{"id":4374,"date":"2012-10-14T23:24:29","date_gmt":"2012-10-15T04:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/?p=4374"},"modified":"2014-12-14T19:26:45","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T00:26:45","slug":"what-will-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/2012\/10\/14\/what-will-last\/","title":{"rendered":"What Will Last?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Sumerian Cuneiform Tablet, c. 3000 BCE<\/p><\/div>\n

A friend used to like to say I have a mind like a steel sieve.\u00a0 My semantic memory<\/a> (for general knowledge, concepts and facts) is pretty good, but my episodic memory (for my own life experiences) is weak.\u00a0 My sense of my own history is vague, a collection of hazy dream images.\u00a0 Perhaps this keeps me feeling young, as I don\u2019t carry around the weight of the past, but it also gives me the sensation everything is always slipping away.\u00a0 I think this sense, early on, made me interested in documenting and archiving things, collecting images, books, and recordings.\u00a0 As a kid my favorite toys were the cassette recorder and the 8mm movie camera, tools for capturing fleeting moments.<\/p>\n

Recently I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about the impulse to save things, and the factors that make cultural products survive or disappear.\u00a0 In this post I share some of these thoughts for your consideration.\u00a0 Don\u2019t expect me to offer any good solutions!<\/p>\n

I have a room filled with my own drawings and photographs.\u00a0 I keep boxes of papers, shelves of books and discs and tapes, and several terabytes of digital files.\u00a0 A few years ago I had to move twice within two years.\u00a0 Those moves prompted me to get rid of a lot of stuff \u2013 I let go of two thirds of my books and most of my music and dumped tons of paper, but the archive remains vast.\u00a0 If I didn\u2019t live in the city, where space is expensive, I\u2019m sure I\u2019d have kept even more.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Self portrait with my books, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

I grew up in a house filled with books and records, in a family of intellectual collectors verging on hoarders.\u00a0 My mother has particularly recognized the necessity of organizing and distilling things into a useable form, and has, over the last several years, assembled a series of beautiful scrapbooks documenting the family history.\u00a0 Still, I know she feels overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Page from Hatt family history scrapbook, assembled by Martha Hatt<\/p><\/div>\n

We save things to carry what we value of the past into the future.\u00a0 We still find inspiration in the work of creators and thinkers long dead.\u00a0 As artists, we hope that something we create may not only speak to our contemporaries, but survive to inspire future generations.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to see my work preserved after I am gone, but I\u2019m afraid my lack of marketing efforts or serious art-world status may doom it to the dumpster.<\/p>\n

In the art supply store, paper is labeled as acid-free and archival, and paint pigments are ranked for permanence.\u00a0 But stable and durable materials won\u2019t preserve your work after you\u2019re gone unless those who receive it think it\u2019s worth saving.\u00a0 Cultural change, war and disaster, chance misplacements and discoveries, can doom or save artworks.\u00a0 Here are a few examples:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Child-Headed Whiplash-Tail Blengins, date unknown, by Henry Darger<\/p><\/div>\n

The reclusive artist Henry Darger<\/a>\u2019s obsessional writings and paintings on paper, work he never shared with anyone while he was alive, were preserved only because his landlord, Nathan Lerner<\/a>, an established photographer\/artist, recognized the creative merit of the work found in Darger\u2019s apartment after his death.\u00a0 Now Darger is much more famous than Lerner.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pennsylvania Station, Concourse from South, 1962, photo by Cervin Robinson<\/p><\/div>\n

New York\u2019s Pennsylvania Station<\/a> was one of the great buildings of the early 20th<\/sup>century, a magnificent temple of trains the same size as St. Peter\u2019s Basilica in the Vatican, but in the early 60\u2019s the interstates and the airlines were supplanting the railroads in American travel, and the vast building was razed to build Madison Square Garden.\u00a0 Neither its massiveness nor its grandeur could save it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Portrait of Antonio Vivaldi, artist unknown<\/p><\/div>\n

