Dragan Espenschied @despens@digipres.club

Dragan Espenschied, Ilya Kreymer, "Oldweb.today: Browsing the Past Web with Browsers from the Past" in Gomes, D., Demidova, E., Winters, J., Risse, Th. (Eds.), The Past Web, Springer, 2021. ISBN 978-3-030-63290-8

Hit me up if you need "more info" if you know what I mean, especially if you require the full-resolution screenshots.

The man who experiences has no part in the world. For it is "in him" and not between him and the world that the experience arises. -- Martin Buber, I And Thou

Hey folks, you happen to know if is there such a concept as "media self-blindness", in that the specifics of a medium cannot be expressed in the medium itself, but only in another one?

For instance, a CRT screen's resolution is too low to show how colors are composed on a crt screen. But on photographic slides or on 4k video it could be visible.

Now the specifics of how images are rendered on a 4k screen can also not be shown on a 4k screen...

"Using multiple file manager windows and drag&drop gestures to copy files: 3 case-studies"

"Changing system settings as a way to relive stress"

"The middle mouse button vs control+click: comparing the efficiency of different techniques for opening new browser tabs"

If there would be an AI that wrote down in prose what I do on the computer every day I could publish a lot of papers.

These artwork "medium" descriptions always crack me up

Some oral history on the famous alien.gif, created by Audrey Witters

https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/6748

From my notes:

Software, during execution, can produce certain "inner states" in computer or emulator components. These inner states could potentially be intercepted, imaged, and examined with every tick of the CPU clock. The changes that could be observed from one tick to next are an expression of computer performance, but are not, on their own, necessarily legible as objects, developments of or interactions between objects.

Inspiring wisdom from my software curator colleague: "Do we have actual proof that this ever worked?"

What would I do without rclone..?

From my notes:

It is crucial to understand that what is considered "the object" for a live artwork does not neccessarily match or even make sense for defining the object for the purpose of preservation.

There seems to be a vibe of one-upping each other with ideas about how accurate one could be here, without regard for the fact that it is extremely unlikely that in the future museums will re-create a hard disk controller and flush the onboard chip with authentic firmware from the 2000’s just so that a program can load data. This stuff is luckily abstracted away by operating systems and emulators: once a disk is imaged, it is just a stream of data.

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There was also discussion about what metadata to record about the computer the disk was in, and if it came from a computer, with some participants suggesting to “image” the content of system chips and describing every little detail in the computer hardware.

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From my previous notes:

Conservators love the idea of storing disk geometry information with their disk images, although this only matters if in the future they would want to write the data back to exactly the same make and model of disk, which is extremely unlikely—and the whole purpose of creating a disk image is to get it off unstable media carriers in the first place.

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