In the final days of  the XFR STN exhibition at the New Museum, we encountered what was hands-down the most challenging born-digital recovery to have occured during the run of the exhibition. On August 30th, artist Phil Sanders arrived at the New Museum with an amalgam floppy disks, and two external hard disk drives. XFR STN technician Kristin MacDonough went into production mode with recovering the floppy disks. In just a few hours Kristin was able to recover 146 of Phil’s floppy disks. Prolific!

While Kristin tended to the sea of floppy disks, I investigated the hard drive situation. The...

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For those interested in video game preservation, I highly recommend giving the following article a careful read: “In Search of Scanlines: The Best CRT Monitor for Retro Gaming.” Considering the wave of acquisitions at MoMA my colleagues and I have been spending a whole lot of time thinking about how display hardware shapes the visual experience of a game, and in each case, what should be considered the ideal rendering by which to judge any sort of emulation. Needless to say, I’ve been chatting a bit with Nick Montfort.

I found the article interesting not for its discussion of CRTs,...

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By now you’ve likely heard that Yahoo! intends on acquiring Tumblr. While, the acquisition is not (at time of writing) confirmed and even if it goes down, it does not mean death to Tumblr, you are likely wondering how to take your stuff and run. Today. Here’s how.

Bad news: there is no official Tumblr backup tool. Some people have cooked up well intentioned tools, but none of them preserve the lookand feelof your Tumblr. For those that have spent countless hours perfecting their own theme, this will simply not do. If you want a backup of your Tumblr that...

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Dear internet: over the course of the past week, a few people have mentioned that they have heard I was leaving Rhizome. This is not the case. There have, however, been some some wonderful changes in my professional life that I have not quite shared publicly. I’d like to update you, dear reader, on the particulars of these changes – lest misinformation befall you.

As of two weeks ago, I am officially splitting my time between Rhizome and the conservation department of the Museum of Modern Art. I have joined the fantastic team at MoMA to lead on the development...

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Ben Vershbow, Manager of NYPL Labs introducing the talk

Yours truly, photo courtesy Neal Stimler

Post talk dinner, watching the 2nd presidential debate

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I recently participated in First Five – a Tumblr where guests list the first five websites they visit daily (my five here). Similar to recent contributor Luke Robert Mason, the concept seems foreign to me. As a poster child for consumption via aggregation, apps, and streams, I do not pull up my bookmarks in the morning as though unfolding the daily newspaper. Rather than opting to compensate for this by providing (as many contributors seem to) my favorite five, I decided to provide a strict, data driven answer to the question – of a sample of the first five URLs...

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Last week, early web folklorist, OG net artist, and friend of Rhizome, Olia Lialina wrote a post that dug at Art.sy for how severely their image processing system had mangled an image of her piece My Boyfriend Came Back From The War. Despite (for the lulz) comparing the problem to the recent destruction of a 19th century fresco, Olia is correct: the image of her work, as processed by Art.sy’s system does look pretty bad. This is just one manifestation of an underlying problem I have been pondering lately: how can documentation of works that are screen-based, and inherently low-resolution,...

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I wrote a piece for Rhizome about an object that is currently on display at the New Museum for the Ghosts in the Machineexhibition: Homer Dudley’s VODER. It’s a really fantastic piece of history that arguably ushered in the modern era of speech synthesis, and influenced culture in some very significant ways. Here’s the full article, and here for your enjoyment is a six minute demonstration of the VODER.

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tl;dr: Storify is not a Twitter archiving tool, but it easily could be.

After the great conversation at #ArtsTech on 6/13, I collected tweets from the evening [see them here] using Storify. It was the first time I’d ever used it. My takeaway echoes most people who have used Storify: fantastic.

However: there is one major gap that Storify isn’t addressing. One that would be trivial for them to implement, but would have a major impact on the landscape of personal digital preservation tools. To summarize the issue: Storify is a black-box service. When they inevitably cease to exist, so...

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1. 

Tonight @eyebeamnyc-#ArtsTech: Digital Conservation and Archiving, ft. EAI’s Media Art Collection Manager Desiree Leary http://www.meetup.com/Arts-Culture-and-Technology/events/67451062/

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EAI

Wed, Jun 13 2012 10:48:00

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#artstech http://pic.twitter.com/Ba8sh9dw

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GiovannaSun

Wed, Jun 13 2012 19:31:44

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RT @ArtsTechMeetup: . @juliaxgulia opening up the #Artstech presentations @eyebeamnyc http://pic.twitter.com/2brPvzbP

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