At the edges of the solar system, the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts launched in the 70s, began to slow down. To understand this anomaly, NASA had to go through data recorded during the construction and flight of the crafts.
Conference in english.

Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 6:30pm, IRCAM, Igor-Stravinsky Room

In the part of ManiFeste-2013.  Art-Science Think Tank. Posterity, The Future, and Oblivion: The Digital Work (June 12-914, 2013)
© Ircam, 2013

Using open formats and freeware, by encouraging copies and sharing, the problem of preserving works could be solved, with the condition that alternative means of remuneration are offered.
Video in French.

Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 2:30pm, IRCAM, Igor-Stravinsky Room

In the part of ManiFeste-2013. Art-Science Think Tank. Posterity, The Future, and Oblivion: The Digital Work (June 12-14, 2013)
© IRCAM, 2013

Debates and the Art-Science Think Tank on the Work in the Digital Age: A Comparison of Faust and Janus. How can works created using technology that will soon be obsolete be perpetuated? This is a crucial question that touches both the arts and the sharing of knowledge. More info>

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Conferences

3:30pm, Sacem, Auditorium Debussy-Ravel

Christophe Dessimoz Information Storage in DNA [abstract]

4:30pm, Sacem, Auditorium Debussy-Ravel

Alain Bonardi Identity (Identities) and the Transmission of a Real-Time Musical Work [abstract]
Delphine Dauga Biocurating: Conserving Live Data [abstract]

Debate

6:30pm, Sacem, Auditorium Debussy-Ravel

Patrick Bazin | Emmanuel Hoog | Michaël Levinas | Laurent Petitgirard | Bruno Racine
Discussion Leader: Didier Si Ammour

An IRCAM-Centre Pompidou and Sacem coproduction. With the support of the DREST-the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the UPMC.

RERO www.reroart.com

Conferences. June 13

2:30pm, IRCAM, Igor-Stravinsky Room

Roberto Di Cosmo Organizing Sharing to Preserve Data [abstract]
Amadeo Napoli From Data to Knowledge: A Long Path to Enrich Memories [abstract]

4:30pm, IRCAM, Igor-Stravinsky Room

Christine Berthaud Open Archives for Science [abstract]
Thierry Bouche The Digital Mathematical Library [abstract]

Keynote

6:30pm, IRCAM, Igor-Stravinsky Room

Slava G. Turyshev The Pioneer Anomaly [abstract]

Debate

8pm, IRCAM, Espace de projection

Pierre Boulez | Régis Debray | Pierre Lemarquis
Discussion Leader: Frank Madlener (Director of IRCAM)

An IRCAM-Centre Pompidou and Sacem coproduction. With the support of the DREST-the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the UPMC.

What is the subject of the book?

Jérôme Vincent. This book is made up of three parts; each part takes place during a different time, several centuries apart. The subject is the destiny of a monastery. The first part takes place six centuries after a nuclear apocalypse. The survivors refuse all forms of knowledge under the pretense that science had led the world to a catastrophe. A young monk discovers a secret place filled with books. After certain events, the works are hidden within the religious edifice.

What pushed the author to write such a fable?

J. V. In principle, the destruction of the Monte Cassino abbey during the Second World War pushed Walter Miller to write this book in the 50s. This former soldier was involved in combats around the building. The connection seems obvious, just like nuclear trauma in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The man was more a short-story writer than novelist and A Canticle for Leibowitz was his only work (and is made up of three long short stories).  Miller committed suicide while writing the following episode during the 90s.

Pascal Godbillon. The war was particularly bloody for Miller. He wrote this book as a kind of therapy. Walter Miller Jr. lived in solitude. He wrote to authors he liked to congratulate them, but always told them that he didn’t want to meet them! We can also think of a SF author like Joe Haldeman who wrote The Forever War when he came back from Vietnam.

What is the meaning of this story?

J. V. The work is ripe with numerous themes and questions. It evokes the fluctuations of humanity, going from a period of technology to one of barbarism in which science and knowledge is refused. The question of knowledge and its connections with peace is explored. Are we happier with knowledge?

P. G. This is a highly topical novel if we analyze the events in Syria, for example. The grand principle of the book is that humanity almost destroyed itself and despite that, it began again. From an archive point of view, the book’s lesson is that with digital technology, mankind would have found itself with dead silicon after the apocalypse. With paper archives, they are able to recreate the earliest forms of technology. With digital supports, we can lose understanding of both the signal and the signal itself.

So this book, like other science fiction books, echoes our reflection on the loss of knowledge?

