Day in the Life of a Tech Hub Librarian

I was going through some old files the other day, when I came across a speculative writing exercise I did for the Dream of a Low Carbon Future project back in 2014. The brief was to use the model of the future envisaged by the project (based on people, societies, and the human and physical environment) and write a 'day in the life' of someone from 2150. Reading it back now, some of these ideas already seem out of date (!) but anyway this is what I came up with... 

The Tech Hub Librarian

Let me describe for you the conditions of my life in 2150AD. I live a fairly solitary existence. I’m not exactly a social pariah but my position in my community is a precarious one. Now at 60 years of age, with no close family, it hardly seems to matter much, although loneliness sets in from time to time. I should be grateful, at least I’m never cold; a side-effect of living in the hub is the abundance of surplus heat generated in powering the knowledge servers. My job title ‘librarian’ is somewhat deceptive. The general understanding of such a role was for many years closely associated with books and written papers, and it was those things that initially drew me to the profession. I was always attached to the romantic idea of preserving material culture - caring for the books and artefacts accumulated over centuries and so treasured by 20th and 21st century societies - that old-fashioned notion of the ‘authentic’. The reality, of course, is vastly different. The hubs constitute a digital cultural record, made up of 0s and 1s. It’s not much to look at; rows and rows of servers punctuated by the odd terminal. There’s a popular myth that these hubs still hold and protect the original treasures. In fact, most of them were sold off long ago into private collections; no one really noticed, what with all the flooding and famine. And goodness knows what happened to them after that! 

Long-held prejudices persist, however, the old ‘knowledge is power’ stereotype... Naturally, it gives us librarians a bad reputation. We’re treated with general suspicion, subject to occasional threats and one extremist group is out to prove we’re a sect of information overlords, who control the inner workings of society. Par for the course, I suppose. Perhaps once there was some grounding for this conspiracy theory. Back in the 21st century, huge server warehouses (probably resembling the hubs of today) used to guide the investment of trillions of assets all over the world, prolonging the boom years and delaying the inevitable financial collapse of world economies by almost 100 years. Sinister stuff. Now, the economy is relatively transparent, although the Citizen’s Income allocation gets more farcical every year. Yes, gone are the ‘knowledge societies’ of the 21st century. A popular, widely held view is that culture is dormant and we’ve returned to the Dark Ages. Odd time to be a librarian, eh? 

It’s all nonsense though! The concept of high culture may be dead but a different kind of cultural value has taken centre stage: know-how, as opposed to Knowledge with a capital ‘K’. There’s still an appetite for heritage in my community but more in the form of family history, which has always been popular. That’s what the majority of the hub’s visitors come for. In the 21st century, there were companies that compiled huge databases of information, digitized from written records: birth, death and marriage certificates, newspapers etc. The floods wiped most of them out but there are still records, saved from the Amazon servers, of individuals’ purchasing history. An odd kind of family history if you ask me but people seem to be fascinated to learn that on the 23 May 2050 great great grandad bought a new birdfeeder. They obviously find all that consumerism rather quaint.

Reciprocal Dialogues: Researching Digital Culture and Science Fiction

It feels like a very long time ago now, but back in January 2020 (pre-the first UK lockdown), I gave a talk at the University of Birmingham in the Centre for Digital Cultures. The theme 'Researching Digital Culture and Science Fiction' gave me the opportunity to draw together the threads of my research over the last few years, and speak about many topics I've covered in the blog in one form or another, including J.G. Ballard's invisible literature, Computational Economies in History and Science Fiction, and the Transcultural Fantastic.

Niall Gallen - who invited me to Birmingham - produced a write-up of the talk here, which includes some great critical reflections and insights. Niall is a doctoral researcher in the department of English Literature (Birmingham), whose thesis explores Eduardo Paolozzi, J.G. Ballard and contemporary responses to technological acceleration. He is also a committee member of Research/Curate, a network for postgraduate students researching curation, art, or objects within an academic context. His recent projects include co-editing a special issue of Alluvium journal on 'Futurity in Crisis'.

