WEBVTT 00:00:00.140 --> 00:00:03.647 Good evening, everybody. Welcome and thank you for coming. My name is Jim 00:00:03.680 --> 00:00:08.506 O'donnell. I'm the university librarian In that capacity and in other 00:00:08.539 --> 00:00:12.656 capacities. I know a thing or two about encyclopedias. The word has been 00:00:12.689 --> 00:00:18.017 around for over 2000 years and it always captures a spirit of trying to 00:00:18.050 --> 00:00:23.206 include somehow or another everything we can know in the confines of a 00:00:23.239 --> 00:00:29.017 curriculum set of books, an intellectual architecture of some kind. So 00:00:29.050 --> 00:00:32.887 tonight we're here to think about encyclopedias and other things and we 00:00:32.920 --> 00:00:36.957 have our exhibits set up if you haven't noticed that facing a lot of other 00:00:36.990 --> 00:00:42.317 traditional print encyclopedias. But this one that we're playing with, 00:00:42.350 --> 00:00:46.747 thinking with thinking about tonight is about two orders of magnitude 00:00:46.780 --> 00:00:50.997 larger than anything on the other side of the aisle, two orders of 00:00:51.030 --> 00:00:55.906 magnitude is a lot. It's a whole lot bigger. The world is changed and 00:00:55.939 --> 00:01:03.766 different for this kind of thing, if it's a thing to be possible. So thank 00:01:03.799 --> 00:01:08.087 you for coming. We've invited three people to introduce us to the exhibit 00:01:08.120 --> 00:01:15.206 and their reflections on the exhibit. I'll introduce each in sequence um, 00:01:15.239 --> 00:01:20.906 while also recognizing a another important friend who's with us tonight. 00:01:20.939 --> 00:01:25.387 Michael Mando Berg will speak to us first. He is the artist. I haven't 00:01:25.420 --> 00:01:29.846 consulted with him, but I'm going to call him an internet artist because 00:01:29.879 --> 00:01:33.656 almost everything he does gets tangled up in the internet in some form or 00:01:33.689 --> 00:01:37.977 another. I'm not sure I've ever thought about calling a firefox plug in a 00:01:38.010 --> 00:01:43.867 work of art, but I'm not quite sure what else to call the things he does 00:01:43.900 --> 00:01:49.626 that are Firefox plug ins. He's been working for the last 15, 20 years in 00:01:49.659 --> 00:01:52.857 developing a profile. He teaches at the College of Staten Island. He's 00:01:52.890 --> 00:01:58.206 based in New York, but he's also had exhibits in various places in Europe. 00:01:58.239 --> 00:02:03.596 This exhibit comes to us because it previewed on the road before coming 00:02:03.629 --> 00:02:09.406 to the big city of Tempe Arizona in Lower Manhattan um at the Elizabeth 00:02:09.439 --> 00:02:12.737 Denny Gallery. And it's a pleasure to welcome Elizabeth Denny, who's here 00:02:12.770 --> 00:02:16.566 in the front row. Who was the impresario? Who with Michael made this 00:02:16.599 --> 00:02:21.066 happen. Got our attention. Uh it got a fair amount of ink in some ways 00:02:21.099 --> 00:02:25.237 last summer, but it was there in provincial Lower Manhattan and we thought 00:02:25.270 --> 00:02:28.886 it was time to bring it to the bright lights and big city of Tempe. And 00:02:28.919 --> 00:02:33.626 we're grateful uh to Elizabeth and Michael for helping us make this 00:02:33.659 --> 00:02:37.126 possible. So I will shut up and say no more. We have two of our faculty 00:02:37.159 --> 00:02:41.807 colleagues to respond and reflect on this after we hear from Michael. But 00:02:41.840 --> 00:02:47.406 Michael, welcome to Tempe and welcome to the microphone. 00:02:47.439 --> 00:02:52.807 Okay, yes, 00:02:52.840 --> 00:02:57.406 no, that's not going to stay there. 00:02:57.439 --> 00:03:02.226 Thank you. That was a really great introduction and it's really awesome to 00:03:02.259 --> 00:03:09.057 be here. Um and I'm actually going to start out with some things. Um I 00:03:09.090 --> 00:03:14.686 want to thank jim for having the idea of bringing the project here and 00:03:14.719 --> 00:03:21.647 bringing me here. Uh he wrote me out of the blue via an introduction from 00:03:21.680 --> 00:03:28.927 another, you might say, internet artist, um And said, Let's make this 00:03:28.960 --> 00:03:34.147 happen, this is amazing. I'm trying to think about what libraries are in 00:03:34.180 --> 00:03:41.096 the 21st century. Uh and this seems like the kind of um work that would do 00:03:41.129 --> 00:03:47.066 just that and allow us to have a conversation. Um and I want to thank 00:03:47.099 --> 00:03:54.666 Elizabeth Denny for helping make this all happen um and really 00:03:54.699 --> 00:04:01.406 facilitating the arrival of this project here. Um 00:04:01.439 --> 00:04:05.737 having arrived here, it would not have been possible without jenny 00:04:05.770 --> 00:04:12.196 Duvernay, who's been producing this project ah with me over the last week 00:04:12.229 --> 00:04:19.627 , I arrived on Wednesday. Um and I've been keeping her here late um and 00:04:19.660 --> 00:04:23.647 she's been having to arrive early and make trips and go find things 00:04:23.680 --> 00:04:30.147 because she has turned into a producer um and also a little bit of a 00:04:30.180 --> 00:04:36.877 prepared or um along the same lines, I want to thank Gordon Knox for um 00:04:36.910 --> 00:04:44.387 you know, helping co present this with the art museum um because this 00:04:44.420 --> 00:04:51.007 project actually can't entirely be understood without the context of 00:04:51.040 --> 00:04:56.106 the Humanities and the Arts. Um 00:04:56.139 --> 00:05:00.106 and that's one of the reasons why I was so excited about doing this year. 00:05:00.139 --> 00:05:04.596 Um when I show this, I teach at the Graduate Center and the College of 00:05:04.629 --> 00:05:09.887 Staten Island, I teach in the Digital Humanities. I'm an artist uh 00:05:09.920 --> 00:05:16.567 teaching amongst a bunch of phds. Um and uh They kind of get it from one 00:05:16.600 --> 00:05:22.496 angle, they get the like technology, the the the sort of intellectual 00:05:22.529 --> 00:05:26.507 capacity of it. Um but they're missing out on some of the art historical 00:05:26.540 --> 00:05:31.366 contexts. On the other hand, you know, when I show it in the art context, 00:05:31.399 --> 00:05:35.577 they don't know, say the history of the encyclopedia, they don't 00:05:35.610 --> 00:05:41.226 understand these sorts of factors as well. Um having arrived at this 00:05:41.259 --> 00:05:46.007 possibility of doing it in two places, it would not have been possible. Um 00:05:46.040 --> 00:05:52.846 without Gregory Sale who has last night I called him the fixer. Um he's 00:05:52.879 --> 00:05:57.286 known exactly when to help and what exactly the right ways and I'm really 00:05:57.319 --> 00:06:03.496 , really grateful. Um a stray, a Peyton and Rosita turova helped 00:06:03.529 --> 00:06:08.106 facilitate a lot of things as well. Craig Barton and Zachary's ship from 00:06:08.139 --> 00:06:12.267 the design school allowed me to print this on their printers. Adrian 00:06:12.300 --> 00:06:19.476 Yannick, um Gracia Coleman have all come together and helped um when it 00:06:19.509 --> 00:06:23.267 actually came time to putting it up, I worked with six wonderful students 00:06:23.300 --> 00:06:26.906 , Kelsey, hi Ainsley, 00:06:26.939 --> 00:06:34.009 Angel Lopez, Dressler Parsons, kayla, meyer brian eccles and rob fuller. 00:06:34.240 --> 00:06:36.240 Those are just the people that helped here. 00:06:38.639 --> 00:06:43.467 I've been working on this project for six years. I've worked with probably 00:06:43.500 --> 00:06:48.007 dozens of people to help make this happen, most notably Jonathan Catherine 00:06:48.040 --> 00:06:53.176 who's been working with me on the code for two years, anna Hachani who's 00:06:53.209 --> 00:06:58.536 been working as my studio manager, Patrick Davison who worked with me in 00:06:58.569 --> 00:07:02.507 2009 when I started this project 00:07:02.540 --> 00:07:06.906 helping with some of the programming, as well as the design. 00:07:06.939 --> 00:07:13.236 I did a residency at Banff For a month working with three people there. I 00:07:13.269 --> 00:07:17.077 started this project at IBM in 2000 and nine during my fellowship in 00:07:17.110 --> 00:07:20.007 Senior Fellowship. 00:07:20.040 --> 00:07:23.906 And this was supported by Cooney 00:07:23.939 --> 00:07:28.846 and I think it's important to thank people, but I didn't go through that 00:07:28.879 --> 00:07:33.906 laundry list just 00:07:33.939 --> 00:07:38.416 to thank people. It's also a way of showing the way in which projects like 00:07:38.449 --> 00:07:42.007 this require collaboration. 00:07:42.040 --> 00:07:45.007 Um 00:07:45.040 --> 00:07:50.507 in a sense, I'm collaborating with 7.5 million people as well. 00:07:50.540 --> 00:07:54.406 I'm going to come back to that but I want to tell a little bit about what 00:07:54.439 --> 00:08:01.027 I did and how I did it. Um as you've probably gathered, I turned Wikipedia 00:08:01.060 --> 00:08:07.166 into books. Now I did that by taking the database and uh I wrote code that 00:08:07.199 --> 00:08:13.096 transformed it into PDFs along with covers, and then a separate piece of 00:08:13.129 --> 00:08:17.246 code that uploaded those to lulu dot com, where they're available, prefer 00:08:17.279 --> 00:08:22.306 print on demand. Um 00:08:22.339 --> 00:08:26.567 The show at Denny Gallery, we actually did the upload as a performance, a 00:08:26.600 --> 00:08:31.277 kind of data performance. It lasted 24 days, three hours and 18 minutes. 00:08:31.310 --> 00:08:37.526 Um that structured the exhibition um when the exhibition ended the final 00:08:37.559 --> 00:08:40.167 tweet from the software cause it tweeted out every time there was an 00:08:40.200 --> 00:08:43.427 upload it tweeted out the title and the volume number and then a link. The 00:08:43.460 --> 00:08:49.427 final tweet went up um at the show. There were the same same wallpaper, 00:08:49.460 --> 00:08:56.106 some of the same books. Um and 00:08:56.139 --> 00:08:58.307 the 00:08:58.340 --> 00:09:02.846 mm hmm. One of the other things that's there is the contributors appendix 00:09:02.879 --> 00:09:07.646 which is downstairs on the first floor. The contributors appendix came 00:09:07.679 --> 00:09:11.837 about because of this question of collaboration. So one of the questions I 00:09:11.870 --> 00:09:16.396 get is, well, how did you get permission to do that? Um and I usually 00:09:16.429 --> 00:09:18.866 actually don't ask for permission when I do things like this, but I 00:09:18.899 --> 00:09:21.846 actually didn't have to this time because it's all available under a 00:09:21.879 --> 00:09:25.937 creative commons license. Wikipedia is available under a creative commons 00:09:25.970 --> 00:09:29.537 attribute attribution share alike license for those of you that don't know 00:09:29.570 --> 00:09:34.307 what a creative commons licenses it's somebody exercising their copyright 00:09:34.340 --> 00:09:38.297 to enable other people to use it. You have all rights reserved. And that 00:09:38.330 --> 00:09:42.537 includes saying, I don't want to reserve all my rights. So in this case 00:09:42.570 --> 00:09:46.087 the rights are reserved as long as you give attribution and also preserve 00:09:46.120 --> 00:09:49.907 the creative commons attribution share like license. 