User:Dusan Barok/Monoskop library

Public library of media arts and culture

Outline

Throughout the years I collected about 75 gigabytes of experimental films, video art, electroacoustic music, scanned copies of computer-aided paintings, graphics, prints, and numerous publications covering media arts and culture in east-central Europe, which currently sit on my harddrive. I included content I thought is relevant for otherwise under-developed history of media culture in this region. Thinking about how to make the collection public and particularly about limits of online archiving, I started to treat it as a initial phase, a starting point for development of a framework for multimedia resource maintained by a peer network.

Objective

The main objective of the project si to build a distributed framework for permanent public access to the archive.

Approach

• Open source art history - provide source documents, so that multiple art histories may be produced
• P2P topology for non-tech audience
• Place-based history - ground the works and events to locative context

Relation to previous work

The project emerged from my previous work on Monoskop, a collaborative wiki research on social history of media art and culture (since 2004), and Monoskop/log, a living archive of writings on art, culture and media technology (since 2009).

Research threads

archive, distributed/peer-to-peer network, art history, taxonomy/tagging

Field

Peer-to-peer archives

• Private torrent trackers: Karagarga, SurrealMoviez, What.cd. The three probably best sources for movies and music online are exclusive private communities maintaining strict user guidelines and being ruled by benevolent dictatorship of a few.
• Filesharing sites for ebooks: Aaaaarg, Library.nu. Both are non-invite archives using centralised and third-party file storage.
• Runme.org software art repository

Curated archives

Ubu, compArt daDA

Software

• BitTorrent DNA [1], [2], WebSocket [3], P2P-Next, Anomos, ActiveArchives, 0xdb.org

Discussion

• Aaron Swartz's Jstor case [4] [5], Papers from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society leak
• public data criticism of open data activism (Gurstein's criticism of Open Knowledge Foundation) [6] [7]
• critique of digital humanities and 'computational turn' in humanities [8]
• Manovich's cultural analytics (Holmes) [9]
• tactical librarianship [10]

Bibliography

• Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945 [11] Memex
• Ted Nelson, A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate, 1965
• Ted Nelson, Literary Machines, 1980s Xanadu
• Tim Berners-Lee, 1980 ENQUIRE System
• in 1903 Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss published their essay on primitive classification systems to show how they are determined by the shape of society [12]
• Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. University of Chicago Press, 1996. [13]
• Esther Weltevrede, "Archiving Web dynamics" [14]
• Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito, Caitlin Jones (eds.), Permanence Through Change: The Variable media Approach, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with Montreal: Daniel Langlois Foundation, 2003. English and French. [15]
• Sandra Fauconnier and Rens Frommé, Capturing Unstable Media: "Summary of Research Results", March 2003 [16]
• Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (eds.), Making Art of Databases, Rotterdam: V2, 2003. [17]
• Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive. London: Whitechapel, 2006. [18]
• Pelle Snickars, Patrick Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader. National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, June 2009 [19]
• Karin Bijsterveld, José van Dijck (eds.), Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2009. [20]
• Julian Myers, "Four Dialogues 2: On AAAARG", Aug 2009. [21]
• Janneke Adema, "Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing", Sep 2009. [22]
• Morgan Currie, "Small is Beautiful: a discussion with AAAARG architect Sean Dockray", Jan 2010. [23]
• Annet Dekker (ed.), Archive2020 – Sustainable Archiving of Born-Digital Cultural Content. Virtueel Platform, 2010. [24]
• "The AAAARG.org Discussion of the Macmillan Threat", Apr 2010. [25]
• -empyre- list, "Publishing In Convergence" mailing list discussion moderated by Michael Deiter, Morgan Currie and John Haltiwanger, Jun 2010. [26]
• Nina Wenhart, "W0rdM4g1x. Or how to put a spell on Media Art Archives", January 2011, [27]
• Matthew Fuller, "In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with Sean Dockray", Mute magazine, May 2011. [28]
• more: [29], [30]