Thanks to Niall for this piece and the original invite to speak. I really enjoyed the conversation with other researchers and students affiliated with the Centre.

Australian SF Fan Fiction and Conventions

The other day I was thinking about the SF encounters I had while visiting Australia last year, including a trip to the exhibition ‘'Synthesizers: Sound of the Future’, which I wrote about back in October.

The reason I went to Aus was to research digital heritage collections, but this project turned up some intriguing SF connections of its own. HuNI, a digital research and discovery platform developed in partnership with Deakin University, was one of several interesting efforts I learned of to foster new approaches to researching cultural collections.

It works by drawing together records from across different research, museum and archive collections and lets people make their own connections between them, based on their field of interest. If you go on the ‘Collections’ part of the site you can see a list of public collections created by researchers. This consists of a range of topics, from railways, to skateboarding, to Australian literary journals. While browsing through, two collections in particular caught my eye; one called ‘Australian Speculative Fiction Fan Groups and Conventions’, the other ‘Australian Speculative Fiction Small Presses and Publishing Houses’, created by Gene Melzack.

Here was an insight into a whole world of SF fandom and writing previously unknown to me; prolific fan editors such as Susan Smith-Clarke, or small fanzine clubs like the Futurian Society of Sydney, contemporary with the Leeds-based fanzines Futurian and New Futurian, which were featured on the blog previously. Or Australian SF publishers including Chimaera, Orb and Ticonderoga Publications that have been going since the 1990s, alongside more recent efforts like Twelfth Planet Press, established in 2006. What’s more, HuNI allows the connections between groups, fan conventions and publishing houses to be mapped visually (see image). In this way, I was able to learn that the fanzine editor Bruce Gillespie helped to found the small press Norstrilia (1975-1985), which published Greg Egan’s first novel.

To learn more about HuNI, you can read this Medium article by Deb Verhoeven and Toby Burrows.

SF Images on the Mechanical Curator

I attended a British Library event in Edinburgh recently where I learned more about the activities of their Labs initiative, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Launched in 2013, BL Labs helps researchers develop new ways of working with collections content and data. In practice, this work ranges from making digitised collections more accessible, to facilitating the use of text analysis software and spatial mapping tools.

So, on to the SF part of the story. Many people who encounter BL Labs will have done so (perhaps without knowing it) through the images taken from its ‘Mechanical Curator’ project. This is a program that BL Labs created to extract images from 65,000 of the digitised books in the Library's collection. In 2013, as a result of this process, a million images were uploaded to Flickr Commons under the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication, which means that anyone can copy, modify and distribute them, even for commercial purposes, without needing permission. The collection includes cartoons, architecture, adverts and decorative art, among other things. But there's also a Space and SF album, made up of astronomical and speculative space imagery (see example below).

Image taken from page 84 of La fregate l'Incomprise. Voyage autour du monde à la plume par Sahib.

These reminded me of illustrations from some of the Special Collections volumes included in the the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery’s exhibition ‘Visions of the Future’ (4 April - 11 June 2011) (see below).

Albert Robida Le Vingtième Siècle

Albert Robida Voyages Très Extraordinaires

For those who prefer chance encounters, there's also the Mechanical Curator tumblr page, which automatically publishes a randomly selected image from the collection every hour. And the public domain mark on the images has led to some interesting cases of creative re-use. Notable examples include artist Mario Klingemann's series of artworks using the images and the music video design for the song 'Hey There Young Sailor' by The Impatient Sisters.

Museums of the Future

Museums make fairly frequent appearances in SF novels, as discussed in the 2012 post, 'The Museum in Science Fiction'. Often, the encounter with the museum in SF is a metaphor for the past (former societies, wars, lost civilisations etc.) and a counterpoint to the future or parallel world of the story. This association is perhaps related to the management of time such institutions are implicated in. Debates in the museum profession are revealing of a similar impulse but from the perspective of the future as well as the past. However, beyond the perennial concern about the future of museums, there seems to have been an intensification of future-gazing type surveys and opinion pieces during the last few years, in a distinctly science fictional vein. The influence of scientific and technological developments, particularly involving the Internet, is clearly part of the reason for this trend. Therefore, I thought I'd do a quick round-up of commentaries on what the 'future museum' might look like.