00:09:49.940 --> 00:09:52.807 So how do you give attribution 00:09:52.840 --> 00:09:57.756 to Wikipedia? I went to the foundation, I asked them, I said, shit, how do 00:09:57.789 --> 00:10:03.787 I do this? And they said, ah that's a good question. We can't give you 00:10:03.820 --> 00:10:07.976 legal advice. You should you should not be it should not be the wikimedia 00:10:08.009 --> 00:10:11.807 foundation. We can tell you that uh we will point you to these pages that 00:10:11.840 --> 00:10:15.907 might give you some information. Uh the pages were about how to cite an 00:10:15.940 --> 00:10:20.856 individual article which said that you should cite the five most prompt, 00:10:20.889 --> 00:10:23.976 you should cite the five leading authors. They didn't say whether it was 00:10:24.009 --> 00:10:27.947 the bite count. They didn't say whether it was the Whether it was the 00:10:27.980 --> 00:10:30.917 number of edits. They didn't say whether it was the person edited 1st. 00:10:30.950 --> 00:10:35.256 There was a lot of uncertainty besides which at the very end of the 00:10:35.289 --> 00:10:38.606 process, having to go back and rewrite all the code in order to account 00:10:38.639 --> 00:10:44.327 for that was computational and frankly impossible to think about doing. Um 00:10:44.360 --> 00:10:47.526 I went to creative commons, they said that's a really good question. We 00:10:47.559 --> 00:10:51.577 can't give you legal advice. And I said, you know what? I'm just going to 00:10:51.610 --> 00:10:55.467 make a list of all of them. And then I went back to the foundation, I said 00:10:55.500 --> 00:10:59.896 , where does this list live? And they said, that's a good question. We 00:10:59.929 --> 00:11:04.596 don't know. But you can look at this code, it might help you. It's meant 00:11:04.629 --> 00:11:08.467 for generating lists of user names. I looked at the code, I modified it a 00:11:08.500 --> 00:11:13.236 little bit. I ran it, it crashed, it crashed because no one had ever tried 00:11:13.269 --> 00:11:16.266 to do this before. It wasn't buffered, it just tried to store all this 00:11:16.299 --> 00:11:20.516 information and then when the whole process was done right it to a file Um 00:11:20.549 --> 00:11:28.549 it ran out of memory, I think I had 16GB of RAM on the computer. 00:11:28.639 --> 00:11:32.197 There's a lot of people that have made this possible. This points to these 00:11:32.230 --> 00:11:38.746 ideas of information um in in this context, in the 21st century. Um some 00:11:38.779 --> 00:11:42.856 numbers that are probably pretty useful. The appendix, like I said 7.5 00:11:42.889 --> 00:11:48.606 million contributors. Um There's 11.5 million entries that do include 00:11:48.639 --> 00:11:53.516 redirects. Um if there are any Wikipedia is in the house, they get very 00:11:53.549 --> 00:11:56.276 they want to know that information. 00:11:56.309 --> 00:12:03.287 There's five million pages. I made a 91 volume table of Contents. All this 00:12:03.320 --> 00:12:07.207 points to uh 00:12:07.240 --> 00:12:12.246 data. We live in a world of data. Uh you've probably heard the term big 00:12:12.279 --> 00:12:16.957 data. You might know what that means. You might not we hear it so much 00:12:16.990 --> 00:12:22.297 that's thrown around the way I try to understand big data. And this is not 00:12:22.330 --> 00:12:26.366 my definition and I honestly don't remember exactly whose it is, but it's 00:12:26.399 --> 00:12:30.596 information that cannot be processed at a human scale. It requires a level 00:12:30.629 --> 00:12:36.287 of abstraction between you and the data for it to be legible. We don't 00:12:36.320 --> 00:12:40.907 know how much data is being stored in the NSA's facility. We don't know 00:12:40.940 --> 00:12:47.106 how much data is being stored in facebook's facility. Um 00:12:47.139 --> 00:12:50.776 We might know the square footage but that doesn't really tell us anything. 00:12:50.809 --> 00:12:54.287 We might know the number of petabytes, but that doesn't tell us anything. 00:12:54.320 --> 00:12:59.606 It's abstract. It's not legible at a human scale. 00:12:59.639 --> 00:13:02.626 One of the reasons why I wanted to do this was to figure out how big it 00:13:02.659 --> 00:13:06.557 was because I had no idea I had been contributing to Wikipedia for a year. 00:13:06.590 --> 00:13:12.077 So at that point I'm not a heavy contributor at that time. Um and I 00:13:12.110 --> 00:13:14.817 wanted to figure out how big it was. And one of the things I learned along 00:13:14.850 --> 00:13:18.976 the way is that a book at this point in time? Probably not in 100 years. A 00:13:19.009 --> 00:13:26.407 book is a really useful unit of measurement. 00:13:26.440 --> 00:13:29.567 You don't, I I started thinking about do I need to make them? Do I need to 00:13:29.600 --> 00:13:32.407 print them all out? We'll print them all out. Would cost probably about 00:13:32.440 --> 00:13:35.307 $300,400,000. 00:13:35.340 --> 00:13:40.016 I decided I didn't need to, but I did need to print some, our brains can 00:13:40.049 --> 00:13:43.386 finish the rest. So that's one of the other questions. Why didn't you 00:13:43.419 --> 00:13:48.496 print it all out? You know why you have to print it at all? Um one of the 00:13:48.529 --> 00:13:54.016 other things I learned is that when you alphabet alphabetize a database, 00:13:54.049 --> 00:13:58.447 you learn things we live in a world where things are stored in databases. 00:13:58.480 --> 00:14:03.337 Many of these, you know this this um library is is not stored in a 00:14:03.370 --> 00:14:07.157 database. It's all in order. It's not out of order. You can't pull things 00:14:07.190 --> 00:14:10.766 up randomly. We have databases that will help us get into the ordered 00:14:10.799 --> 00:14:15.246 information. This is all linear Wikipedia is all linear. So we learn 00:14:15.279 --> 00:14:19.307 things we put that together. Um 00:14:19.340 --> 00:14:26.746 one of the volumes over there. There's 20 eight volumes for back. So I 00:14:26.779 --> 00:14:31.797 chose the entries here based off the words on the spine. Art fat cat cats 00:14:31.830 --> 00:14:36.957 because cats win the internet ear and end. Um, there are some others that 00:14:36.990 --> 00:14:44.990 we chose God sex. Those are pretty obvious. Um, but why bat? Um, 00:14:46.340 --> 00:14:53.407 Those are 28 volumes primarily consists of descriptions of battles. 00:14:53.440 --> 00:14:58.197 So we end up seeing a kind of structural history of humanity. Similarly 00:14:58.230 --> 00:15:05.126 new is 26 volumes, which ends up being The Story of Colonialism in the 00:15:05.159 --> 00:15:08.807 19th Century. 00:15:08.840 --> 00:15:13.486 So this is a kind of data visualization. Um, people who do proper data 00:15:13.519 --> 00:15:16.386 visualization would look at this and say that's not a data visualization. 00:15:16.419 --> 00:15:20.827 Where's the graphs? But it is a kind of visualization. I've abstracted 00:15:20.860 --> 00:15:25.787 the information in in order to make it legible at the same time. Um, It's 00:15:25.820 --> 00:15:32.957 a work of art it points to and an ax a history and trajectory of 00:15:32.990 --> 00:15:40.990 conceptual art, appropriation. Um, and those kinds of works. Um it engages 00:15:42.129 --> 00:15:47.317 poetry and poetics, I think of it as one giant found palm at the same time. 00:15:47.350 --> 00:15:55.006 And the works on the spines are these kind of chance poems. Um 00:15:55.039 --> 00:15:59.407 and 00:15:59.440 --> 00:16:02.386 one of the other things that's important and this engages both with a kind 00:16:02.419 --> 00:16:06.907 of poetics as well as as a history of art is is that it's always already 00:16:06.940 --> 00:16:09.577 out of date. That's one of the other questions are you going to update it 00:16:09.610 --> 00:16:12.476 ? Are you going to update it? I don't need to update it because it's 00:16:12.509 --> 00:16:15.927 always already out of date when I started this, I was working with the 00:16:15.960 --> 00:16:21.037 April seven database dump. Um and I immediately started unpacking it. It 00:16:21.070 --> 00:16:25.787 takes about four days to download, you know, takes another six days to 00:16:25.820 --> 00:16:29.126 unpack into the database, then I run some sequel queries against it, which 00:16:29.159 --> 00:16:32.587 takes another two days and then I start running the code and that takes 00:16:32.620 --> 00:16:36.506 another three weeks. Um so no matter how I cut it, by the time I get to 00:16:36.539 --> 00:16:41.207 PDFs were already out of date um and that's kind of a metaphor, right? 00:16:41.240 --> 00:16:46.126 That's a metaphor with life with technology. Um So this is my sort of 00:16:46.159 --> 00:16:53.006 framing and and um for the context and I'm really excited to hear what 00:16:53.039 --> 00:16:59.606 MEREDITH and I'd have to say 00:16:59.639 --> 00:17:04.006 Mhm. 00:17:04.039 --> 00:17:06.816 I was going to try to pretend that our other speakers are just mild 00:17:06.849 --> 00:17:09.707 mannered professors from the department of English and the department of 00:17:09.740 --> 00:17:13.347 Art history, but if I tried to say that I wouldn't be able to say anything 00:17:13.380 --> 00:17:16.437 else about them without revealing that it's a little more complicated than 00:17:16.470 --> 00:17:20.296 that MEREDITH Heuer will be our first speaker. She comes from the School 00:17:20.329 --> 00:17:25.107 of Design, she has a PhD from Berkeley, she works in contemporary, we 00:17:25.140 --> 00:17:31.016 could say art history and art theory, but in a very s you kind of way, 00:17:31.049 --> 00:17:34.367 she's always looking for the boundaries, she's looking for the ways to 00:17:34.400 --> 00:17:39.447 include what traditionally might not have been included. Um for her And I 00:17:39.480 --> 00:17:43.326 think this is probably the best way to introduce her for her. Somebody 00:17:43.359 --> 00:17:48.786 like Michael is perfectly normal and familiar and conventional or almost 00:17:48.819 --> 00:17:54.506 so MEREDITH. Thank you for joining us. 00:17:54.539 --> 00:18:00.857 Mhm. Thank you very much girl in trouble. I am going to push the 00:18:00.890 --> 00:18:07.776 boundaries by not using the podium. Um Not because I'm not much of a rebel 00:18:07.809 --> 00:18:12.357 really. Um but because my arms aren't long enough to push the button on my 00:18:12.390 --> 00:18:20.390 computer and um because I am somewhat of an art historian. Oh, the mic 00:18:20.910 --> 00:18:26.526 because I am somewhat of an art historian, I did bring images. Um so 00:18:26.559 --> 00:18:31.086 unfortunately they will not be very easy to see. Um but they aren't very 00:18:31.119 --> 00:18:35.597 good quality either. So as long as you see colors on the screen, you'll be 00:18:35.630 --> 00:18:43.630 in really good shape. Um So here we go. Um and I'm also sitting next to 00:18:44.799 --> 00:18:49.387 the artist. This is a little bit dangerous. Uh feel free to correct me if 00:18:49.420 --> 00:18:54.897 I get anything grossly wrong. So many of Michael Mando Berg's other 00:18:54.930 --> 00:19:01.306 projects such as After Sherry Levine, 00:19:01.339 --> 00:19:06.097 which focused sharply on issues of appropriation, copyright, intellectual 00:19:06.130 --> 00:19:10.826 property, patronage, and originality. Print Wikipedia re addresses these 00:19:10.859 --> 00:19:15.756 issues in a new way by giving pride of place to the phenomenon of 00:19:15.789 --> 00:19:21.026 information, production, dissemination organization and general overload. 