Towards Preserving Digital Culture: An interview with Dragan Espenschied
Towards Preserving Digital Culture series is contribution to the Software Heritage initiative, supported by INRIA and UNESCO. The primary objective of this series is to underscore the pivotal role of software heritage preservation in mitigating the loss of digital cultural heritage. Through these interviews, we present diverse perspectives to foster discussions on challenges related to technological progress, obsolescence, legal limitations, and preservation complexities, contributing to addressing current field needs.
Hello Dragan, thanks for joining us! We would love to hear more about you! Could you tell us a bit more about yourself?
Hello! Yes, certainly. I’m a digital art conservator with a focus on software art and internet art. At Rhizome, I’m mainly focussed on designing and building infrastructure for software and network preservation. Rhizome’s ArtBase collection started out in 1998 as a radically open futuristic archive for a then-new artistic community to establish itself and later switched to a curatorially controlled accession model. As of today, ArtBase holds 2313 artworks. I was educated as a designer and came into software preservation from a history as a home computer folk musician, a virtual reality researcher in the Silicon Graphics era, and, most importantly, a net artist.
What are the main benefits of software preservation?
Digital artifacts “at rest” can be regarded as a string of symbols that computers can copy over and over again. But these symbols cannot be perceived or made sense of just by themselves. Only a computer performance can make them into legible “objects”: an image appears on screen, a game can be played, a database becomes ready for queries. When the computer is turned off, the performance stops and the object disappears. Keeping these performances available into the future is a precondition to having a sense of history in the digital age. While a piece of software “at rest” saved on a disk will not change over time, the environment it was made to perform in is subject to constant change, currently mostly driven by economic interests of the tech industry. Software Preservation is the discipline that equips conservators with the ability to effectively historicize software by establishing and maintaining a productive degree of independence from the industry. This finds expression in tools and techniques that allow the management of software artifacts and fully performing software environments.
What are the challenges and/or obstacles?
Contemporary software might be executed across multiple, increasingly remote or distributed systems, receive streamed updates not necessarily versioned, query “boundless” data sources, create the illusion of a local user interface while critical computation is performed on some cloud computing platform, and so forth. This requires new software preservation strategies. Additionally, many practitioners are seeing that knowledge management is becoming a capacity issue: software can be kept usable, but future users and researchers won’t be able to make sense of it. For instance, we have already witnessed a big shift from mouse to touch operated interfaces, or “files” not being a meaningful unit presented to users at all anymore. Young conservators starting out today will not have any lived experience with Windows 3.11 and find its “windows within windows” concept pretty confusing. As of now, most of the required knowledge is embodied in experts who have grown up using the legacy systems they’re tasked with preserving. As the stack of preserved software grows, it will be impossible for practitioners to consume all the documentation they might need to gain a sufficient understanding of legacy platforms. This means that other ways of knowledge embodiment need to be developed.
What would be your advice on collectively moving forward on software preservation?
More institutions have to collaborate on research to increase the capabilities of emulators’ interfaces with the “outside world,” such as different input/output devices, GPUs, networks, etc. We will have to collectively let go of cherished metaphors like “file,” software being “loaded into” computers, or “digital record” to achieve breakthroughs that are closer to the materiality of software. Otherwise we risk fortifying in preservation infrastructure an idea of software that was maybe true in the 1990’s, but won’t hold up to the reality of contemporary software that is already using older software as a metaphor. Cloud-hosted, multi-user document editors are striving to look like a Windows 2000 version of Microsoft Office, but technically — and culturally — are vastly different. “Files” still appear as cute icons in grids or lists, but can represent conceptual units that have almost nothing to do with chained chunks of data stored on a carrier medium. (Finding instances of software using software as a metaphor is a fun activity!)
Could you recommend us with a blog, article or publication that you particularly appreciated?
The 2010 novel The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang manages to inhabit the perspective of software, and how it is pulled into different directions as it becomes used, licensed, re-purposed, etc. An important research resource is Ethan Gates’ Emulation Bibliography which collects articles about using emulation for preservation purposes.
Thank you, Dragan, for participating in this interview series!