One of the most interesting things I noticed was that the word 'platform' came up a number of times. This term is increasingly associated with digital media platforms but used in different ways here in relation to museums. For example, in a Tate blog post, Chris Dercon (Director, Tate Modern, London) draws attention to the ever expanding space of the museum, both physical and virtual, writing that 'it is becoming a unique platform for human encounters'. Several contributors to a Museum ID piece also make the connection between the museum and social technologies; Peter Gorgels, (Internet Manager, Rijksmuseum) says: 'Modern museum visitors want to follow their own interests and form their own opinions. The museum of the future will therefore function more as a "meaning platform" where users are inspired to chart their own course and to become, as it were, designers and artists themselves. The digital domain has a logical role to play in this development'.

Others emphasised the social over the technological aspects of the platform model; Clare Brown (Program Head, Master of Arts in Exhibition Design, Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University) commented that exhibit designers are becoming inspired to 'consider exhibitions as nimble platforms for information exchange and social engagement' and Andrew McClellan echoes these thoughts in the Frieze article, 'What is the future of the museum?' He also points out, 'museums can be palliative as well as acting as platforms for global dialogue, and will thrive to the extent they successfully manage their dual identities as zones of engagement and escape'. Finally, in response to the Guardian's question, What should our museums look like in 2020?, Robert Hewison stressed the need for museums to be flexible, suggesting, 'they are meeting places for people and ideas. Their future depends on remaining a dynamic part of the public realm'.

It's difficult to tell how far these ideas constitute prophecies about the museum of the future. Nevertheless, it's a useful insight into the history of the present and the way in which digital technologies are having a growing impact on how people conceptualise their interactions with culture and each other. And if museums in the future do end up becoming increasingly digital, let's just hope the oft-predicted digital dark age doesn't catch up with them...

Thanks to Bethany Rex for the links and for drawing my attention to this topic.

Blake's 7 Fanzines

A long time ago (2012) in a library far, far away, this blog delved into the SF history of the University of Leeds architecture, debunking rumours that buildings such as the Roger Stevens had been used as locations for classic dystopian films like Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). Another SF series sometimes associated with the Leeds campus is Blake's 7, although it was in fact Leeds Beckett University where part of the programme was filmed, featuring in the 'Children of Auron' episode from 1980.

Now, following on from last year's announcement about the University of Iowa Libraries' project to digitise 10,000 SF zines, Blake's 7 is back in our orbit with a recent post on the Hevelin Collection's tumblr revealing more about the fanzines and the fan wars connected to the British TV show. The Blake's 7 Wars were a series of disputes in the 1980s between fans and some of the creators and actors over for-profit US conventions, which, fans feared, would restrict and compete with fan-run events.

In keeping with this fanlore was the tone of the zines themselves. The inside cover of the first issue of The Forbidden Zone, seen here, testifies to the themes of resistance and struggle with which the character Blake was identified, reading: 'Forbidden Zone Issue One is dedicated to the liberation of fantasies and resistance to those who would suppress our dreams'. More details of the fan wars and the Hevelin collection can be found here.

New Project to Digitise 10,000 Sci-Fi Zines from University of Iowa Libraries

Back in 2012, the University of Iowa Libraries announced its acquisition of the James L. 'Rusty' Hevelin Collection of pulps, fanzines, and science fiction books. Hevelin died at the end of 2011 but he was well known, particularly in US science fiction circles, as an avid SF fan, collector and dealer. His founding of Iowa state's Icon and DemiCon SF conventions made the Univeristy's purchase of the collection a fitting one.