00:19:21.059 --> 00:19:26.137 In an age of big data when finds that attempting to capture a center of 00:19:26.170 --> 00:19:32.407 meaning In print. Wikipedia initiates a cat and mouse game Manda Berg's 00:19:32.440 --> 00:19:37.066 sprawling project presents a counterfactual ideal, in which all of 00:19:37.099 --> 00:19:42.377 Wikipedia will be printed bound into volumes and arranged in proper 00:19:42.410 --> 00:19:50.410 archival fashion, in from ah to zap. The First Installation of the Project 00:19:51.200 --> 00:19:56.707 at the Denning Gallery in New York City held between June 18 and July 11 00:19:56.740 --> 00:20:02.586 in 2015. Gallery walls were covered with wallpaper imaging the spines of 00:20:02.619 --> 00:20:10.619 the 1st 1980 volumes of the entire set. 00:20:10.740 --> 00:20:15.546 Much of the project involves a notional conversion to printing. It 00:20:15.579 --> 00:20:20.526 manifests partially as a projection on one gallery wall of the process of 00:20:20.559 --> 00:20:26.806 uploading the Wikipedia files to lulu dot com. A print on demand website. 00:20:26.839 --> 00:20:30.707 The total upload would consist of 7,473 00:20:30.740 --> 00:20:38.740 volumes of 700 pages each. The upload process lasted 24 days, 18 hours and 00:20:38.940 --> 00:20:43.607 three minutes For the opening. The gallery was slated to allow entry to 00:20:43.640 --> 00:20:48.986 visitors continuously for 48 hours, but as a reviewer, jennifer lung 00:20:49.019 --> 00:20:53.357 reported in art forum on the second day of the opening. The process was 00:20:53.390 --> 00:20:59.877 beset by technological glitches so often the vein or possibly the backbone 00:20:59.910 --> 00:21:04.927 of media art practice in which instabilities in the upload script cause 00:21:04.960 --> 00:21:09.976 periodic crashes, an event which seems inescapable in the performance of 00:21:10.009 --> 00:21:15.286 such projects and indeed speaks to the specter of the instability within 00:21:15.319 --> 00:21:19.907 the seemingly monolithic Wikipedia. 00:21:19.940 --> 00:21:23.137 It is important to note that Vandenberg had no intention of carrying the 00:21:23.170 --> 00:21:28.197 printing process through to completion. Only 166 volumes were physically 00:21:28.230 --> 00:21:33.347 printed for the installation. In any case, the very notion of a complete 00:21:33.380 --> 00:21:38.316 set of volumes is wittingly riddled with a sense of futility. And so far 00:21:38.349 --> 00:21:43.137 as Wikipedia itself undergoes a constant process of change. Thus leading 00:21:43.170 --> 00:21:47.826 to remark that there is a distinctly absurdist element to mandy birds 00:21:47.859 --> 00:21:52.957 project, which is not out of line, which much of the serious humor of his 00:21:52.990 --> 00:21:55.407 artistic practice. 00:21:55.440 --> 00:21:59.046 One comment about the absurdism of Manda Burke's project was noted in the 00:21:59.079 --> 00:22:03.826 new york Times article regarding his attempt to bind notionally into book 00:22:03.859 --> 00:22:07.627 form, a system of knowledge production. That, according to Catherine Mayer 00:22:07.660 --> 00:22:13.177 , chief communications officer at Wikipedia has transcended our ability to 00:22:13.210 --> 00:22:19.457 hold it on volumes on a bookshelf. Between april 7th 2015, when Man Derek 00:22:19.490 --> 00:22:23.486 harvested the data for print Wikipedia And the publication of the New York 00:22:23.519 --> 00:22:29.907 Times article said it above. On June 17, 2015, An estimated 7.5 million 00:22:29.940 --> 00:22:33.006 edits were made 00:22:33.039 --> 00:22:37.016 while transforming the ever changing landscape of Wikipedia pages, which 00:22:37.049 --> 00:22:41.476 undergo continuous editing from multiple users into bound volumes would 00:22:41.509 --> 00:22:46.957 seem to artificially stabilize immutable system. Mandy berg takes into 00:22:46.990 --> 00:22:51.076 account the irony embedded in the process of converting an electronic 00:22:51.109 --> 00:22:57.187 database into a series of ostensibly inert objects, although those 00:22:57.220 --> 00:23:02.127 invested in the social technological and political history of books. No, 00:23:02.160 --> 00:23:07.496 they are far from inert in this sense, it is clear that print Wikipedia 00:23:07.529 --> 00:23:12.957 takes into account the historicity of individual pages while concomitantly 00:23:12.990 --> 00:23:17.417 gesturing to the history of the book and the necessity to preserve it as a 00:23:17.450 --> 00:23:22.847 living form for Amanda Berg. Not only is this project an act of 00:23:22.880 --> 00:23:28.717 appropriation on a grand skill, but it is also a poetic gesture that draws 00:23:28.750 --> 00:23:34.677 attention to the sheer size of the encyclopedia's content, a subject which 00:23:34.710 --> 00:23:39.657 I shall return presently and the impossibility of rendering with Wikipedia 00:23:39.690 --> 00:23:45.137 as a material object in fixed form once the volume is printed, as he just 00:23:45.170 --> 00:23:50.736 stated is that it is already out of date. It is already out of date 00:23:50.769 --> 00:23:54.157 because the included information is likely to have been edited. Whether 00:23:54.190 --> 00:23:58.707 drastically or to the slightest degree, the radical shifts in Wikipedia 00:23:58.740 --> 00:24:02.957 entries have become the subject of information visualization projects that 00:24:02.990 --> 00:24:08.006 have data mined feuds within the Wikipedia community of authors marking 00:24:08.039 --> 00:24:12.996 swaths of textual overwriting or dramatic erasers, in which entire 00:24:13.029 --> 00:24:19.207 sections or pages disappear. See for example, 00:24:19.240 --> 00:24:25.326 The 2003 project by Martin Wattenberg that visualizes changes made to 00:24:25.359 --> 00:24:29.367 Wikipedia pages over time in a visual metaphor of geological sedimentation 00:24:29.400 --> 00:24:31.506 , 00:24:31.539 --> 00:24:36.766 Wattenberg alongside collaborators, fernanda Viegas and Jonathan Feinberg 00:24:36.799 --> 00:24:41.556 is known for creating highly aesthetic sized visualizations, bridging the 00:24:41.589 --> 00:24:46.806 gap between artwork and industry based information visualization of given 00:24:46.839 --> 00:24:52.197 data sets from musical structure to stock market activity to in this 00:24:52.230 --> 00:24:57.407 instance, activity on Wikipedia pages. 00:24:57.440 --> 00:25:02.506 The website for the project proudly announces the resultant images as 00:25:02.539 --> 00:25:08.026 pictures rather than diagrams of edit histories and four grounds. Dramatic 00:25:08.059 --> 00:25:13.097 zig zagging patterns and abrupt gaps that appear to be glitches rather 00:25:13.130 --> 00:25:18.907 than recordings of significant patterns in the data in the color schemes. 00:25:18.940 --> 00:25:26.940 So this is where, sorry, this is where hopefully you can actually see. So 00:25:27.299 --> 00:25:33.296 on the top here you actually have these bands of black where people have 00:25:33.329 --> 00:25:40.677 completely erased the page and started all over. So the top one is the 00:25:40.710 --> 00:25:48.710 page for abortion and the bottom one is the page for history. 00:25:49.640 --> 00:25:53.526 In addition to projects attending to the history historicity of Wikipedia 00:25:53.559 --> 00:25:57.897 pages, artworks and visualizations dealing in sheer numerical or 00:25:57.930 --> 00:26:02.256 quantitative impossibility are not new to the art scene. Despite the claim 00:26:02.289 --> 00:26:07.836 that Man Durer's print with Wikipedia represents the most concrete metric 00:26:07.869 --> 00:26:13.736 of the database taken thus far. As a point of comparison, John F. Simon in 00:26:13.769 --> 00:26:15.806 1997 00:26:15.839 --> 00:26:21.397 created every icon, a program that utilizes a computational system to 00:26:21.430 --> 00:26:25.907 challenge the imaginative threshold at which humans can grasp the concept 00:26:25.940 --> 00:26:30.107 of a continuously unfolding temporal expanse. 00:26:30.140 --> 00:26:36.996 Launched at 9:42 AM on January 27, 1997, every Icon is an online 00:26:37.029 --> 00:26:42.546 computational flash conceptual artwork That artist John F. Simon claims he 00:26:42.579 --> 00:26:48.397 envisioned in response to the 1980s postmodernist in donations about the 00:26:48.430 --> 00:26:53.367 death of art. In the end of images. In this work, every possible 00:26:53.400 --> 00:26:57.857 combination of black and white squares run sequentially within the 00:26:57.890 --> 00:27:05.890 parameters of a 32 x 32 grid In closing 1024 squares In 1997 with Pentium 00:27:07.069 --> 00:27:12.056 processor speeds capable of generating 100 combinations for a second. 00:27:12.089 --> 00:27:17.437 Simon estimated that all possible combinations in the top line, about 4.3 00:27:17.470 --> 00:27:22.566 billion variations could be completed in 16 months. But given the 00:27:22.599 --> 00:27:26.976 exponential expansion of these combinatorial combinatorial possibilities, 00:27:27.009 --> 00:27:31.637 it would take about six billion years to complete the second line for the 00:27:31.670 --> 00:27:36.707 grid to reach its final state in which every square turns to black. It 00:27:36.740 --> 00:27:42.026 would take several 100 trillion years. An ungraceful number that Simon 00:27:42.059 --> 00:27:48.637 asks us to consider as a human perceptual limit. Yeah. In 1997 he offered 00:27:48.670 --> 00:27:52.746 the New York Times. The following explanation quote. Because there is no 00:27:52.779 --> 00:27:57.457 word for that amount of time and no word for that large number several 100 00:27:57.490 --> 00:28:03.407 trillion years is my way of making you think about a very, very long time. 00:28:03.440 --> 00:28:07.437 And even if processor speeds increased enough to shorten that time span, 00:28:07.470 --> 00:28:11.036 the speed of transformation would vastly exceed the capacity of the human 00:28:11.069 --> 00:28:17.107 eye to stabilize the field of black and white squares into an image. Mhm 00:28:17.140 --> 00:28:21.816 manned american ounces print Wikipedia similarly as both a utilitarian 00:28:21.849 --> 00:28:26.056 visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic 00:28:26.089 --> 00:28:31.447 gesture towards the challenge of going in an episiotomy of big data. Like 00:28:31.480 --> 00:28:37.097 every icon, it is a visualization although whereas Simon is visualizing a 00:28:37.130 --> 00:28:42.586 system that represents simple sequences. Only manned Berg is visualizing a 00:28:42.619 --> 00:28:47.687 representation of knowledge and more epistemological dense proposition. 00:28:47.720 --> 00:28:53.677 Indeed. And like every icon, it refers poetically outside itself to 00:28:53.710 --> 00:28:57.597 meditate on the nature of information, the volume of information that can 00:28:57.630 --> 00:29:01.867 be contained and processed individually and collectively. Now the notion 00:29:01.900 --> 00:29:06.427 of information is reconfigured when it is unfolded into the universe of 00:29:06.460 --> 00:29:11.167 big data. On the one hand, the first part of this declaration seems a 00:29:11.200 --> 00:29:16.266 straightforward statement. It is a mysterious material instance creation, 00:29:16.299 --> 00:29:20.586 and thus it could be argued more than a visualization as visualizations 00:29:20.619 --> 00:29:26.137 are often screen based and two dimensional with notable exceptions, like 00:29:26.170 --> 00:29:30.407 not only me box baskets that you see here, 00:29:30.440 --> 00:29:34.996 it is utilitarian in that it supplies access in an organized fashion to an 00:29:35.029 --> 00:29:40.707 informational database. It represents an attempt at total ized knowledge, 00:29:40.740 --> 00:29:45.766 but to what kind of knowledge are we referring is this in fact the largest 00:29:45.799 --> 00:29:51.407 accumulation of human knowledge. A contemporary library of alexandria. 