Antonio Vivaldi<\/a>\u00a0was a well-known composer in his own lifetime, but after his death his work was forgotten and was not part of the classical music canon for nearly 200 years until a boarding school, eager to sell off its dusty archives, asked music historian Alberto Gentili to assess the value of its music manuscripts.\u00a0 This was in 1926.\u00a0 Today, Vivaldi\u2019s \u201cFour Seasons\u201d is one of the most frequently recorded and performed baroque music compositions of all, and it\u2019s hard to imagine that it was unknown in the time of Mozart and Beethoven, but that is the case.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Francois 1, King of France, c. 1530, by Jean Clouet<\/p><\/div>\n

An art historian once told me a story about Fran\u00e7ois 1<\/a>, King of France, who was an important patron of the arts in the Renaissance era, supporting Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, and other great artists of the time.\u00a0 Apparently the king was a bit of a libertine, and constructed Roman style steam baths in his palace at Fontainebleau<\/a>, where he hosted parties.\u00a0 He hung many of his favorite paintings in these steam baths, where they were destroyed by the moisture.\u00a0 (I tried to verify this story by doing a little online research.\u00a0 I did find references to the King\u2019s having displayed paintings in his baths – nothing about any specific works having been ruined, but surely constant moisture can\u2019t have been good for them!)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Statue of Buddha in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, shown in 1997, left, and after destroyed by the Taliban, 2001, right, photographer(s) unknown<\/p><\/div>\n

There are so many stories like this.\u00a0 The painters considered the greatest in the nineteenth century are mostly forgotten today.\u00a0 Herman Melville died a failure, his work appreciated by almost no one until decades after his death.\u00a0 The great manuscripts of antiquity were gathered in the Library of Alexandria, which was burned down in an accident of war.\u00a0 Statues have been melted down to recover the bronze, or destroyed by religious fanatics as forbidden idols.\u00a0 Films thought to be forever lost have been found in garden sheds and attics.\u00a0 Works of the creative spirit are always being destroyed or lost or forgotten, sometimes rediscovered or reconsidered.\u00a0 It all seems incredibly random.\u00a0 An artist can try to make something that has the potential to last for a long time, and can hope it will be something people will value enough to protect, but nothing is certain.\u00a0 The future is a crapshoot.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Hall of Bulls, Cave of Lascaux, photo by Sisse Brimberg<\/p><\/div>\n

The artworks that survive from the Paleolithic era<\/a>, 40,000 to 10,000 years ago, are carvings in stone or bone and paintings in deep, difficult-to-access caves.\u00a0 Surely there were carvings or constructions in wood, paintings on bark or animal skins or fabrics, body art, and many other things, but all of that is gone now.\u00a0 I doubt that the artists thought of the caves as time capsules for their art, though that\u2019s what they became.\u00a0 The caves may have been secret ritual places, known to only a few in their time, but the art our paleolithic forebears showed in public is gone, while their deep hidden art still inspires many of us today.<\/p>\n

I grew up in an era of analog media \u2013 vinyl records, chemical photography, movies on film, books on paper.\u00a0 When I was in college, we studied Walter Benjamin\u2019s 1936 essay, \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction<\/a>\u201d, which argued that mass media had changed the function of art from something rare and precious and ritualistic into something ubiquitous and ephemeral, public and political.\u00a0 The digital revolution has accelerated this alteration to the point that it\u2019s now hard even to imagine the magical power that images once had.\u00a0 Even in my youth, finding a rare book or record in a dusty old shop was still exciting, but now almost anything is available by Google search.\u00a0 We need a new essayist to write a follow-up to Benjamin, \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Digital Media Avalanche\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Essayist Walter Benjamin, photographer unknown<\/p><\/div>\n

In the analog media era, mastering a musical instrument or photographic equipment were intensive crafts, and producing and distributing books or movies or records was an expensive industrial undertaking overseen by gatekeepers.\u00a0 These factors tended to draw clear lines between amateur and professional artists, and to keep the appearance of new material in any artistic field to a manageable flow that an audience could follow.\u00a0 Digital tools have made the production and sharing of material so easy that we\u2019re all swamped by mediocrities from artists who haven\u2019t paid their dues or done serious time in the woodshed.\u00a0 Even before the digital revolution, the arts had a bit of a supply\/demand problem.\u00a0 Suddenly there\u2019s this eruption of material, and the gems must be somewhere in that cataract, but finding them, even recognizing them, isn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n