The items in the collection attest to Hevelin's years as a fan, during the evolution of SF fandom, and the announcement in October of plans to digitise 10,000 fanzines was motivated by a growing interest in the history of this movement. Fanzines to be digised include titles such as the The Phantagraph published in the 1930s-1940s in New York and the Leeds-produced Futurian War Digest (covered in previous posts Futures Past: SF History in Leeds, P.2 and P.4, an issue of which can also be seen in the SF montage that forms a background to the blog). These were DIY materials produced for a growing SF community and often distributed by hand. They also provided a chance for aspiring SF writers to publish their stories, some of whom, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke to name a few, would go on to become icons of the genre. The University's Curator of Science Fiction and Popular Culture Collections, Peter Balestrieri, explained, 'some of the earliest works by these writers can be found in Rusty’s collection of fanzines, along with important writing from all of the major fans who created this new form of popular culture'.

There are plans to record the progress of the project to digitise the fanzines at the Hevelin Collection Tumblr, where updates will be posted.

The Guardian's 'Fiction in 2043'

As a special feature for the Edinburgh World Writers' Conference, author Ewan Morrison takes a Wellsian trip through time - to the year 2043 - to report back on what he's seen of the future of fiction. You can read his satirical correspondence on the Guardian website, published in two parts. The first part, 'The War Years', pictures a world in which books have morphed into 'titles' to accomodate the diversity of reading formats, and a reluctance to publish new authors has led to an explosion of spin-offs, prequels and sequels, producing franchise hybrids such as 'Shades of Hermione - a pornographic Potter serial, and The Twilight Code - in which vampires save the Catholic church'. The second, 'Peace after the Digital Revolution', describes the post-revolution environment, the international commitment to rediscovering the art of fiction and the intervention of China, the new world superpower.

Personally though, and at risk of sounding like one of the 'useful idiots' sent up by Morrison, while his serialisation spells out a dystopian fate for fiction in the wake of the digital revolution, I'd be reluctant to lay the blame on the proliferation of fan-fiction, file-sharing and community-based Wiki-texts. I think perhaps these types of ventures could be compared to the boom in pulp publishing in the 20s or the popularisation of exploitation cinema in the 60s and 70s, forms that have since gained a measure of critical acclaim. Besides which, The Twilight Code sounds like a thrilling read...

Memory-Technology-Utopia

Or, Can We Salvage the Future?

[The following is an excerpt from a longer piece of writing, which forms part of my PhD research]

‘Why are there no utopias today?’ is Judith Shklar’s opening gambit in her essay, ‘The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia’,  a question that assumes the utopian project to be a thing of the past, a historical artefact. This view forms part of a broader narrative of utopia, dominant since the late 1960s, which attributes its disappearance to the decline of modernist narratives of collective progress and improvement. So, where did these utopian visions go? Were they banished to the convenient ‘no place’ of the word’s Greek origins? Was the unfashionable and deterministic idea of progress responsible for their fall from grace? And what, if anything, stood in their (no)place? One version of events is that by the 1970s, the unifying drive of utopia was no longer up to the task of reconciling the competing claims of minority groups in a world with increasingly global perspectives.  As the utopian project waned, the concept of collective memory began to emerge in academic discourse, with all its evocative, recuperative and inclusive potential. Offering a means of coming to terms with the events of the past in order to move forward, memory seemed like an antidote to the perceived authoritarian strain in historical narratives. The past, then, having achieved a healthy distance from the present, was once again close and familiar, no longer a foreign country, but the vehicle for societies’ shared inheritance.  This temporal manoeuvre is well documented, whereby the past, through a discourse of social remembering, is shaped and interpreted according to the present situation.  However, there is something in the latest incarnation which, under the banner of memory, speaks of a particular anxiety about the future. The renewed impetus to remember, memorialise and pass on a legacy, particularly in the sphere of culture, is underpinned by the fear that a failure to do so will perpetuate the already pervasive spectre of cultural amnesia.   Consequently, stories, sites and monuments of the past were never so popular, as much for what they represent as for what they are. But the question of what they represent now is critical; do they memorialise the glories of the past or hold the promise of the future? Is there something faintly utopian about the new and oft cited memory boom?