00:29:51.440 --> 00:29:55.586 What kind level description of knowledge is contained in the animals of 00:29:55.619 --> 00:30:02.746 the Wikipedia archives. one might argue that it is not scholarly text, but 00:30:02.779 --> 00:30:08.526 merely collectively amalgamated. Haphazard information. A collage of 00:30:08.559 --> 00:30:14.397 everyday points of reference utilize ubiquitously ubiquitously while Simon 00:30:14.430 --> 00:30:19.607 simultaneously ostensibly untrusted, 00:30:19.640 --> 00:30:23.707 it might be knowledge light. 00:30:23.740 --> 00:30:27.836 This is where the second half of the above quotation becomes relevant. It 00:30:27.869 --> 00:30:32.076 refers to the challenge of knowing what to count as information. The 00:30:32.109 --> 00:30:37.607 challenge of what it means to know at all. Furthermore does the 00:30:37.640 --> 00:30:41.296 descriptive model set forth and Wikipedia conform to the episiotomy of big 00:30:41.329 --> 00:30:47.566 data. The database is itself, of course, an exemplar of big data form, but 00:30:47.599 --> 00:30:51.707 its contents call into question the assumption of veracity often attached 00:30:51.740 --> 00:30:57.407 to data as a quantitative, scientifically verifiable truth. 00:30:57.440 --> 00:31:00.667 Manda burger is described by the new york times is an interdisciplinary 00:31:00.700 --> 00:31:05.976 artist. There is a strong conceptual element to his work, but it is it is 00:31:06.009 --> 00:31:10.276 a sly conceptualism that calls upon the ideation all realm while also 00:31:10.309 --> 00:31:14.857 engaging social, historical, political, economic, and aesthetic aspects of 00:31:14.890 --> 00:31:19.857 materiality Rather than emphasizing de materialization in the classic mode 00:31:19.890 --> 00:31:23.306 of 1970s conceptualism. 00:31:23.339 --> 00:31:27.197 In part this occurs, I would argue, because artists in the 1970s were 00:31:27.230 --> 00:31:31.276 interrogating the burgeoning information world. The transposition of 00:31:31.309 --> 00:31:35.506 materiality into informatics, feedback loops of signals and noise 00:31:35.539 --> 00:31:39.887 manifested most prominently in computational machines. As a result, the 00:31:39.920 --> 00:31:44.226 vital center of the universe was no longer located in material forms, but 00:31:44.259 --> 00:31:48.996 rather in the circulation of information. By 2016 computation in the 00:31:49.029 --> 00:31:53.167 informatics paradigm have become so endemic. The informational quantities 00:31:53.200 --> 00:31:57.276 and big data seemed to have superseded materiality as the fundamental 00:31:57.309 --> 00:32:01.967 explanatory devices describing and driving biological life and the 00:32:02.000 --> 00:32:06.917 physical structures containing it. Here we may be reminded of another 00:32:06.950 --> 00:32:10.546 earlier artwork, and this is my last one. I'll talk about. It begins to 00:32:10.579 --> 00:32:14.437 experiment with the parsing and circulation of information contained 00:32:14.470 --> 00:32:22.470 innocent semi quantified um deal with Art and languages. Index 01 of 1972 00:32:22.740 --> 00:32:27.407 exhibited a documented five in kassel Germany. The work consisted of a 00:32:27.440 --> 00:32:31.336 collection of the artist's writing writings enclosed in eight violent 00:32:31.369 --> 00:32:35.976 cabinets. Each filing cabinet contained six drawers and which were filed 00:32:36.009 --> 00:32:42.167 index cards on which texts were printed cold from self publications, art 00:32:42.200 --> 00:32:47.276 magazines, catalogs and manuscripts texts were divided into sections to 00:32:47.309 --> 00:32:51.306 which numbers were upended, corresponding numbers were printed on the 00:32:51.339 --> 00:32:57.006 drawers of the filing cabinets. Complex intersections deemed compatible, 00:32:57.039 --> 00:33:02.897 incompatible and not comparable or transformational were assigned to inter 00:33:02.930 --> 00:33:06.647 textual relationships made possible by combining number of elements in 00:33:06.680 --> 00:33:11.677 different ways and photos. DATs, charting these evaluations were posted on 00:33:11.710 --> 00:33:15.766 the gallery walls to accompany and annotate the information contained in 00:33:15.799 --> 00:33:20.467 the filing cabinets. The various informational pathways and relationships 00:33:20.500 --> 00:33:25.736 between textual elements were made putatively available for viewers to to 00:33:25.769 --> 00:33:30.197 peruse at their leisure. But the work was more fundamentally about the 00:33:30.230 --> 00:33:35.736 unavailability, invisibility or in digestibility of information rather 00:33:35.769 --> 00:33:40.157 than its submission, either for visual delectation or for an efficient 00:33:40.190 --> 00:33:45.256 transmission. Despite eras of philosophical rigor afforded by for the by 00:33:45.289 --> 00:33:49.907 the documentation printed on the photos, dots 00:33:49.940 --> 00:33:54.707 are in language did not posit a totality of knowledge, but rather a 00:33:54.740 --> 00:34:00.256 competent story mode of text mining. It certainly addressed as Warren Sapp 00:34:00.289 --> 00:34:05.667 has argued database aesthetics aurally hypertext aesthetics, through its 00:34:05.700 --> 00:34:09.416 explicit invitation to the viewer to create languages between texts and 00:34:09.449 --> 00:34:14.316 ideas rather than viewing writings as discrete, self contained arguments 00:34:14.349 --> 00:34:17.106 or entities. 00:34:17.139 --> 00:34:22.256 Likewise, print Wikipedia invites viewers to experience Wikipedia as a 00:34:22.289 --> 00:34:27.236 volumetric phenomenal logically encompassing but necessarily quixotic body 00:34:27.269 --> 00:34:31.577 of information. It is both present to the viewer as a notional, usable, 00:34:31.610 --> 00:34:37.407 notionally usable quantity of data but caught in the space of potentiality 00:34:37.440 --> 00:34:44.907 of always almost tangible. Itty of partiality of availability for purchase. 00:34:44.940 --> 00:34:48.606 It is latent with possibility. But like the paper layering the walls of 00:34:48.639 --> 00:34:54.227 the gallery, it is a promise of informatics. Utopia that can quite 00:34:54.260 --> 00:35:02.260 intentionally never reach apotheosis. Thanks. 00:35:03.139 --> 00:35:09.706 Yeah. Okay. 00:35:09.739 --> 00:35:13.967 Okay. So our mild mannered english professor refugee from provincial 00:35:14.000 --> 00:35:19.756 Silicon Valley to Metropolitan. Uh Metropolitan Tempe is also the founding 00:35:19.789 --> 00:35:23.456 director of the Center for Science in the imagination. And is that housed 00:35:23.489 --> 00:35:28.206 inside your school where that stand alone? No, that's that's often another 00:35:28.239 --> 00:35:32.997 issue ASU dimension. Yeah, sure. Um but I love being part of an 00:35:33.030 --> 00:35:36.037 institution where a mild mannered english Professor Professor is a 00:35:36.070 --> 00:35:39.177 professor in a school that has engineering in the title. Uh he's in the 00:35:39.210 --> 00:35:44.227 school of art media and Engineering. Um he is also in the department of 00:35:44.260 --> 00:35:49.066 english but that seems to be just one of the various places he dances. He 00:35:49.099 --> 00:35:53.637 dances through. He's a historian and theoretician and thinker of and about 00:35:53.670 --> 00:35:58.497 books. He's working on a book about the social lives of books which 00:35:58.530 --> 00:36:02.537 mandatory witticism here fairly lame g when I was young. Books was where 00:36:02.570 --> 00:36:07.546 you went when you didn't have a social life. Um but he knows things that 00:36:07.579 --> 00:36:10.486 we didn't know back then. And that's one reason we bring him around this 00:36:10.519 --> 00:36:14.597 evening. Professor Ed Finn, please come to the market. 00:36:14.630 --> 00:36:18.997 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:36:19.030 --> 00:36:23.896 Gonna come up here so I can gesticulate more freely uh, in the spirit of 00:36:23.929 --> 00:36:27.546 Knowledge Light, I have prepared for you. I have improvised four chapters 00:36:27.579 --> 00:36:30.977 on the future of the book. And uh feel free to fact check me as we go 00:36:31.010 --> 00:36:36.997 along. So the first chapter is about books as technologies, 00:36:37.030 --> 00:36:39.807 if you think about it. And one of the things that I think is most powerful 00:36:39.840 --> 00:36:43.387 about Michael's installation and this project is that the codex is an 00:36:43.420 --> 00:36:48.736 incredibly sophisticated technology. Uh, I see many of our colleagues from 00:36:48.769 --> 00:36:51.137 the libraries here and I know you're all sort of nodding your heads and 00:36:51.170 --> 00:36:55.387 this is old information, but uh, we don't for the rest of us, we don't 00:36:55.420 --> 00:36:59.626 often actually paused to think about How the book, the Codex is a 00:36:59.659 --> 00:37:03.677 technology that's been perfected over the course of 500 years and arguably 00:37:03.710 --> 00:37:09.896 connects to the older technological development of writing. Uh and that 00:37:09.929 --> 00:37:14.206 technology is very sophisticated. And one of the really interesting things 00:37:14.239 --> 00:37:16.577 I see in the future of the book is people trying to replicate that online 00:37:16.610 --> 00:37:20.396 , trying to create e books that were just like print books do. And they're 00:37:20.429 --> 00:37:23.227 always disappointing because they're never as good as print books. If you 00:37:23.260 --> 00:37:26.617 think about the print book, it's got almost infinite stories, depending on 00:37:26.650 --> 00:37:30.646 how wide the margins are. It requires very low power, like maybe what? 25 00:37:30.679 --> 00:37:35.517 watts, 40 watts to read it at night. It's solar power during the day. Uh 00:37:35.550 --> 00:37:39.807 it's uh, it's more durable as a storage medium than basically any 00:37:39.840 --> 00:37:45.546 technological digital medium that we've created thus far. Um I don't know 00:37:45.579 --> 00:37:48.657 unless you want to make an argument for the Voyager spacecraft that's got 00:37:48.690 --> 00:37:54.606 its gold plates of Mozart and math sailing grandly out the solar system. 