Artifacts (1 of 2)
another installment of the Theory of Everything
In 2005 the photographer and educator Robert Burley set out to document how digital technology was changing photography. Two years later when Kodak began dynamiting its international headquarters he realized things weren’t changing — they were ending.
Robert Burley is the author of The Disappearance of Darkness — a picture book / wake for the last days of analog photography. Over the course of five years Robert travelled around Canada and the United States taking pictures of the grand finale. He travelled to Rochester, New York when Kodak imploded and he travelled to Parsons, Kansas when Dwayne’s Photo-lab announced it would no longer process Kodachrome film.
The world’s first collaborative sentence entered the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1995. When the staff decided to put the work back up for display last year, they were faced with a philosophical dilemma: use the old version with the dead links, or create an updated version, one users could interact with. Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney, tells us what the Museum did and why. You can find the sentence here
Digital works, like the Sentence, are posing new challenges to Arts Conservators. Christine Frohnet (yes, this episode has TWO Art World professionals of German Descent) explains to us why “Art with a Plug” is so difficult to care for and why so many Electronic Artworks are in danger.
And wrapping up this installment: a chat with our D.C. correspondent “Chris” who tells us the TRUTH about Edward Snowden and Snapchat.