I want to explore this possibility further and to argue for a theory of utopia that goes beyond its status as an artefact of the modernist era. So rather than asking, as Skhlar does, ‘why are there no utopias today?’, I will not foreclose the question of utopia because it seems to me to be intimately linked to the contemporary concern with memory, borne out of a desire for the future. There is, of course, a well-established precedent for locating the utopian impulse within the realms of memory, for example, in the figure Walter Benjamin's angel of history,  or in the mixing of ‘memory and desire’  in T.S. Eliot’s opening to The Waste Land. Theodor Adorno gave a succinct expression of this relationship in Aesthetic Theory, writing ‘ever since Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, the not-yet-existing has been dreamed of in remembrance’.  Here, memory appears as the anchor for utopia, opening up the space from which it emerges. The anchoring function of memory is significant in an age where temporal boundaries are being increasingly challenged, effecting a sense of displacement that has been noted by several cultural theorists. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman comments that, ‘due to the ‘pendulum-like’ trajectory of historical sequences a close proximity of forward and backward or ‘utopia’ and ‘nostalgia’ pregnant with confusion is virtually inevitable’.  In this regard, utopia is peculiarly relevant to my study, where the museum, that shrine to the past, is explored in its relation to digital technologies, the current symbol of the future par excellence. Furthermore, my focus is on memory, specifically the discourse of collective memory, and its uptake in discussions about preserving cultural heritage digitally. The question of digital technology is not insignificant, since it potentially re-defines the transmission of culture as the flow of information. Nor is memory a politically benign concept in the projects, press and policies that have the digitisation of cultural heritage as their goal. The central proposition is that a loss of memory is what is at stake in a failure to digitise. Yet there is an irony in making claims, in the name of memory, for a technology which, arguably, changes the nature of how we experience time. As Andreas Huyssen, claims ‘the very organization of this high-tech world threatens to make categories like past and future, experience and expectation, memory and anticipation themselves obsolete’.  The study of memorial forms also entails the study of the history of communication technologies; Paul Ricoeur’s observation that ‘what is peculiar to a history of memory is the history of the modes of its transmission’  highlights the extent to which they are inter-related. Developing this thought, Patrick Hutton adapts Walter J. Ong’s theory of media communications to broadly distinguish four modes of mnemonic representation. He links ‘orality with the reiteration of living memory; manuscript literacy with the recovery of lost wisdom; print literacy with the reconstruction of a distinct past; and media literacy with the deconstruction of the forms with which past images are composed’.  In its latest phase, the opportunities for a more reflexive engagement with memory are both obstructed and enabled by technology. While the capacity to access and interact with heritage collections are greatly increased by their presence online, the process of digitisation potentially disrupts the conventional sequence of past, present and future events, since cultural memory (that sense of the past defined through human actions or social phenomena), is not applicable to the digital archive, which has a time-based element internal to the workings of technical media.  The attendant concern is that in an environment of instant messaging and real-time updates, temporal categories will be swallowed up by an all-pervasive present. 

However, rather than allowing that this situation precludes the emergence of utopian visions, I want to examine how the utopian project is manifested in the wake of temporal crisis. Contra Huyssen who concludes that ‘there can be no utopia in cyberspace, because there is no there there from which a utopia could emerge’,  I will suggest that there is a viable account of memory, technology and utopia beyond the narrative of ‘techno-utopianism’ critiqued by many contemporary commentators. 

Free Issues of Astounding Stories Online

Astounding Stories of Super-Science,
January 1930. From Project Gutenberg.

I've mentioned before my interest in preserving and promoting the Science Fiction collection at the University of Leeds. Photographing the cover artwork of SF periodicals (Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories so far), published between 1927 and 1936, has formed part of this work. These are soon to be made available online - watch this space - but in the meantime Project Gutenberg have gone one step further, recently making 20 whole issues of Astounding Stories of Super-Science free to download from their site. First founded in 1930,  Astounding Stories, latterly Analogue Science Fiction and Fact, would go on to become one of the most popular (and longest running) science fiction magazines, considered by many enthusiasts as the best of its genre.

