Page 253 - The Black Box Book

The process of critically making media architectures at the level of
computing, design, technology, information modeling, data structures,
interface, and protocols should transform the theory and practice in dig-
ital curation. As fundamental tenets of cultural platforms, inclusive social
tools of digital curating and preservation should permit critical reading,
qualitative methods, support paratextual apparatus, invite widespread
performative involvement, and promote conversation.
Media artists and free software developers, previously the first in-
habitants and thinkers of the empty internet space, continue to create
and shape ethical networks. There are already several open social proto-
cols being used by websites to talk to each other, which could connect
archive repositories and collection systems. Open public standards in
federated social networking already provide solutions without contro-
versies of deplatforming or dividing corporations and digital curators are
starting to incorporate them into digital art infrastructures. In thousands
This should be taken into account when designing and choosing of repositories spread out across memory institutions and present in
exhibition spaces for digital archives of cultural heritage. Corporate con- their cultural preservation strategies, social networking can offer infra-
tent platforms failed to provide a place for cultural discourse or educa- structure for equitable and environmentally conscious communication
tion. Instead, they were strengthened and reinforced as attention-driven and activities. Aware of the fact that what determines art is often found
tabloid advertising services. As private walled gardens, they deliberately in relation to broader social alliances, Annet Dekker pointed out, that it is
lack transparency and interoperability based on technical standards. Even not uncommon for networks to form around artworks that are collected
if history is showing us that the walled gardens are disappearing and in by museums, large institutes, or private collectors:
the long term are replaced by open ecosystems that eventually bring
more value, they are often the way to the most profitable business in “I suggest that such a network could evolve into a network of care
the early days of any industry. that maintains or conserves (parts of) an artwork, consists of a com-
Although information infrastructures had undergone a long develop- bination of experts and non-specialists, and introduces knowledge
ment from monolithic and isolated systems to modular and interoperable, from a variety of fields and backgrounds.” Conservation thus “ is
the general use of prefabricated and presumptive tools still inevitably less about conserving materials and more about the preservation
interferes and inhibits critical, independent, thinking. As Johanna Drucker of social information and relations.” (Dekker, 2018, p. 14)
puts it:
However, carbon imbalance measures the time to rethink long-
“The cultural authority of digital technology is still claimed by the term preservation strategies. Because the only possible digitization and
fields that design the platforms and protocols on which we work. long-term preservation projects are those that are within the limits of
These are largely fields in which quantitative, engineering, and sustainability. The trustworthy repositories and curatorial practice should
computational sensibilities prevail. Tools for humanities work have be seen from the perspective of their ability to maintain art together with
evolved considerably in the last decade, but during that same pe- the biological livability of the interconnected environment.
riod a host of protocols for information visualization, data mining, One of the strategies of datacenter operators is increasing efficien-
geospatial representation, and other research instruments have cy and optimization. That is not difficult to accomplish, it saves money,
been absorbed from disciplines whose epistemological foundations and it does not change too much the existing system. It is promoted that
and fundamental values are at odds with, or even hostile to, the hyperscale or AI utilization control make datacenters more environmen-
humanities. Positivistic, strictly quantitative, mechanistic, reductive tally friendly. However, that is nothing new and will not seriously tackle
and literal, these visualization and processing techniques preclude greenhouse gas emissions. Efficiency is a factor that is already present
humanistic methods from their operations because of the very as-
sumptions on which they are designed: that objects of knowledge
can be understood as self-identical, self-evident, ahistorical, and
autonomous.“ (Drucker, 2012)

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