J. V. Yes because science fiction is basically a genre that never stops questioning our present. It is also for this that the book remains topical, close to us. In terms of references, we can cite Foundation by Isaac Asimov of course, where a community of scientists saves human knowledge in preparation for a barbaric period.

P. G. Concerning the problem of archival storage, I think about Borges and his Library of Babel that stocks unreadable books. Another work comes to mind: Le Successeur de pierre.  Its author, Jean-Michel Truong begins with a pope’s bull and then moves on to a future (2032) where men are stored in the pyramids. He presents humanity like something transient. In the French title the author has put a capital letter on the word Successeur successor, rather than on pierre because it is successor who is the superior being. The successor is digital technology; the digital age that must replace humanity. We archive consciousness in silicon. A book that is close to your theme…

Why did you decide to republish A Canticle for Leibowitz?

P. G. The book has been unavailable for a few years. Sales weren’t very high so we decided to leave it be. This decision frustrated me because it’s a major work. A few years later, Walter Miller began writing the next episode. But he had writer’s block. He looked for an author who could finish the work. Before committing suicide, he left a lot of notes about the novel’s future. The continuation wasn’t available for a long time either. This time, we are publishing the two works at the same time. Certain authors write only one book. This is the case of Walter Miller! A Canticle for Leibowitz is a great science fiction book that has gone beyond its genre.

Science, The First Victim

The organizations and companies that feel concerned by this subject are rare, as seen during the public awareness project CASPAR supported by the European Commission. Who would think that NASA, the space agency that pilots robots on Mars, could be one of the first victims of this digital dark age? At the frontiers of our solar system, Pioneer 10 and 11 launched in the 1970s experienced acceleration anomalies. It wasn’t easy for program managers to bring themselves to contradict the laws of physics to explain this phenomenon.  The teams at Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Aerospatiale wanted to understand what was wrong with their calculations, or with the engine design. For this, they had to dig up the data recorded during both the probes’ construction and flight. But digital obscurantism had already carried out its work: it was impossible to read the old punch cards and find the plans. Considerable efforts were made over several years to uncover the information buried in antiquated and occasionally defective supports.

Digital Art Victim of its Overzealousness

If NASA was impacted, it is obvious that other institutions have alowed a part of their memories deteriorate. Beginning with IRCAM: when the publisher of Marc André Dalbavie’s work wanted to revive Diadèmes for a concert in the United States in 1986, the computer music designer, Serge Lemouton, discovered that the Yamaha synthesizers originally used were no longer functional. The fact that the technological parts of the work were carried out on old versions of software and on old machines meant that it was not performable in its current state. Weeks of work were required to bring the piece up to date on modern tools. Music, like science, is outmoded by the incredible speed of digital technology. Unreadable CDROMs of contemporary art installations created using old versions of software fill the FRAC’s drawers. A 10,000-year-old cave painting is still visible but a work commissioned 10 years ago is barely accessible. The artist must be contacted for the source code so that it can be brought up to date on recent software. The sales purchase agreement does not always contain this clause and the artist, endeared to the initial form, does not want to adapt it. In video games, this digital quagmire can also be seen; the industry thinks that conserving its heritage can only be carried out at the expense of innovation. Impassioned activists have taken it upon themselves to revitalize works. A French association (MO5.Com) is specialized in the conservation of game titles and supports, maintaining their initial interaction. Because of their work, it is now possible to play Frédérick Raynal’s Alone in the Dark on a keyboard from 1992, if you can get to one of their exhibits. It is much easier to watch a film by Marcel Carné on BluRay. The film industry has begun its change to digital technology, but in France it is still compulsory to deposit a reel of film at the CNC where it is archived.

Good Digital Technology Practices

While digital technology is a danger for the immediate future, it is still a good way to construct, disseminate, and store. The problem must be addressed and subtle strategies must be put into place today. The first strategy consists of programming in languages that can be read in the future. There will always be a clever engineer capable of waking up a square of silicon. We must insure that the lines memorized are understandable and compilable. For this, nothing is better than a mature language fairly close to the machine, but well structured. C and its affiliate C++ are excellent candidates: born in the 1970s, they have weathered the technological upheavals.

Concerning the documents themselves, it is essentially a choice of format. Software programs die in rhythm with their business cycles, taking with them proprietary locks. The .doc was put in place by Corel and taken over by Microsoft. Innumerable documents have been written and saved in this format. Nevertheless, the company Redmond is abandoning it because its retro-compatibility is too difficult to maintain. It appears to be preferable to favor open formats with public specifications. Separating contents from their formatting is also an avenue for preservation. This is one of the concepts of LaTeX, a highly successful software program with the scientific community that loves it for its transparence and functionality that are the results of freeware.