The new additions, published between January 1930 and August 1931, are among a growing number of vintage sci-fi publications available from Project Gutenberg. These magazines are listed as out of copyright because for the first two years they were published in the USA without a copyright notice. However, for each of the covers I've digitised at Leeds, I've had to seek permission from the artist's estate.

  

You can access e-versions here, posted by Piotr Kowalczyk on the Ebook Friendly site, which as you might guess have also been formatted for Kindle and Tablets. Alternatively, you can access directly from Project Gutenberg here. Enjoy!

Digital Damages: The Future's Pixelated!

Imagine a future where our historical archives are prone to unexpected deterioration and sudden, severe changes in appearance. Sounds more like the plot for a dystopian science fiction story than a worrying and imminent reality. Nevertheless, this is the situation that digital preservation professionals are increasingly met with. Towards the end of last year, the point was raised by Barbara Sierman in a blog post when she asked 'Where is our Atlas of Digital Damages?' In other words, how do we document evidence of corrupted files, colour damage and pixel loss in digital images and objects? In response, an Atlas of Digital Damages was launched via Flickr, a crowdsourced group where people can upload examples of their dodgy digitalia (see example below). 

An example from the Atlas of Digital Damages

 This issue seems especially relevant at a time when the digitisation of rare and fragile materials is being promoted as a method for preserving and providing access to collections. Being interested in collections myself, particularly (for the purposes of this blog) in science fiction collections, I've viewed digitisation in a similar light when photographing rapidly disintegrating SF periodicals from the 1920s and 1930s. Although digitisation seems to offer preservation options, it's perhaps not yet well established enough to offer permanent solutions, which is why many digital preservation projects are currently underway to develop better preservation standards.

And in fact the idea of finding permanent solutions to preservation problems, digital or otherwise, is somewhat misguided anyway. As David Lowenthal writes in The Past is a Foreign Country:

Preservation itself reveals that permanence is an illusion. The more we save, the more aware we become that such remains are continually altered and reinterpreted. We suspend their erosion only to transform them in other ways.

If we can only slow, rather than halt the passage of time, what would be deemed an acceptable stage of deterioration? With books and manuscripts, their manifest age lends them a sort of authenticity or authority. Conversely, damaged computer files more often highlight the perceived ephemerality of digital information. Lowenthal's notion of transformation also re-focuses the question of digital preservation back onto the object and identifying the important aspects of the object in the digital realm. How do we define the authentic look of the digital object? How do we distinguish the original and what would be the effect of losing it? And does the concept of an original digital object even make sense? The Atlas of Digital Damages presents the opportunity to begin thinking about some of these concerns, and how we might address them in the future.

Employment of Time (excerpt)

I recall one weekend, aged 8 or 9, going with my father to his place of work. An occurrence not necessarily out of the ordinary - I have a series of recollections of my mother refusing to leave the car, constantly complaining of the smell (my dad worked in sewage) and generally not looking very pleased at all to have her weekend imposed upon her husband’s work ethic. Anyway, she wasn’t present on this occasion. I think my brother was, but he has no part to play in this story so might as well be left out.

On this particular trip, in one of the offices my father set up some apparatus: a television, VHS player and a home video camera (VHS) mounted on a tripod. He played a video on the television, checked the sound levels, and started recording on the camera.  We left the room and occupied ourselves for the next hour or so - For me this usually involved riding down a hill on my skateboard.  I never stood up on this hill as at the time it seemed very steep.  Instead I would lie down on my chest, much like a surfer or a skeleton-bobsledder might lie, or perhaps, in later years when I’d become too large for the skateboard, in the way a Vietnam war veteran who has lost the use of his legs might sit on a skateboard - calves folded under thighs, using my hands to paddle along. I should also mention here, that this hill was excellent for sledging, and was, due to it’s location on a sewage works, a private ski-slope of sorts. After the recording was complete we returned to the office, dismantled the equipment and went home. I remember the film being Short Circuit 2.

