go away. People are flocking to platforms like Snapchat, Nathan says, because traditional social media services, the ones with feeds, profiles, and timelines, just ask too much. Time is weighing very heavy on us right now

because dominant social media take our present and they ask us to record it and it builds up. We have these profiles that are growing and they're kind of weighing us down. Who we were in the moment in the past is just is there the screen. And when we're out somewhere, dominant social media, they ask us to view the world as always a potential document. And I think ephemerality is precisely a rejection of that. Most of our social interactions have always, they've always been ephemeral, right? That's been the default. And then social media came around and said, what if we take everything we're doing

and just record it and save that forever? So every conversation you're having at a coffee shop over the dinner table, there's a recorder on, right? And then we're going to keep that forever and like archive that. That was a very radical way to understand human sociality. A lot of people who use ephemeral apps way to understand human sociality. A lot of people who use ephemeral apps are just enjoying letting things go. It's not that the thing they let go needed to be secret.

It's just a type of interaction that is like normal interaction. It's just not recorded. It's just not a big deal. We shouldn't always have to put the present to work to be part of this recorded permanent identity brand. It's just about rejecting that. It's not about doing anything that you don't want anybody to see and that needs to be kept secret. And I think that's the hang up why people just go, go, well, anything digital is going to be safe forever. And they just completely missed the point. Now, I should point out here that the design features of platforms like Snapchat can easily be circumvented.

You can, for example, take a permanent picture of the ephemeral snap on your screen with a camera or another phone. But according to Nathan, our fixation with security and privacy is blinding us to what's truly revolutionary about ephemeral media. Traditional and dominant social media were organized around the traditional notion of the photograph, which is an art object. It's a document of the present. It's a thing that you can hold, even in the digital versions of it. Let's say it's Instagram.

That's the ends. Everything happens around that object. You can do faves and hearts and likes and retweets and comments. And all of that happens around this photo object. And in ephemeral social media, the ends is just left to fade away. And that very fundamental unit of analysis, the unit of organization for almost all of our social media, that object just really becomes the means.

And the ends is then the communication. The entire history of photography, every new technological invention has been about making more photos. And I think that ephemeral social media, Snapchat in particular, is really the first technological invention in the history of photography that's about there being fewer photos in the world. And I think one of the great advantages to injecting some ephemerality into photography, into

our lives, into social media, is to make the photos that we do choose to keep forever relatively more important, right? It's like we've printed too much currency, too much visual photographic currency, and it's inflated and it doesn't have any value, so let's maybe print less. This way, the photos that we do choose to keep forever can really be more permanent, can really be more special. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything.

This installment is called Artifacts. This episode was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Nathan Jurgensen, Robert Burley, Christine Frohnert, and Christiana Paul. Special thanks to Bill Bowen and Mathilde Biot. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, the world's greatest podcast network. Check out all the other shows in our tribe. Everything you need to know is at radiotopia.fm. dot f m Radiotopia from PRX