The famous “open source” seems to provide a sort of continuity assurance. The projects are carried out in large communities, knowledge is shared and the work is accessible to everyone. A user has all the keys to a product; a product is no longer a black box. The GitHub hosting service is a favored spot to discuss these programs. Source codes are deposited in this worldwide catalogue on servers located all over the Web. This is the principle of storage that has focused everyone’s attention today called “the cloud”. This cloud is made up of immense data centers spread out throughout the world. Servers are linked to each other so they can receive and distribute data synchronously according to the traffic.

By placing this information in such systems, the user becomes free of the system’s material constraints. The user simply deposes their objects on these servers via the Internet. The hosting company looks after the maintenance of the servers, guaranteeing permanent availability.  Questions of confidentiality and of the volatility of data are often brought up as a critique of this type of storage. While waiting for a more reassuring national cloud, bioinformatic scientists carry out experiments where documents are coded in DNA format. After all, these molecular chains, these keys to the information of living organisms, are a simple format that is simple to produce and store. The few thousand years that separate us from the first cells are a reassuring message for conservators.

RERO www.reroart.com

Encounters. June 12

2:30pm, IRCAM, Igor-Stravinsky Room

Andrew Gerzso The Future of Mixed Works: the Issues [abstract]
Anne Laforet Net Art at the Museum [abstract]

4:30pm, IRCAM, Igor-Stravinsky Room

Frédérick Raynal Conserving Interaction [abstract]
Jean-Baptiste Clais The Video-Play Patrimony and the World of Cultural Heritage [abstract]
Philippe Dubois Techniques for the Preservation of Video Games [abstract]

Debate

6:30pm, IRCAM, Salle Igor-Stravinsky

Nicolas Bourriaud | Christophe Bruno | Jean-Baptiste Clais | Radu Mihaileanu
Discussion Leader: Emmanuel Tellier (journalist Télérama)

An IRCAM-Centre Pompidou and Sacem coproduction. With the support of the DREST-the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the UPMC.

Throughout its history, IRCAM has been an arena where we can observe the problem of the conservation of digital supports for interactive music. In the beginning, we were not aware of the seriousness of the problem: the works produced in the 1980s were made with a total lack of concern for this issue or with the optimism of a technophiliac. The realization of the issue came about later, in the beginning of the 21st century.

IRCAM has always been concerned by the conservation of the works created in its studios. To create its repertoire, the institute has committed to working with composers from whom it commissions works that use the fruits of the institute’s research. This concern for the conservation takes the form of archives on different supports and documentation written by tutors/assistants/computer music designers. Increasing the prestige of works by performing them in concert and on tour leads to the creation of an original repertoire. The conservation of this repertoire is obviously a part of the will to create a history, a certain type of tradition.

The experience of the computer music designers, who must transfer sometimes complex works to perform them again (at IRCAM we call this action “porting”) from one system to another as technology evolves from one generation to another (from the historical 4X to the IRCAM computer music station and different versions of MAX software), has led us to invent, to develop, a specific savoir-faire of the techniques and practices that have made it possible to save almost the entire catalogue of works created at IRCAM (about 600 works) from digital ruin.

The score is an integral part of our musique savante (serious art music). Even if all music is ephemeral and immaterial, the act of writing it down inscribes it in history and in the effort of “the desire to last”. Not all composers seem particularly worried about the future of their works; creation is more about renewal, about a flow, than about hoarding and storing. And yet, if composers write down their music, it is for its survival. The score is both a means to transmit music to the performers and a support that enables its long-term preservation. In this respect, electro-acoustic music, and particularly interactive mixed works, creates numerous problems because today there is no universally shared musical notation.

The conservation of electro-acoustic works is impossible without its performers who are computer music designers, both archeologists of a near past, specialists of obsolete technologies, interpreters of musical texts, and virtuosos of new musical instrument-making technologies. The responsibility of transmitting the composer’s will with authenticity lies with them.

You recently addressed the status of forgetting in the digital age. Can you tell us your thoughts?

What is striking is that digital technology is anchored in the information culture. In this context, there is no way to think of forgetting beyond a technical failure. Without forgetting, humans could not function. There is a specificity in the use of our memory: we can forget a piece of information and then remember it again later. In the digital structure, this is not the case; we can not go backwards. The status of memory is changing because we are moving towards a model imposed by technology.

What are the consequences of this change?