In our digital world, most images, music, and writings increasingly exist only in digital form on hard drives or memory cards, or on servers in \u201cthe cloud\u201d.\u00a0 You sometimes hear the idea that all of this material is protected from loss by the fact that it\u2019s widely distributed and shared.\u00a0 How can the ubiquitous cease to be?\u00a0 But I think digital media have striking vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Fred Hatt projecting 35mm film in the Airstream trailer projection booth at the HBO\/Bryant Park Film Festival, 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

Some of you may know that besides my art and photography and filmmaking, I work as a freelance motion picture projectionist.\u00a0 It\u2019s a good trade that offers me a certain level of financial stability I\u2019ve never found from my more creative endeavors.\u00a0 I project old and new films at places like the Museum of Modern Art<\/a>, the Film Society of Lincoln Center<\/a>, and the French Institute\/Alliance Fran\u00e7aise<\/a>.\u00a0 In the film business, sound recording, film editing, and special effects have been mostly digital for decades now, but until fairly recently most movies were still shot on film and projected on film. \u00a0That’s all changing. \u00a0Now, when you see a new film at the multiplex, it is almost certainly a digital file<\/a> played on a server by a high-resolution digital projector, and probably shot with digital cameras as well.\u00a0 The major film distributors have announced plans to cease production of film prints<\/a>\u00a0in the next year or two.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Projectionist with Super Simplex 35mm projector, Capitol Theater, New London, CT, date and photographer unknown<\/p><\/div>\n

A good 35mm<\/a> theatrical movie projector will keep working for 50 years if you take good care of it.\u00a0 Cinema-quality digital projectors cost several times as much and can only be expected to last five to ten years, even if they aren\u2019t rendered obsolete by technological developments before they reach such an advanced age.\u00a0 Film projectors are 19th\u00a0<\/sup>century technology, simple mechanical devices, and most things that can go wrong with them can be fixed or at least jerry-rigged by the operator.\u00a0 The film print is a strip of pictures, 24 projected for every second of running time.\u00a0 You can look at the film directly and see the pictures on it, and they can be scanned or copied by any potential future technology.\u00a0 Film prints suffer from some wear and tear, but it\u2019s a gradual deterioration.\u00a0 A film that has some scratches and dust, or a little color fading, is still watchable.\u00a0 Technologists use the term “robust” to describe a technology that is reliable and flexible to changing conditions – it bends but does not break, or it deteriorates slowly but still does the job, or it is simple to maintain and fix even while it is running.\u00a0 35mm is the ultimate example of a robust technology.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Two frames of 35mm motion picture film. The picture is optically “squeezed” to be projected on a wide screen using an anamorphic lens. To the left of the picture area is the analog, optical sound track. A digital sound track is recorded with dots in between the perforations on the left, and another format digital sound track in blue on the edges of the film. \u00a0Twenty-four of these frames are projected every second, and the average feature film is about 2 miles or 3 kilometers in length.<\/p><\/div>\n

The new digital cinema systems, on the other hand, are highly complex and also encumbered by copy-prevention measures that put serious limitations on testing and troubleshooting.\u00a0 If something goes wrong during projection, the screening usually has to be cancelled, because there is no quick fix.\u00a0 At this year\u2019s New York Film Festival, a screening<\/a>\u00a0of Brian De Palma\u2019s new movie, with the director in attendance, had to be aborted midway due to technical difficulties.\u00a0 Already most of the projectionists I know have experienced these occasional devastating problems with digital screenings, problems that never happened with film.\u00a0 Unlike the film print, with its visible image frames, the digital film is nothing but about 150-200 gigabytes of ones and zeroes, highly encrypted.\u00a0 A small error, a little bit of corruption in such a file can render it completely unplayable, or at least unbearable to watch.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dolby Cinema Server<\/p><\/div>\n

All digital files are analog information encoded into binary numbers and recorded microscopically on optical or magnetic media.\u00a0 Reconstructing the texts, images, or sounds they represent into a form we can use requires both the correct hardware and the correct software – if either one is unavailable, you have a problem.\u00a0 These technologies are constantly changing.\u00a0 Already if you have obsolete media like floppy discs, or files recorded in a ten-year-old program, you may have difficulty recovering them today.\u00a0 These files have become essentially unreadable in a matter of years.\u00a0 How much more will be lost this way over the course of decades or centuries?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Corrupted jpg camera image file, photo by Sokwhan Huh<\/p><\/div>\n