00:37:54.639 --> 00:37:57.807 But uh, it's pretty good. You know, we've used it for a while, we've 00:37:57.840 --> 00:38:02.316 tested it out, we're aware of its its flaws and uh, and it works pretty 00:38:02.349 --> 00:38:06.986 well. Uh and as you think about its evolution, uh the encyclopedia has 00:38:07.019 --> 00:38:11.617 always been a really important part of the innovation of the print book, I 00:38:11.650 --> 00:38:18.236 think about the uh the great monument, the 7 51 encyclopedia francaise uh 00:38:18.269 --> 00:38:23.026 which did a number of really alarming weird and innovative things like uh 00:38:23.059 --> 00:38:26.106 alphabetize ng was still kind of new, but other people have done that, but 00:38:26.139 --> 00:38:30.517 it also organized everything into this tripartite structure of knowledge 00:38:30.550 --> 00:38:35.387 where uh Lordy God was like on the same page with everybody else and part 00:38:35.420 --> 00:38:40.427 of the hierarchy and not just at the top of the hierarchy. Um, and uh, you 00:38:40.460 --> 00:38:44.927 know, there are a lot of people who argue that the, that that book, that 00:38:44.960 --> 00:38:48.086 technology and the third technology that that was really powerful. There 00:38:48.119 --> 00:38:51.387 was the creation of, of hyper looking cross links and cross references 00:38:51.420 --> 00:38:54.727 across different entries, which was another way to demonstrate the 00:38:54.760 --> 00:38:58.416 interweaving and threading of knowledge. A lot of people say that that 00:38:58.449 --> 00:39:03.307 book caused the french revolution. Uh but I think maybe a more interesting 00:39:03.340 --> 00:39:05.936 and more beautiful statement about it is the way that robert Darnton, one 00:39:05.969 --> 00:39:10.197 of the great historians of that, of that project, described the way that 00:39:10.230 --> 00:39:15.666 uh uh linen would leave the back door of the bourgeois french households 00:39:15.699 --> 00:39:18.666 as that was sold to rag men and then it would come back in the front door 00:39:18.699 --> 00:39:24.086 as pages of the encyclopedia. That this was a very elaborate technological 00:39:24.119 --> 00:39:27.727 material, consumer production process. And it was really hard, you know, 00:39:27.760 --> 00:39:31.686 nobody wanted to invest in this because it was such a crazy project. So 00:39:31.719 --> 00:39:35.376 books are technology and I find it really fascinating to hear your 00:39:35.409 --> 00:39:39.206 technical description of how hard it was to actually take Wikipedia and 00:39:39.239 --> 00:39:43.066 turn it into a print book, which involved not just you know, the 24 hours 00:39:43.099 --> 00:39:47.157 uh seven, I wish I wish I'd remembered that so I could repeat it again 00:39:47.190 --> 00:39:50.197 because it's so incredible that not just the time, the 24 plus hours it 00:39:50.230 --> 00:39:54.316 took to upload this thing. Two, 24 days. Alright, excuse me, I'm sorry. So 00:39:54.349 --> 00:40:01.467 , so be little thank you. Yeah. Um so so yeah, 24 days. Uh seven hours, 13 00:40:01.500 --> 00:40:06.907 minutes. Is that it? Okay. All right, okay. Uh that was just one part of 00:40:06.940 --> 00:40:11.137 it. Right? That was that was just uh one component of this process that 00:40:11.170 --> 00:40:15.896 also involved uh you know, at different stages working with lulu dot com, 00:40:15.929 --> 00:40:20.017 this this print on demand service and working here with with colleagues to 00:40:20.050 --> 00:40:23.046 and students to get this thing printed out. Books are sophisticated 00:40:23.079 --> 00:40:27.677 technologies and to to do that. You had to take Wikipedia, which is a very 00:40:27.710 --> 00:40:30.557 interesting thing, will come back to this, this question of what Wikipedia 00:40:30.590 --> 00:40:35.137 is. Um and you had to take it and you had to you had to do the the book 00:40:35.170 --> 00:40:37.517 thing. You have to take it and you have to make PDFs of it. You have to 00:40:37.550 --> 00:40:42.177 turn it into a series of pictures and freeze it like uh that people call 00:40:42.210 --> 00:40:44.977 it, putting a book under glass. That's the book experience right now, 00:40:45.010 --> 00:40:47.666 right? You can sort of see the book in there, it looks a lot like a book, 00:40:47.699 --> 00:40:50.956 but you can't actually touch it, you can't get to the book, you can just 00:40:50.989 --> 00:40:58.077 sort of approach it through this impermeable corning where layer 00:40:58.110 --> 00:41:04.137 Chapter two Books Our Communities. So I had a high school teacher who used 00:41:04.170 --> 00:41:07.287 to talk always it was my latin teacher and used to talk about how it's 00:41:07.320 --> 00:41:10.117 time to break bread with the dead and what you do when you read is you're 00:41:10.150 --> 00:41:12.986 breaking bread, you're communing with these people who might be your 00:41:13.019 --> 00:41:19.697 contemporaries or they might have been alive centuries ago. And so again, 00:41:19.730 --> 00:41:23.936 being in a library is a is a place where you feel that I'm reminded of 00:41:23.969 --> 00:41:28.427 terry pratchett, wonderful notion of l space that books are magic. I have 00:41:28.460 --> 00:41:31.356 this discussion now with my with my toddler that books really do have 00:41:31.389 --> 00:41:34.896 magic in them. They are magical objects. And when you put them together, 00:41:34.929 --> 00:41:39.376 the magic sort of multiplies. Uh, and a lot of that magic has to do with 00:41:39.409 --> 00:41:44.396 that notion of community, that notion of being able to reach other people 00:41:44.429 --> 00:41:49.267 and other times, uh, in a way that's uh unique to human experience, the 00:41:49.300 --> 00:41:52.907 only thing we have right now that comes close to the notion of telepathy 00:41:52.940 --> 00:41:57.197 is the novel, right? Or the literary experience, because language is the 00:41:57.230 --> 00:42:00.436 first technology we came up with and it's the one, Well, I don't know, 00:42:00.469 --> 00:42:04.316 fact check me on that, but it's uh it's certainly been maybe the most 00:42:04.349 --> 00:42:07.586 fundamental for the human experience in establishing that sense of 00:42:07.619 --> 00:42:12.017 community. And books are the vessels for that, right? They accumulate all 00:42:12.050 --> 00:42:16.327 of the temporal experience. Uh, if you think about the 7.5 million people 00:42:16.360 --> 00:42:21.236 who've contributed to Wikipedia and imagine all of the the hours days, the 00:42:21.269 --> 00:42:25.927 millions of years probably that went into that have been layered into this 00:42:25.960 --> 00:42:32.796 , this this object or this project. Um, uh, books are really fascinating 00:42:32.829 --> 00:42:36.836 communities and projects like Wikipedia are not just any kind of community. 00:42:36.869 --> 00:42:40.447 They're also fan communities and I think it's really important to point 00:42:40.480 --> 00:42:43.427 that out. And I think this is something that Michael has addressed in some 00:42:43.460 --> 00:42:47.376 of his other work that that comes with all of the pluses and minuses of 00:42:47.409 --> 00:42:52.666 fan communities, fans are passionate, they're engaged. They also uh I want 00:42:52.699 --> 00:42:55.467 to be part of something and part of being part of something often means 00:42:55.500 --> 00:43:00.077 figuring out how others cannot be part of that thing. And so Wikipedia has 00:43:00.110 --> 00:43:03.157 been challenged as something that is technically a completely open and 00:43:03.190 --> 00:43:08.686 accessible project. But that in reality often tends to exclude people who 00:43:08.719 --> 00:43:14.197 uh I don't know the sort of the Lexicon and the norms of that community. 00:43:14.230 --> 00:43:18.967 Uh and Fascinatingly, uh fact check me on this, but as I understand it, 00:43:19.000 --> 00:43:23.537 the community is widely skewed, it's about 90% male and 10% female in 00:43:23.570 --> 00:43:27.256 terms of its user base. And I think this is this is part of the project 00:43:27.289 --> 00:43:31.927 that Michael's engagement and sort of bringing feminism to Wikipedia and 00:43:31.960 --> 00:43:35.697 opening up a larger conversation about that. But you should really ask him 00:43:35.730 --> 00:43:40.727 about that. So I won't put any more words in his mouth. Um, but uh you 00:43:40.760 --> 00:43:46.407 know, being a fan community is uh is not something that we should uh as as 00:43:46.440 --> 00:43:49.537 academics or scholars sort of smile at Wikipedia and said, well of course 00:43:49.570 --> 00:43:52.727 , you know, Wikipedia does that because you know, what is the O E. D. But 00:43:52.760 --> 00:43:56.057 a fan community, the people who have contributed to the O. E. D. These 00:43:56.090 --> 00:44:00.247 crazy word hunters who track down neologisms and you know, try and find 00:44:00.280 --> 00:44:06.066 the first instance when somebody said McGuffin, you know this is this is 00:44:06.099 --> 00:44:10.157 not something you do for the big bucks. Uh This is something you do to to 00:44:10.190 --> 00:44:12.947 break bread with the dead and it's something you do to become part of a 00:44:12.980 --> 00:44:17.247 community of fellow weirdoes. Um And what are we if not uh you know, 00:44:17.280 --> 00:44:23.947 accumulated aggregated communities of fellow weirdos here. So So the book 00:44:23.980 --> 00:44:28.986 is a community in a way that leads up to to my two Chapter 3. It's a it's 00:44:29.019 --> 00:44:33.376 a it's a it's a vehicle. It's a platform. The book is a place for bringing 00:44:33.409 --> 00:44:38.037 people together. So if you think about it, there are a lot of really clear 00:44:38.070 --> 00:44:42.316 examples of that books that you you remember and that you might even have 00:44:42.349 --> 00:44:48.177 that visceral physical Ithaca like tug to return to uh ulysses is a is a 00:44:48.210 --> 00:44:51.307 place, right? A ulysses is a place you can return to when you pick up that 00:44:51.340 --> 00:44:54.686 book and read it again. Uh For many of us, the most powerful books in our 00:44:54.719 --> 00:45:00.706 lives are uh places that we return to over the years and that remind us of 00:45:00.739 --> 00:45:03.876 the people we were the last time we visited. Just like we would if we were 00:45:03.909 --> 00:45:10.767 going to a physical place. Uh And uh books are physical places and that 00:45:10.800 --> 00:45:14.566 they have geography ease. Those hyperlinks. Those cross references are 00:45:14.599 --> 00:45:20.447 pathways uh telecom Calvino is wonderful book. Invisible cities. I think 00:45:20.480 --> 00:45:25.477 it maybe makes this this point most beautifully that uh language itself is 00:45:25.510 --> 00:45:29.776 the way that we construct reality. And so not only are books places, but 00:45:29.809 --> 00:45:32.977 all of our places are constructed out of language. They're constructed out 00:45:33.010 --> 00:45:40.166 of memory and imagination and desire and books are uh I'm glad we also 00:45:40.199 --> 00:45:44.227 brought up the notion of abstraction. Uh books are abstraction made 00:45:44.260 --> 00:45:47.586 concrete, right? And that's a very interesting notion. Uh their 00:45:47.619 --> 00:45:53.197 technologies, their communities, their places, that uh first make that 00:45:53.230 --> 00:45:56.807 critical step of taking lived experience and somehow translating it into 00:45:56.840 --> 00:46:00.396 an ethereal thing, something that can be multiplied and copied and moved 00:46:00.429 --> 00:46:05.767 around and stored for centuries. Uh but the that even essence thing that 00:46:05.800 --> 00:46:11.066 is the idea of a book also exists in physical form. Uh there's a wonderful 00:46:11.099 --> 00:46:15.387 recent novel called the Raw Shark tests, but shark texts by uh british 00:46:15.420 --> 00:46:21.747 author named Stephen Hall uh that imagines a man struggling with a growing 00:46:21.780 --> 00:46:25.456 conviction that that all of reality is is semiotic, that, you know, the 00:46:25.489 --> 00:46:29.847 floor is made up of words and letters and uh he's he's pursued by this uh 00:46:29.880 --> 00:46:33.617 oh gosh, what kind of a shark is it? I've forgotten a conceptual shark, 00:46:33.650 --> 00:46:36.416 He's consumed by a giant conceptual shark. And this is very serious 00:46:36.449 --> 00:46:40.907 business. Um but that notion that language constructs the world around us 00:46:40.940 --> 00:46:47.637 is inescapable. You know, no matter how many layers of mediation, how many 00:46:47.670 --> 00:46:52.206 layers of uh of performance you try and put on it, there's always this 00:46:52.239 --> 00:46:56.347 sense that we, you know, there's a reality of of of ideas that are 00:46:56.380 --> 00:47:00.416 expressed in language and also, you know, memories and other experiences 00:47:00.449 --> 00:47:04.006 that can only be shared and communicated through language. Uh languages. 