Over the intervening years, on several occasions I’ve spoken to my dad about this trip. He says he doesn’t remember ever having made a copy of a film, and has no recollection of the specific event outlined above [Though almost any of this may be a false memory -  from the recording of the film through to my memory of my father failing to recall having done so, the skateboard (which had a ninja printed on it’s underside) and that hill were both most definitely REAL and TRUE].

The lack of corroboration from my father doesn’t really concern me, the memory seems such a strong one for me because it was a little out of the ordinary while for my dad it was just a typical weekend trip to work (there were a lot). Recently while I was thinking about this memory, it struck me that this may have had an impact on my later interests,  my own (art) practice, my writing things such as this thing you’re reading now, and even my job (I photograph and scan things in a library), but the idea of somehow condensing the seed of all future developments into this one event on a weekend from childhood is too simplistic to bear any interest or to glean any real meaning from.  What I do find interesting in this memory is the real-time-ness of the experience, the scale of the passage of time  in the undertaking of this analogue recording, the 1:1 ratio of it all, the fact that the recording of something will take the time it will take to occur - you know, like in real-life.

[A few years after this Short Circuit 2 incident, I recall my brother bringing home a copy of Predator 2. Upon further questioning it was revealed to me that this copy was created not by the screen/camera setup outlined above but in a Double-Decker video recorder (made by Amstrad?) which still took an analogue real-time duration to record, but provided the operator the opportunity to watch something else while the copying was being done. A development in technology which blew my mind at the time.]

It’s interesting to think of the 1:1 ratio now, these days, when it’s possible to digitally copy time based media very quickly indeed. It would seem that the transition from analogue to digital in these media has affected the very nature of our relationship to them.  The shift in the user experience of these digital media has precipitated the erosion of it’s relationship to our attention: that because things are so readily available, abundant, and free, they become somewhat more diffuse or disposable, providing the user the opportunity to graze or browse rather than immerse. Instantaneity means experiences can be cherry picked for immediate gratification. I’m uncomfortable with this kind of relationship as I’m sure a lot of other people are too, but I tend not to answer my phone (and subsequently don’t call people back), and I take a long time to reply to text messages or emails.  Why should this be the case when everything is so readily available? 

Perhaps it is precisely because of this abundance and availability that postponement becomes a seemingly reasonable manner in which to communicate.  I have several draft responses to emails where the intent to respond is most certainly there, but the actual response, the part that matters, isn’t. I’ve been sent emails from friends with links to youtube videos that I don’t get around to watching in their entirety, or .mp3s that I download then never listen to. Recently I received a .pdf copy of Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson. I know because I download it, it’s on my desktop, though I have never had a look inside [However, in the course of writing this, I’ve since had a brief look, so you’d best discount that last sentence]. I’d like to argue that this is a matter of technology, that if I owned an iPad or Kindle, that I’d of course read it straight away, and this would be precisely because of the availability and malleability of the media, but I’m not so sure. Likewise, if I had a comfortable room where I could listen to these mp3’s on a good stereo, of course I’d listen to them. But perhaps it’s just that I never seem to find the time, because, to do so I'd have to care enough about these ephemeral items, and because they don’t have any weight - they don’t exist through time expended (on my part) in accessing them - I don’t give them any intellectual weight.  Maybe this is a side effect of having grown up alongside these technological developments - I still have hundreds of CDs, untouched in years, at my parents house - I wonder whether I’ll ever listen to them again - DVDs that I meant to get round to watch but just never-managed-to-find-the-time. Maybe the cause of this is an internal confusion of what exists and what doesn’t, that because these are here in an instant I can get them anytime, however much I know that anytime roughly translates to never.

This text is an excerpt from the piece Employment of Time written for the exhibition of the same name curated by my friend Pernille Leggat Ramfelt. It has been (very minimally) adapted. The full text can be found here.