#digital ruins

[shisasan]

tumblr giving us access to oldest likes is like discovering the ruins of an entire extinct civilization beneath the dashboard, full of vanished blogs, dead links, and piles of content-labeled posts sitting there like classified documents

[jamesusilljournal]

Myrto Amorgianou (Digital Ruins)

[ruins-digitales]

ａｂｙｓｓ

[jamesusill]

James Usill x Digital Ruins, 2017

[rc11-group5]

Wayback Machine

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age | Digging through the Geocities Torrent

https://neocities.org

https://secondlife.com

[rc11-group5]

Find features in digital ruins

[apartnotthewhole]

Corrupt Artefacts and Digital Ruins: An Interview with Anika Schwarzlose

Anika Schwarzlose collects objects whose purpose is dictated by their materiality and alters them in her visual reproduction of them.

“One thing the images of the series Artefacts have in common is that they are so-called mnemonic devices – devices which function as externalized memory and objects at the same time. They are still autonomous objects and have an aura as things in themselves. But they also help us form a collective memory of our shared history. This collective memory is what constructs our social identity, our perception of our past and the way we decide about our future. The way memories are mediated, dispersed and archived has a great influence on us. Images and objects and their mediation have the power to enhance, corrupt, extend or replace memory.”

“For all of these objects and their capabilities of representing, their materiality used to play a big role. But what we do now is we only treat them as images. We photograph these mnemonic devices and share those images online. We remake them once more; we're turning them into another layer of reproduction. This kind of digitalisation has limitations and potential qualities. There are certain things that you can communicate very well in a digital representation and there are other things that you can't communicate at all. There are certain vulnerabilities. By treating the images as I did in my series, I tried to probe around to find out: what is this vulnerability and what are the possibilities?”

“Even when I work three-dimensionally it's still connected to photography-related subjects.”

“Brian McKenna and I have been traveling during the summer through the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium where we started recording monuments. Real life monuments. The technology is called photogrammetry. A photography based 3d modelling technique that at the moment archaeologists are very excited about.”

“We already made a couple of models of monuments and looking at our results, and looking at the results of other archaeological projects using the same techniques, I bump into really severe limitations. For example in our images we photographed quite large objects from the ground - so we couldn't get a top view, that means they don't really have a top. There is always information missing, and this is when the software invents visual information.”

“I think that if we are busy recording and archiving our surroundings in that way, the question becomes, are we getting a little more comfortable losing originals?

There have been studies showing that, since our communication functions primarily via visual representation of certain objects and certain subjects, the fact that certain species of animals are becoming extinct right now is actually not phasing people that much, because all we would ever get to see of them anyway is their visual representation. Often we will not travel to the place where these animals live. We will not see them in nature. So, to us, it actually makes no difference, because we have a huge database of all kinds of visual content representing the world around us.

I see this as an exciting part of our social and cultural development but also a dangerous part as we become very comfortable letting go of physical surroundings in favour of their digital representations. For me this is a fascinating phenomenon.”

“How do you see people’s attitudes towards these objects change when they become digital?

I think my generation and younger, when we think of really important cultural artefacts, whether paintings or sculptures, we don't really think of the time that we went to go and see them, but we rather think of a multiplicity of versions and reproduction that an image search would give us because that’s how we experience those things. With certain monuments you can see the consequences of that kind of perception very literally, for example with the so called Spomeniks in ex-Yugoslavia.

A lot of architecture that remains from the socialist past of ex-Yugoslavia is very much deteriorating. The Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers documented a lot of those monuments and published an aesthetically beautiful, really gorgeous photobook of them. These images proliferated online very quickly for a number of reasons, one being the fact that they are clear geometrical shapes and they are really pleasing to look at on a screen. These images just went completely viral, and everyone knew what these monuments looked like all of a sudden, but people didn't know their context and their meaning. What happened is that the object became pictured and the picture became sort of 'meme-ified' - it spread like a meme. When an image turns into a meme it’s the same as when you repeat a word really, really often; it loses the content, it loses the information, it rather transforms into a sounds and rhythm.

That’s also what happened to these kinds of objects. They were translated into images and they proliferated like crazy, and all of a sudden there are all these versions. Their background and meaning seems to almost dissolve. It’s very difficult now to talk about what the individual object meant.”

[pelas-telas-que-andei-blog]