00:47:04.039 --> 00:47:07.217 That one thing uh getting back to that notion of telepathy, This is 00:47:07.250 --> 00:47:10.506 something that David Foster Wallace also talked about. Language is the one 00:47:10.539 --> 00:47:16.146 thing that we can use to bridge that loneliness between us. And so I think 00:47:16.179 --> 00:47:19.037 this project is quite powerful in that way as well. When you think about 00:47:19.070 --> 00:47:23.256 that appendix with the 7.5 million people, the lists of names who all 00:47:23.289 --> 00:47:28.086 contributed to this uh that this is a kind of a record. It's like a guest 00:47:28.119 --> 00:47:31.876 log, right? Uh And when you look at Wikipedia online and you see the time 00:47:31.909 --> 00:47:36.186 stamps and the I. P. Addresses and the the names, the biography is often 00:47:36.219 --> 00:47:40.977 the personal details of these people who are contributors and editors. Uh 00:47:41.010 --> 00:47:47.336 there is this sense of these long tendrils of human experience, memory uh 00:47:47.369 --> 00:47:51.936 and geography and history that are attached to that. And so the all of 00:47:51.969 --> 00:47:56.717 that that that vast multi dimensional abstraction, you know, concrete ties 00:47:56.750 --> 00:48:00.117 into this experience here again is very powerful because we can see the 00:48:00.150 --> 00:48:05.137 scope of it. We can try to come to terms with the incredible scope of it. 00:48:05.170 --> 00:48:11.767 Last chapter. It's alive. Books are alive. Um They are alive first in the 00:48:11.800 --> 00:48:14.517 sense that they're mortal books or mortal artifacts. This is something 00:48:14.550 --> 00:48:18.847 else that I think our colleagues in the libraries are keenly aware of, um 00:48:18.880 --> 00:48:23.546 they bear the scars of their passage through the world. They have uh 00:48:23.579 --> 00:48:28.717 adolescence is and Middle ages and son essences books can die. It's very 00:48:28.750 --> 00:48:31.657 rare, There's sort of vampire like, but you can do it if you're really 00:48:31.690 --> 00:48:37.657 devoted to it and uh they grow and change in part because they are members 00:48:37.690 --> 00:48:41.256 of these communities or they are the platforms, the places where 00:48:41.289 --> 00:48:45.967 communities gather. Uh The novel Frankenstein is a lovely example of that. 00:48:46.000 --> 00:48:49.827 It's a it's a story that has evolved and changed over time. Almost as 00:48:49.860 --> 00:48:53.376 soon as it was published, it began to grow and morph and become this 00:48:53.409 --> 00:48:58.256 adaptive myth. That's now a pervasive story that uh everybody has heard of. 00:48:58.289 --> 00:49:01.287 Uh stay tuned because you will hear more about that in the next couple of 00:49:01.320 --> 00:49:04.637 years. So 00:49:04.670 --> 00:49:10.037 books are also alive in the sense that there they're organisms. Uh so they 00:49:10.070 --> 00:49:14.977 grow, they change not just in the ways that they're reflected, uh, you 00:49:15.010 --> 00:49:18.597 know, out to us or the ways that we we ingest a book and we carry around 00:49:18.630 --> 00:49:22.177 little pieces of it in our minds, but they're also organisms in the in the 00:49:22.210 --> 00:49:26.396 sense that they have internal structure. Um they have histories that can 00:49:26.429 --> 00:49:30.666 be histories that uh that start when they're first conceived, when they 00:49:30.699 --> 00:49:34.387 when they exist in manuscript form. And uh there's the wonderful fill a 00:49:34.420 --> 00:49:39.166 logical tradition of figuring out how books evolved over time. Uh, and I 00:49:39.199 --> 00:49:42.456 think what's so fascinating again about this project about this physical 00:49:42.489 --> 00:49:47.677 instance, creation of Wikipedia is that it's, in one sense, a snapshot. Uh 00:49:47.710 --> 00:49:53.347 , but I think it's a better way to describe it or maybe just an extension 00:49:53.380 --> 00:49:55.967 of that would be to call it something like a high school yearbook photo. 00:49:56.000 --> 00:49:59.427 Right. We're still in Wikipedia's awkward adolescence and we have this 00:49:59.460 --> 00:50:03.727 two dimensional photographic representation of the thing and all of its 00:50:03.760 --> 00:50:07.356 weird and multi furious, you know, four dimensional, possibly more 00:50:07.389 --> 00:50:15.389 dimensional glory. And so, uh, I want to close with 00:50:16.059 --> 00:50:20.787 this idea. This notion of books is things that grow and Wikipedia as part 00:50:20.820 --> 00:50:23.557 of this quest for knowledge, which is a topic I'm really fascinated with 00:50:23.590 --> 00:50:31.276 as well, MEREDITH. And uh I think about the, I think about a project I saw 00:50:31.309 --> 00:50:34.867 a few years ago at a conference by the poet john kelly and he had written 00:50:34.900 --> 00:50:39.927 a script to uh work through word lists and put them together and then 00:50:39.960 --> 00:50:43.677 search google to see what results came up. And every time that his script 00:50:43.710 --> 00:50:47.376 came up a string of with a string of words that got no results back from 00:50:47.409 --> 00:50:51.747 google that would become the next line of the poem because then it was, he 00:50:51.780 --> 00:50:55.606 knew that it was an original work of art. Uh that was the, that was that 00:50:55.639 --> 00:51:01.807 was the conceptual project of his work and I really like that because it's 00:51:01.840 --> 00:51:05.626 uh it's it's a very interesting counterpoint to Wikipedia, right. 00:51:05.659 --> 00:51:10.657 Wikipedia is not about uh doing the thing that's never been done before. 00:51:10.690 --> 00:51:15.927 Wikipedia is about capturing everything that's ever been done right. Um, 00:51:15.960 --> 00:51:19.256 and because it has this fan community and it has the people who are 00:51:19.289 --> 00:51:24.557 excited about it, it, you know, they're the marvel universe is very 00:51:24.590 --> 00:51:27.927 thoroughly covered. Uh you know, minor characters in on a car nina 00:51:27.960 --> 00:51:32.566 possibly less well covered. Uh, but one day presumably we'll get there 00:51:32.599 --> 00:51:35.557 right, we'll arrive at the promised land where everything will be in 00:51:35.590 --> 00:51:40.456 Wikipedia. And uh, the, you know, the number of volumes and the number of 00:51:40.489 --> 00:51:43.997 contributors will grow to include all of us. And in some bore his like, 00:51:44.030 --> 00:51:48.166 magical future. Library Wikipedia will include the story of all of our 00:51:48.199 --> 00:51:52.807 lives and all of our possible lives. And so I think that's a pretty good. 00:51:52.840 --> 00:51:55.896 That's a pretty good place to stop to think about that as the myth of the 00:51:55.929 --> 00:51:59.796 future of the book. The quest for knowledge and stan she hated in a book 00:51:59.829 --> 00:52:03.387 that is just as alive as we are. 00:52:03.420 --> 00:52:08.017 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 00:52:08.050 --> 00:52:11.316 Yeah. 00:52:11.349 --> 00:52:17.017 And I'm not sure I share your faith. I've been thinking here listening 00:52:17.050 --> 00:52:22.807 that in some ways, language and number are starting to fail us. Uh, the 00:52:22.840 --> 00:52:25.767 world has always been too big for them, but we've lived for a very long 00:52:25.800 --> 00:52:29.146 time with the idea that you can put words around it, you can count it, you 00:52:29.179 --> 00:52:32.396 can count just about everything. And I was hearing all three of you 00:52:32.429 --> 00:52:38.646 describing a space in which you really can't count everything. Um it's if 00:52:38.679 --> 00:52:43.046 Wikipedia is a pokey little corner of the internet and it's this big and 00:52:43.079 --> 00:52:48.177 it's all growing as fast as the big bang is making the universe grow. We 00:52:48.210 --> 00:52:52.546 lose the traditional enterprise loses and we need other tools to think 00:52:52.579 --> 00:52:56.947 about how we manage some kind of conscious control over the space around 00:52:56.980 --> 00:53:01.186 us. Well, thank you all very provocative. Obviously we can take a few 00:53:01.219 --> 00:53:06.807 minutes for questions and comments from anyone as we said before. Best we 00:53:06.840 --> 00:53:11.396 can immortalize you if you come up here to the microphone and the lights 00:53:11.429 --> 00:53:15.827 and at the very least we would like to get you to the microphone. I 00:53:15.860 --> 00:53:21.916 realize this puts a boldness test on you but I see boldness happening. So 00:53:21.949 --> 00:53:27.046 uh please come on up. Sure. So I think you need to be in the bright lights 00:53:27.079 --> 00:53:30.577 in the big city up here all the way up all the way up. We want to see you 00:53:30.610 --> 00:53:36.486 as well as here. Hello, That is very bright. Um Monica green. I'm in 00:53:36.519 --> 00:53:41.177 history here on the Tempe campus um when I heard about this and it was 00:53:41.210 --> 00:53:44.336 only just a couple of days ago that we got the notice um about this 00:53:44.369 --> 00:53:49.717 session. My first thought was that oh that's just like the human genome 00:53:49.750 --> 00:53:57.666 project book um in London and I have seen the human genome a project book 00:53:57.699 --> 00:54:05.356 in London and have been awed by it but then walked out of the room. Um I 00:54:05.389 --> 00:54:12.666 mean I didn't do anything more for me um and so I would like to hear more 00:54:12.699 --> 00:54:20.699 about what is the physical impact um that uh that we're looking for with 00:54:22.340 --> 00:54:26.427 with with Wikipedia that it is something more than the human genome is a 00:54:26.460 --> 00:54:30.217 fixed thing. It's not growing changing. I mean it is growing um it's 00:54:30.250 --> 00:54:34.686 certainly changing. Um but certainly not at the speed that Wikipedia's so 00:54:34.719 --> 00:54:42.719 I'd like some some comment on that. Mhm. Mhm. Okay. Um I'm not I think I'm 00:54:43.369 --> 00:54:47.037 really interested in I'm unaware of the human genome book at that. I think 00:54:47.070 --> 00:54:55.070 that's really interesting um um I'm not really sure um that 00:54:55.340 --> 00:54:58.967 so I think some of the things I've said already are really and I think 00:54:59.000 --> 00:55:03.307 that you know others have sort of underscored them is that this is this 00:55:03.340 --> 00:55:07.796 it's a paradox, right? The work is a kind of paradox. Um it does and 00:55:07.829 --> 00:55:11.916 doesn't do the thing that it's supposed to do and it's pushing back and 00:55:11.949 --> 00:55:16.697 forth at the ways in which 00:55:16.730 --> 00:55:24.730 information worked and works. Um and what in the book form and the way it 00:55:24.750 --> 00:55:29.006 worked and continues to work. You know