Professional archivists<\/a> suggest that all digital materials should be recopied every few years onto the best available current formats and media.\u00a0 As long as the speed and efficiency of the technology continues to increase exponentially (as does the quantity of digital material we expect to conserve) this has been possible, but does it really seem completely unlikely that a slowing of the technology, a financial crisis cutting budgets for media archiving, or some other occurrence may erase or render unusable vast quantities of words, images and sounds?\u00a0 A serious collapse of our technological civilization, even a gradual collapse, due to wars or peak oil or environmental disaster or whatever, would probably completely doom all digital files to extinction.<\/p>\n

I envision a time in the twenty-second century when cultural historians will still have great collections of 20th<\/sup> century analog photographs, recordings, films, and printed matter, while much of the 21st\u00a0<\/sup>century stuff has vanished into a technological memory hole \u2013 a digital dark age.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jpg Corruption, photo by Codell. This is a digital camera file damaged by a loss of power while saving the file.<\/p><\/div>\n

Perhaps the most permanent material ever discovered for information recording is the clay tablet<\/a>.\u00a0 Thousands of such tablets, inscribed in soft clay with a stylus over five thousand years ago, still survive in completely readable form.\u00a0 Ceramics can be broken, but generally in a way that can be reassembled.\u00a0 A bull in a china shop can never be as destructive as a corrupt code in a digital system.\u00a0 Perhaps our creative efforts have a better shot at lasting if they stay closer to earth.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Akkadian Cuneiform Tablet, c. 3000 BCE, photographer unknown<\/p><\/div>\n

Most of the images in this post were found on the web. \u00a0Clicking on a photo links to the site where I found it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend used to like to say I have a mind like a steel sieve.\u00a0 My semantic memory (for general knowledge, concepts and facts) is pretty good, but my episodic memory (for my own life experiences) is weak.\u00a0 My sense of my own history is vague, a collection of hazy dream images.\u00a0 Perhaps this keeps […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[69,200],"tags":[161,271,272],"class_list":["post-4374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-and-society","category-art-history-2","tag-archiving","tag-art-history","tag-art-and-society"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Will Last? - DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/2012\/10\/14\/what-will-last\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Will Last? - DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A friend used to like to say I have a mind like a steel sieve.\u00a0 My semantic memory (for general knowledge, concepts and facts) is pretty good, but my episodic memory (for my own life experiences) is weak.\u00a0 My sense of my own history is vague, a collection of hazy dream images.\u00a0 Perhaps this keeps […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/2012\/10\/14\/what-will-last\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-10-15T04:24:29+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2014-12-15T00:26:45+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/fredhatt.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/cuneiform-tablets-charles-frith-sumerian.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"fred\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"fred\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"13 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/fredhatt.com\\\/blog\\\/2012\\\/10\\\/14\\\/what-will-last\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/fredhatt.com\\\/blog\\\/2012\\\/10\\\/14\\\/what-will-last\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"fred\",\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/fredhatt.com\\\/blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/c298e6b4be9e8bbc43ff45acb35fcc76\"},\"headline\":\"What Will Last?\",\"datePublished\":\"2012-10-15T04:24:29+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-12-15T00:26:45+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/fredhatt.com\\\/blog\\\/2012\\\/10\\\/14\\\/what-will-last\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":2681,\"commentCount\":14,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/fredhatt.com\\\/blog\\\/2012\\\/10\\\/14\\\/what-will-last\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"http:\\\/\\\/fredhatt.com\\\/blog\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2012\\\/10\\\/cuneiform-tablets-charles-frith-sumerian.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Archiving\",\"Art & History\",\"Art and Society\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Art and Society\",\"Art History\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/fredhatt.com\\\/blog\\\/2012\\\/10\\\/14\\\/what-will-last\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/fredhatt.com\\\/blog\\\/2012\\\/10\\\/14\\\/what-will-last\\\/\",\"name\":\"What Will Last? 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