User:ThomasW/First Proposal Outline

My Hard-Drive Died (working tittle)

Proposal

I am making a speaker installation of old hard-drives that will communicate peoples experience on the topic of data loss by gathering story’s from twitter.

Introduction

We live in a world where we make and store more and more information electronically, we take photos all day long with our smart phones, we write emails and write texts.... But with this mass of production of information, we are hitting the problems of storing all of this securely over a long period of time. Printed photos last for decades if stored secularly, but a digital photo is way more unstable. Hard-drives last only around 5 years, flash memory will not keep its information over a long periods with no use, Cloud services can never guaranty that they still be in business in a 100 years. But what happens when this devices and services that we put so much trust in fails. I want to inform people that we need to be worried about where and how we store our information, that we are the only ones that can really take care of it. "Yet digital culture brings with it a great paradox whereby it contributes as much to amnesia and collective forgetting as to remembering. "What of, ask Andreas Huyussen, to boom in memory were inevitably accompanied by a boom in forgetting?" Page 70

Recent observations

Technology is getting more and more distance from everyday people. Its hidden away in black boxes where only the experts are allowed access, its cuttings people access by hiding it behind hyper-bull and security screws self-destructing glues. A manufacture of drives can never promise more then a five year lifespan, but that will never be communicated, instead hyper bull like “life-time” guaranty and “shock resilient” are used. Its not something new, all true history of storage technology this words have been used.

Possible outcome

The visual appearance of it can take the form of a box on a table with all of its sides coved with hard-drive drives, mimicking the notions of a “black box” Even that most drives are made around the same configuration, there is always some difference in how the look on the visual side, there is possible to work with that as making some drives stand out, or pattern can be made.

Relation to previous practice

I have never really done a project related to electronics and code, I see this as a project to expand on my own knowledge in the field.

Practical steps

The initial state of the project I need to refined the way I solder the hard-drives together as my prototype did work, but I had some problems of keeping the connection solid and stable. For the project I need to still keep working on collecting tweets from people, this is done by my own twitter account “My Hard-Drive Died” where I log into once I week, search for the term and retweets and by 22 July 2015 I have over 200 tweets, I can also automate this process, but there is some general difficulties using the twitter API. Twitter has made it much harder now then just for over a year ago to make a bot for retweets. I need to research and figure out how the tweets can be read and spoken true a text to voice program out of the different hard-drives. 1. They all speak the same time, this can maybe be an interesting effect 2. They all speak on different times, possible map drives to different “setts of text” The twitter accounts content will be downloaded as a CSV file, as this is still possible and allowed to download your own twitter account that you own true the Twitter menu systems. What the code language that will be used, I think it maybe will be Python code, running from a Raspberry Pi.

17.05.2015

Dead Media Wall

• 1) There is no permanent storage device yet made, but company’s always promises eternal, permanent, life time guaranty for storage of your digital information. Been looking into people own experience when this lies break their promises with their user.
• 2) Collecting peoples own experience of data-loss on-line on twitter .
• 3) A wall that show ads of storage devices on different types of screens together with re purpose storage devices as speakers.. (Speakers of old Hard-Drives)

Found Media Log

• 1) All around us there is old disc, drives, cds, tapes ++ with your collective memory's, but what happens when they get stock on them. Do we remember whats on them? Do we remember the formats?
• 2) Make an online collection of peoples old storage media, ask people to send in their objects with the stories around them, where they are from, what they think is on them and also show what's on them if I can get access to them (kryoflux, VHS to Mac adapters +)
• 3) A online website, printed book/magazine with the collection, or both.. as paper is fare better storage medium them digital for long-term preservation.

The Printed Cybernetic Library

• 1) Computers come and go, that's the nature of technological development, but old machines form the 70s. 80S and even 90s are long since been driven to the dump. A lot like the Acorn Computer, Atari, Osborne and more are slowly dissipating, but the irony is that the computer manuals still exist, the printed word outlast the electronics..
• 2) Collect old manuals, books for computer system
• 3) Make a box, “storage device” or shelf (maybe of old computer cabinets) on where to show them and display them..

The Unlimited Drive

• 1) There is no permanent storage device yet made, but company’s always promises eternal, permanent, life time guaranty for storage of your digital information.
• 2) Collect information and knowledge around current and dead storage devices.
• 3) One or a collection of “fantastic” storage devices, the USB stick hat got 1000000000tb, but will never store it, but content delete the “old” information on them. (fake usb sticks from China)

The Unlimited Cloud

Same as The Unlimited Drive, but only as a “cloud” storage

10.05.2015

1) what have been your current areas of research?

• “Personal” Digital Archive [1]
• Over-promises of Cloud Services
• Video Games – Digital legacy / Specific Games...
• Creations of digital memory’s and social media
• Where designers role are and how not to go total mad in [Technocultures, +++
• The renaissance of paper printing in the digital society
• The role library have now?

Bruce willis itunes

2) how do you intend to build on them?

• Look at people gut feelings about data loss by looking at social media
• What language does cloud services use when they market themselves?
• How does archive store materials, physical, visit places?
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3) formulate an (im)possible project (or projects) that address 1) and 2)

• A screen wall that show text from the Internet (social media) with texts from the internet about loss of personal data and the text is being transmitter true old dead hard-drive as audio.
• An online magazine/site +++ where I ask people to send in their old dead media objects that they cant access no more. They send in there objects with a description on where, why and what they think is on there. The object is photograph, and it get put online (if I can get the content of I show that as well) as a collection.
• Show a collection of “lets plays” video game footage , video cube where you are in the games. Video walls (screens of different sizes and type)
• Fake ads for cloud services put in the stress twisting the promises of the cloud (ad busting)
• Fake websites for cloud services put in the stress twisting the promises of the cloud (ad busting)
• Use the marketing for cloud services in a new way, to mock them.
• Never saving “storage solution” that never saves the content but just deletes it
• Mock online storage solution where content are being mined for data and being sold on a data “stock-market” (not real)
• Hybrid laser/ink printer where you can print out content from > for offline storage
• Video-photo-text about the library, record the living and the dead archives