as you know you're talking about 00:55:29.039 --> 00:55:36.367 and the way in which it works uh in a digital form and I think that Jim 00:55:36.400 --> 00:55:40.717 has pointed out that this is a point where we all talked about like it's a 00:55:40.750 --> 00:55:48.750 point where the information escapes our ability to um grasp it and it's a 00:55:51.639 --> 00:55:56.206 representation of that. 00:55:56.239 --> 00:55:59.236 I don't know if that is what you're looking for but I think that's what I 00:55:59.269 --> 00:56:07.269 would say to that. Mhm. I think that's one of the difficulties of um 00:56:09.449 --> 00:56:15.486 information visualization representation of any kind is that it is an 00:56:15.519 --> 00:56:21.387 attempt to give some kind of phenomenal logical richness to information, 00:56:21.420 --> 00:56:25.347 right, data visualization. So the history of low project that I showed 00:56:25.380 --> 00:56:33.380 that's a graph basically um is uh you know trying to embed you phenomena 00:56:33.920 --> 00:56:41.396 logically in big data. Um but does it achieve that? And um this project 00:56:41.429 --> 00:56:45.497 gives you a different kind of experience and that it gives you a tactile, 00:56:45.530 --> 00:56:50.747 partially partially a tactile experience of information. And then it pulls 00:56:50.780 --> 00:56:58.780 away by giving you 166 volumes instead of 7000 volumes or whatever. And so 00:56:58.920 --> 00:57:03.606 so it is that like I called it quixotic or it's you know it's it's 00:57:03.639 --> 00:57:08.847 paradoxical or what have you. So it's it there's a phenomenal logical 00:57:08.880 --> 00:57:16.287 problem with representation of data of big data because it does escape the 00:57:16.320 --> 00:57:23.896 human sensory um kind of it every that every intersection. Thank you. 00:57:23.929 --> 00:57:29.367 Okay. Yeah. The human genome project book. Mhm. Not having seen it but my 00:57:29.400 --> 00:57:36.097 guess is it doesn't have much plot except 00:57:36.130 --> 00:57:39.956 on another level. It's got the entire plot of human history wrapped up 00:57:39.989 --> 00:57:44.077 inside it. But it's undetectable. This project at least is playing in the 00:57:44.110 --> 00:57:49.606 space of the book and lends itself to being thought about this way, even 00:57:49.639 --> 00:57:57.639 though it also, it also escapes fascinating. Yes. Okay, come on. 00:57:58.829 --> 00:58:03.396 Funny to be called up here to ask questions. I'm Gregory sale and I teach 00:58:03.429 --> 00:58:07.747 in the school of art and I was really excited when I heard that Michael's 00:58:07.780 --> 00:58:13.856 project was coming here um in part because of the ways in which he was 00:58:13.889 --> 00:58:19.097 taking something that so much I am pursuing as a social practice artist. 00:58:19.130 --> 00:58:23.956 That was such a social practice entity. Um Wikipedia. And then he was 00:58:23.989 --> 00:58:28.927 reverting it back into this realm of almost like a studio practice artist 00:58:28.960 --> 00:58:35.316 by himself, essentially to help it find form. Um but from his, his solo 00:58:35.349 --> 00:58:40.787 authorship and so that was interesting to me and I want to acknowledge 00:58:40.820 --> 00:58:45.577 something MEREDITH opened a gateway for me when she was talking about the 00:58:45.610 --> 00:58:50.106 sort of loose collective in in England art and language. And one of the 00:58:50.139 --> 00:58:55.776 things that aren't in language did for maybe 25 years was that they had a 00:58:55.809 --> 00:59:01.137 practice um that was approved by the government of doing um embedded 00:59:01.170 --> 00:59:07.126 artist with different types of agencies and and public agencies. And I 00:59:07.159 --> 00:59:11.887 what it helped me do MEREDITH was to really think about the ways and 00:59:11.920 --> 00:59:16.296 Michael is a self proclaimed uh embedded artist or artist in residence for 00:59:16.329 --> 00:59:21.467 Wikipedia. And he started in this sort of fictitious space of holding up 00:59:21.500 --> 00:59:27.407 this house of cards. And then Wikipedia embraced him and made him their 00:59:27.440 --> 00:59:32.497 own. And uh, and in the same way, uh, then this is where the work gets 00:59:32.530 --> 00:59:37.776 even more interesting to me, is that when the peace and correct me if I'm 00:59:37.809 --> 00:59:41.166 wrong here jim. But you have acquired this as part of the permanent 00:59:41.199 --> 00:59:48.017 collection of the library and a kind of way. And, and so in in another way 00:59:48.050 --> 00:59:52.816 , Michael then becomes another embedded artist and he's embedded artist 00:59:52.849 --> 00:59:59.287 with the library and not just the specific library, but the model of 00:59:59.320 --> 01:00:05.506 libraries. And um, and and hats off to the museum for seeing that and kind 01:00:05.539 --> 01:00:12.177 of coming in as uh, as an usher. Um anyway, I'm thinking out loud here, 01:00:12.210 --> 01:00:17.477 but I just want to sort of put that out for comment. 01:00:17.510 --> 01:00:24.217 I really recommend everyone when you go over there. Look um about two rows 01:00:24.250 --> 01:00:31.227 down as you come in on the right about my shoulder level, um, in between 01:00:31.260 --> 01:00:38.256 the reddish encyclopedia and babble Unraveled is one volume, the first 01:00:38.289 --> 01:00:43.637 volume of print Wikipedia shelved um in the stacks with a call number on 01:00:43.670 --> 01:00:48.977 it, which is a kind of embedded Nous 01:00:49.010 --> 01:00:52.336 Michael. I was going to say exactly the same thing because he pointed it 01:00:52.369 --> 01:00:55.856 to me yesterday. Our staff had surprised me with that. I have said, let's 01:00:55.889 --> 01:00:58.767 get a couple of volumes just for the collection before this ever happened. 01:00:58.800 --> 01:01:01.977 But I hadn't seen it is startling when you see it on the left wall, 01:01:02.010 --> 01:01:04.796 you're meant to be playing it off against what's on the right shelves. But 01:01:04.829 --> 01:01:08.666 when one of them sneaks across and sucks up a call number, it's 01:01:08.699 --> 01:01:13.276 masquerading as something else. And pulling it off quite well Maryland. 01:01:13.309 --> 01:01:20.177 We're going to say something Okay, No else. Yes, come on up. 01:01:20.210 --> 01:01:26.327 Uh huh. Say who you are and what you do. So, um my name is Susie morgan 01:01:26.360 --> 01:01:31.427 and I am a conservator. So I'm the one who will fix your Wikipedia book 01:01:31.460 --> 01:01:35.137 when it falls apart eventually, because it was printed by lulu, which 01:01:35.170 --> 01:01:40.896 isn't really great what they do. Um but I'm also really interested. It's 01:01:40.929 --> 01:01:44.447 just the nature of modern books. I'm sorry. Um I'm also interested in 01:01:44.480 --> 01:01:48.387 digital preservation. And so this project really intrigues me because 01:01:48.420 --> 01:01:52.177 there's a physical component, but then there's also the code you used it. 01:01:52.210 --> 01:01:58.126 And um for people who are digital and media art conservators, the code is 01:01:58.159 --> 01:02:04.497 very, very important. So I'm wondering in 100 years, what really is the 01:02:04.530 --> 01:02:09.617 core of this? Is it the wallpaper? Is it the print books, is that the code 01:02:09.650 --> 01:02:14.727 you use? It is the documentation of your process. What do you expect or 01:02:14.760 --> 01:02:20.006 hope to be preserved in the future because also I know with the code 01:02:20.039 --> 01:02:24.206 theoretically you could recreate it, but You know, 50 years from now, five 01:02:24.239 --> 01:02:27.606 years from now it's going to be the number of volumes will be different. 01:02:27.639 --> 01:02:32.626 The content will be different. Um, so I would just like to hear what your 01:02:32.659 --> 01:02:37.086 thoughts are on that as as the artist because these are the things that my 01:02:37.119 --> 01:02:41.617 profession is thinking about and worrying about. Um, and trying to figure 01:02:41.650 --> 01:02:48.666 out what you're thinking. So we know what is important to save. 01:02:48.699 --> 01:02:52.057 So we could probably sit down and talk about this for like five hours 01:02:52.090 --> 01:02:57.847 because it's a real thing. Um, I will point at a couple of different 01:02:57.880 --> 01:03:03.287 things. Um, one of them is that there's a digital conservator who focuses 01:03:03.320 --> 01:03:08.977 on media art named Ben Fino Raton. Um I've known for some time who's doing 01:03:09.010 --> 01:03:13.376 really important work as is dragon espen shied at rhizome about trying to 01:03:13.409 --> 01:03:18.376 solve this problem. One of one of the things Ben says is every time 01:03:18.409 --> 01:03:24.497 somebody talks about new media art or digital media as de materialized, 01:03:24.530 --> 01:03:28.767 hard drive fails somewhere. 01:03:28.800 --> 01:03:33.546 So with that as a context. Um, one thing I can point to is something 01:03:33.579 --> 01:03:37.506 called the variable media initiative, um which is a project that was 01:03:37.539 --> 01:03:41.367 spearheaded by Christiane paul and john paul ido when john was at the 01:03:41.400 --> 01:03:45.986 Whitney in the late nineties, early two thousands. You have to fact there 01:03:46.019 --> 01:03:50.827 has been a day of calling out fact checking, right, citation needed, um 01:03:50.860 --> 01:03:56.736 which is what is said on Wikipedia. Um, so exactly the date there. But the 01:03:56.769 --> 01:03:59.867 idea of the variable and the media initiative, which has been played out 01:03:59.900 --> 01:04:05.157 elsewhere and adopted as a model is that you ask the artist exactly that 01:04:05.190 --> 01:04:11.936 um is this supposed to be recreated in a new language? Can you use a video 01:04:11.969 --> 01:04:18.956 of the code running? Um Do you show images instead of the thing? Do you 01:04:18.989 --> 01:04:24.086 just say it's dead end of story? 01:04:24.119 --> 01:04:28.307 And I've gone through that question with a number of my projects actually 01:04:28.340 --> 01:04:34.606 because You know, my first new media work I made in 2001, that's 15 years 01:04:34.639 --> 01:04:39.577 ago. Um thankfully that one, those two are like pretty stable. They're 01:04:39.610 --> 01:04:44.717 really pretty simple. Um and some of the work I made in between then and 01:04:44.750 --> 01:04:52.750 now um has died. Um 11, so let's see one got one was an early blog, 2000 01:04:57.889 --> 01:05:00.376 five. 01:05:00.409 --> 01:05:05.447 something called Easy Mo Blog. Yeah, you've never heard of that. It was 01:05:05.480 --> 01:05:08.646 before. Wordpress was really standard. I needed something that would work 01:05:08.679 --> 01:05:12.467 with mobile. I used the software, it was open source. That's awesome. It 01:05:12.500 --> 01:05:17.407 wasn't super well maintained. Somebody found a back door. No, no, not that 01:05:17.440 --> 01:05:22.236 they just comment, spammed it to death and and then it sort of got taken 01:05:22.269 --> 01:05:27.126 down by the by turbulence who had commissioned it because it was just like 01:05:27.159 --> 01:05:30.836 , it was just full of comments spam and they were starting to get, you 01:05:30.869 --> 01:05:36.497 know, it was affecting. I think that they were being viewed as a malicious 01:05:36.530 --> 01:05:40.927 site because there was all these bad links going off of it. Um So they 01:05:40.960 --> 01:05:44.057 took the site down 01:05:44.090 --> 01:05:49.137 um and then I had the bandwidth to recreate it like a year or two later. I 01:05:49.170 --> 01:05:53.887 thought you know I should really re create this and I went about doing it. 01:05:53.920 --> 01:05:57.336 They're like okay we'll turn the site back on but the site was no longer 01:05:57.369 --> 01:06:00.146 connected to the database. 