It results in attaching too much importance to archiving data. Before the digital era, what survived became our heritage. With digital technology, we can not carry out this kind of strategy. We must chose what we should archive and maintain. There is a reversal of perspectives that is being put into place. However, it is very difficult to decide what is important or not. There are so many examples in history! Things that were crucial and became minor, and other things that were marginal and became decisive in retrospect. The choice becomes more and more difficult. We must create a social dialogue on the theme of “how to manage our memory to conserve it”.

Waiting for this pubic debate, what coherent strategy for storage do we have?

Very recently, we had the illusion that we could store everything. We discovered shortly after this that it wasn’t possible. Today, we have to choose. The obvious example is the archival storage of the French Internet. It is so complicated for the BNF (French national library) to decide on the proper perimeter. We enter a grey area where archives are no longer personal or institutional. We have to reinvent strategies that are better adapted to the constraints and reality of digital culture. Since 2006, we have entered into the phase of the social network. Internet users create biographies that are shared. Before, they were only in an intimate space. These content platforms have become so imposing that we have lost the control of the photographic, video, and text data.

Who does this data belong to?

Most of it belongs to private companies. And yet, these companies could disappear; this already happened in the recent digital era. The data is lost with the company. The data can also be used for commercial means. We presuppose an intention with an archival trace. But I am not convinced by the absolutism of the promises connected to statistical models. We must look at how they were constructed.  Likewise, we could change to a prescriptive model rather than remaining with predictions. Google, for example, is becoming a recommendation engine. It is no longer just a search engine. What is troubling is that this modifies the relevance model.

A model that relies in part on a unique digital encyclopedia from elsewhere?

Wikipedia, which I have admired since its beginnings, is not exactly a unique encyclopedia because it exists in several languages.  When comparing files from one idiom to another, we see several differences. But in my eyes there are two problems: the writing is based on a model of objectivity that we inherited from the 19th century. Wikipedia therefore proclaims that it only reflects the state of today’s knowledge. We know very well that this is never the case. The references from the search engine gives it a privileged status. That being the case, the responsibility linked to the participatory model must be rethought. This model that consists of accepting an article based on its references is no longer appropriate.  The metric of legitimacy is modeled on the scientific article. But, in reality, this does not suffice to guarantee the chain of knowledge and its production.

For you, what is the status of the conservation of digital memory?

There are always means of conservation. Even in ancient times with the codex or carvings in stone. Digital technology has its own abilities and its own weaknesses. But for the first time, we are using the same technology on a global scale; a small number controls the same platforms. Before the conservation was more spread out, there were forms of autonomy, forms of localism that enabled variations. We see the dynamic between this global dimension and a return to localism. In antiquity, we were in an era of rarity. Today, we are in an era of overabundance, but with a rarity of platforms.

Further Information: Chair of Digital Culture Website

Does a digital artist always program their installations?

Not always. Personally, I do it a lot because I studied computer science and learned several languages. After studying computer science, I went to beau-arts to become an artist. At the end of the 1990s, I veered towards the Internet. I started working on the relationships between virtual streams and real space. At the beginning of the 21st century, I started to become more interested in the medias present on the Web. This is when I created a Web TV dedicated to contemporary art. The site opened and anybody could send me their creations.

How did you start your work on memory and time?

In reality, my work on television and online consisted of creating matrixes that received and stored contents. This is how I began to question the continuity of information.  I wanted to do the opposite of real-time. I started a series called 2067 where the first work was a Website that lets users send messages to the future. I stored the contents in a text file because I thought that the SQL (Structured Query Language) formats weren’t necessarily permanent. I encoded the data in order to respect the confidentiality of the emails. Every day, a clock processes the emails to be sent. The system was installed on a server that has been copied to assure its survival until 2067, at least…

Why this date?

100 years after my birth: it’s a symbolic boundary. Maybe the date of my death… I then varied the concept with a radio and phone booths. The principle didn’t change, but it wasn’t online. I question the fragility of new medias and supports. I created a work on this idea: a hard drive on paper. It consisted of printing a book containing the binary code of a file. I started with Méliès’ film A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) and then La Jetée by Chris Marker. I materialized the files in a paper format to give them a better chance for survival.

Is materializing digital technology your new avenue of exploration?

Yes. Right now I’m working on digital land art installations on the same theme. I am going to encrypt an image file of the Mona Lisa with trees. In practical terms, I will put zeros and ones on the tree trunks in a forest. I worked out that I will need about 8,000 trees. The goal of this research is to invent vitrification methods for the virtual in the real world.

To find out more: www.guez.org | Jeu de Paume virtual space