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GUEST EDITOR

From The Desk Of Negativland: Millenniata

Negativland was asked to be guest editor of MAGNET this week, which poses a challenge to such a large collective of members with extremely disparate tastes and obsessions. Members Peter Conheim and Mark Hosler came forward to share what’s been on their minds lately and, indeed, what’s informed their thoughts and work over the years. The group’s new album is entitled It’s All In Your Head and, being entirely about faith, monotheism and why humans believe in God, comes packaged inside of an actual King James Bible. And while religion and intolerance are posing the biggest and toughest dilemmas facing the world today—well, excepting that climate business—Negativland will focus instead this week on such things as sounds, pictures and books. And the impending death of everything due to digital technology.

Millenniata

Peter Conheim: Most of us take the promise of digital storage for granted. The overwhelming majority of “documented actions” in our day-to-day lives utilize digital technology. We take entirely digital photographs, make entirely digital recordings. We type into machines that capture our words digitally. We speak into phones that convert our analog voicings to low-bit-rate digital streams. And it’s all temporary. It’s all vapor. Every piece of digital media we use is a ticking time bomb, often intrinsically linked to a million other ticking time bombs. And just one of the results of that instability is: Art and culture may very well take a serious hit in a very short span of time. There’s a reason why the Library of Congress still cuts actual vinyl LPs of nearly every sound added to their library: They don’t just sit around and die (to quote a line from one of the greatest movies ever, 1976’s Massacre At Central High).

But hard drives do. Indeed, every currently known digital storage media has a preposterously short shelf life. And when digital fails, it fails big … you can’t “bake” a DAT tape in a dehydrator for two hours and make it perfectly playable like you can with a sticky analog tape. You can pay a data-recovery company upwards of $1,000 to rescue your hard drive that started making “a funny grinding noise” before it stopped reading only three years after purchase, but the backup they give you is … another hard drive. Hard drives develop “stiction” from non-use, too. Film and sound archives the world over are desperately trying to figure out where the manpower will come from to make constant redundant backups of massive amounts of data, all the while hoping that whichever digital medium they choose actually can be read by whatever future technology they adopt in the name of “upgrades” and “progress.”

A company called Millenniata has an optical disc product called M-Disc, which they claim has a lifespan of “1,000 years,” owing to its entirely new and different physical structure, essentially resembling stone. That’s what they say. But, beyond that innovation, there are very few glimmers of hope on the horizon for consumers or archives alike, now that the transition away from analog recording and record keeping is nearly total and complete. As noted anti-fascist researcher Dave Emory says, “food for thought, and grounds for further research.” Read more here.

Video after the jump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK0rwVotgLw