01:06:00.179 --> 01:06:05.447 I don't know the database might have been destructed 01:06:05.480 --> 01:06:08.847 but here's what's awesome. 01:06:08.880 --> 01:06:15.046 Archive dot org had a copy of it. So rebuild 01:06:15.079 --> 01:06:19.756 from archive dot org as static html. So one of the things I've started 01:06:19.789 --> 01:06:24.367 doing with a lot of my web works is creating static html versions of what 01:06:24.400 --> 01:06:29.807 our dynamic sites um uh use like what's called an offline browser which is 01:06:29.840 --> 01:06:37.427 like a flashback to, I don't know, 1997 8 when um you'd have to like take 01:06:37.460 --> 01:06:40.986 your phone line off use and use it to check all your stuff and you just 01:06:41.019 --> 01:06:44.686 say I want to download this whole website and it's gonna take me five 01:06:44.719 --> 01:06:49.186 minutes to download it. Um and then you can talk on your phone again while 01:06:49.219 --> 01:06:52.697 you spend the next hour looking at the website. So it does that it 01:06:52.730 --> 01:06:59.847 recreates the entire structure as if this dynamic website were. Html. Um 01:06:59.880 --> 01:07:05.727 The firefox browser plug ins, the gym mention one of which um converts all 01:07:05.760 --> 01:07:10.776 the prices on a given web page into all the prices and do the equivalent 01:07:10.809 --> 01:07:15.387 value and barrels of oil sort of still works and I could actually re 01:07:15.420 --> 01:07:19.907 create it, things change the structure of that feed from the new york, 01:07:19.940 --> 01:07:26.646 mercantile exchange changes. Um, Firefox changes its requirements so that 01:07:26.679 --> 01:07:31.506 I don't think that one works right now, but it could be recreated. The 01:07:31.539 --> 01:07:36.967 real costs is a lot harder because it's built off of which it inserts 01:07:37.000 --> 01:07:42.947 carbon footprints into airplane travel websites. That one 01:07:42.980 --> 01:07:47.867 is a much more complicated process of finding the place in the code to 01:07:47.900 --> 01:07:53.756 insert that little bit of html that's based off the calculation. Um, it 01:07:53.789 --> 01:07:58.767 has to look for specific CSS markers in order to say right before this, 01:07:58.800 --> 01:08:04.106 right after this one, insert the insert this little snippet of html that's 01:08:04.139 --> 01:08:07.706 been created based off of whatever 01:08:07.739 --> 01:08:13.967 and myself with javascript. And that changes because websites get 01:08:14.000 --> 01:08:21.027 overhauled every 3-5 years, like completely changed entirely. So it's just 01:08:21.060 --> 01:08:27.006 a, it's, you know, chasing a moving target in that regard. I was really 01:08:27.039 --> 01:08:30.217 lucky. Again, there's a lot of luck involved here in this period in the 01:08:30.250 --> 01:08:34.317 middle before I realized it was a problem, I was very lucky that I had 01:08:34.350 --> 01:08:40.756 made videos of, of both of those working there very short. I didn't really 01:08:40.789 --> 01:08:44.826 do really substantial documentation, but they're like Short two minute, 01:08:44.859 --> 01:08:49.017 three minute demo videos that give you enough of the picture that that is 01:08:49.050 --> 01:08:53.786 what will probably be shown for those. I hadn't actually, I don't, I mean 01:08:53.819 --> 01:08:57.987 , okay, let's be So I spent six years working on this. But like we showed 01:08:58.020 --> 01:09:03.317 this nine months ago and I haven't had enough distance from it to really 01:09:03.350 --> 01:09:06.277 think about that question. It's a really good question. And I don't know 01:09:06.310 --> 01:09:12.477 the answer in this case. I do know um that the one good thing is that java 01:09:12.510 --> 01:09:16.987 is actually a very stable language. Um even though there's questions about 01:09:17.020 --> 01:09:21.727 whether certain operating systems will support it natively because of 01:09:21.760 --> 01:09:25.836 whatever that's boring unless there any computer scientists in the room. 01:09:25.869 --> 01:09:31.866 Um, But it's a very it's a 15 year old 20 year old language that doesn't 01:09:31.899 --> 01:09:35.807 change really, it doesn't substantially change unlike some of the other 01:09:35.840 --> 01:09:39.866 languages, which change pretty frequently. So that'll probably be pretty 01:09:39.899 --> 01:09:44.906 fairly stable. Um like as in like there was a period of three years where 01:09:44.939 --> 01:09:48.067 I didn't work on this project and I came back to it installed all of it 01:09:48.100 --> 01:09:51.696 somewhere else and it worked once I figured and remember how to install it 01:09:51.729 --> 01:09:55.746 all, which is kind of unusual in the world of new media art in digital 01:09:55.779 --> 01:10:03.779 media. Um, but I actually feel like in this case 01:10:03.869 --> 01:10:11.567 it's in a way the idea itself that is the core of the work. Um And that 01:10:11.600 --> 01:10:15.406 the way to do it would be too, because Wikipedia will be different. That 01:10:15.439 --> 01:10:19.256 data structure will be different. They'll be different software etc, that 01:10:19.289 --> 01:10:23.347 it will probably end up like 100 years from now. You'll probably end up 01:10:23.380 --> 01:10:28.897 doing the software recreation mode 100 years from now. 15 years from now. 01:10:28.930 --> 01:10:32.727 Different story. 01:10:32.760 --> 01:10:38.487 And um I'm curious to know more about the we can talk afterwards about the 01:10:38.520 --> 01:10:42.597 lulu issues because they are it is acid free. It's about as archival, as 01:10:42.630 --> 01:10:49.036 profound A man can get what's that? Is it sound? Where do you sit down the 01:10:49.069 --> 01:10:53.876 I think that the that's a good question, but I think that the signatures, 01:10:53.909 --> 01:10:57.397 the signal. I think there's like signatures. I will say that it's a very 01:10:57.430 --> 01:11:05.430 it's apparently maybe there aren't. I'm not sure. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, 01:11:05.760 --> 01:11:11.487 that was a long answer. I'm sorry. But it's like For Librarians. Suzy is 01:11:11.520 --> 01:11:14.887 going to get one. We might look for librarians and archivists. It's a 01:11:14.920 --> 01:11:18.196 really important question. Um and it's become a very important question 01:11:18.229 --> 01:11:22.786 for artists because we realize, you know, 50. I mean, new media art is 01:11:22.819 --> 01:11:26.796 what I don't know, 40 years old at the longest one you count. It may be 01:11:26.829 --> 01:11:32.126 Like he became great, rose to prominence in the mid 90s. What's that? It's 01:11:32.159 --> 01:11:38.737 adhesive bound? Okay, blue is not your friend. No. No. So, so we'll see 01:11:38.770 --> 01:11:41.326 what happens. You're really gonna have to take good care of these. You 01:11:41.359 --> 01:11:46.456 realize because this is just a Yeah, I mean, I'll frame it slightly 01:11:46.489 --> 01:11:50.126 differently also, which is that if one of the books catches on fire, like 01:11:50.159 --> 01:11:54.706 we can replace it right for now. That's also part of it, right? It's these 01:11:54.739 --> 01:12:02.739 things are fungible. Mhm Yeah. He's like, yeah, we'll see about that 01:12:03.149 --> 01:12:06.317 anybody else were torn at this moment between still having some treats 01:12:06.350 --> 01:12:10.517 over there and wanting to mingle a bit. But if there was somebody else 01:12:10.550 --> 01:12:16.416 going once try sure. Gordon? I just wanted to say 01:12:16.449 --> 01:12:20.576 Gordon Knox from the art museum. This is such a great collaboration. It's 01:12:20.609 --> 01:12:25.897 such a great um presentation and it's such a fabulous project. And you two 01:12:25.930 --> 01:12:30.527 on the outside your uh I mean the way you packaged this has been just 01:12:30.560 --> 01:12:34.177 really, really a stimulating, interesting evening. I'm excited and 01:12:34.210 --> 01:12:39.987 interested to see that we have questions about permanence and how are we 01:12:40.020 --> 01:12:46.897 going to um identify the endless life and the immortal ization that this 01:12:46.930 --> 01:12:52.857 piece of art is doing when in fact, as you said, it's the idea of the 01:12:52.890 --> 01:12:56.166 piece that really is the most important. And the idea, at least for my 01:12:56.199 --> 01:13:01.256 sitting there and listening is really about the fact that this is a story 01:13:01.289 --> 01:13:06.326 about a collective project of information that's growing so fast. We can't 01:13:06.359 --> 01:13:11.927 get our hands around it. As Ed said, it's alive. It's bigger than us. It's 01:13:11.960 --> 01:13:17.017 going to move faster than us. It requires abstraction to even begin to get 01:13:17.050 --> 01:13:20.727 our arms around it. And if you do the reading people are understanding 01:13:20.760 --> 01:13:24.107 that to mind. Big data, you've got to do it through machine learning. You 01:13:24.140 --> 01:13:27.987 actually create algorithms that teach itself how to make sense of what 01:13:28.020 --> 01:13:32.767 it's going through. So as we relinquish our presence and certainly that we 01:13:32.800 --> 01:13:37.987 relinquish the top post and the pyramid of intelligent beings to the 01:13:38.020 --> 01:13:42.437 collective output of intelligence that we put together. I think it's quite 01:13:42.470 --> 01:13:46.687 all right for us to also give up the immortalizing permanence of the 01:13:46.720 --> 01:13:50.786 object. But I, you know, going through all those places and hearing you 01:13:50.819 --> 01:13:54.586 guys talk has just been a really fabulous evening and I just want to thank 01:13:54.619 --> 01:13:59.710 you so much for having put it together and thank you for bringing it here. 01:14:01.850 --> 01:14:03.850 So I'll do a last word and say, I think we'll know when this project 01:14:07.069 --> 01:14:10.536 changes decisively. I'll make it to be this space. We're gonna want to 01:14:10.569 --> 01:14:13.817 renovate this whole space. But there will be undergraduates coming through 01:14:13.850 --> 01:14:18.217 this particular space for a long time to come by any reasonable prediction. 01:14:18.250 --> 01:14:22.067 And I think the magical moment will come when somewhere in my advanced 01:14:22.100 --> 01:14:25.406 old age, I'm standing here talking to some 19 year old saying, and we had 01:14:25.439 --> 01:14:30.086 this fabulous exhibit. It was about Wikipedia put in print and when the 01:14:30.119 --> 01:14:35.456 kid looks at me and says, what's Wikipedia? Yeah, then you'll have another 01:14:35.489 --> 01:14:38.376 challenge for how you think about this and how you archiving and what you 01:14:38.409 --> 01:14:41.376 make of and I hope we have enough traces left that I'll be able to explain 01:14:41.409 --> 01:14:45.446 what Wikipedia was to some kid here. Listen folks, thank you all very much 01:14:45.479 --> 01:14:48.937 , join me in, thanking our folks here and join us and stay for a few more 01:14:48.970 --> 01:14:52.619 treats before you go. Thank you and good night.