REDUNDANCY AT THE HISTORIOTHEQUE
How To Avoid Having Your Life’s Work Destroyed By Calamity or Malice by A.G.
INTRODUCTION
It is my contention that the ancient scribes who invented writing, and developed the first writing systems, used redundancy in writing so that their documents could better resist degradation and corruption over time, through the “Forces of History”, i.e. the “wear & tear” of the “weathering of the elements”, and what elsewhere I have called “the patination process”.
To preserve the Original Message of the Texts, in the Spirit in which they were Written, those same scribes, and other authors throughout history, have used redundancy in many forms so that if a text or document were broken up into pieces, scattered or distributed across time and space, the entire ORIGINAL MESSAGE of the text, again in the Spirit in which it was written, could be DERIVED IN ITS ENTIRETY, from any small piece of the writing.
I describe my interdisciplinary art-research practice and how I have used redundancy to fight against the “Forces of History”, as I spend much of my day INSIDE THE ARCHIVES, organizing and re-organizing, classifying, annotating, tagging, and so forth, In the Name of Truth & Beauty, attempting to pass THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE, despite the Invisible Forces of History which seem to be conspiring to DESTROY all my efforts in this direction.
I
In my career, I have actually had my art works: a) stolen; b) graffitied upon or destroyed (physically vandalized by people or by being a victim of water damage); c) they were lost; and d) I’ve had to actually throw works in the garbage when I was moving and couldn’t effectively “move” the totality of my personal archives (which are pretty massive and take up a lot of space).
Therefore, I’ve had to learn to put “protections” in place to ensure the survival and preservation of my own personal “documentary heritage”. The very concept of “The Historiotheque” or “Witness-Box” as my art studio or Atelier came out of: a) moving about 15 times in 30 years and having to move my archives AND not lose “OPERATIONAL CONTINUITY” of the Art Operations; and b) so that the concept of The Historiotheque could be widely adopted and “Historiotheques” of all sorts, housing mature Art Operations and Working Archives, could “propagate” across the land.
This last point, the “propagation across the land” of Historiotheque-Solutions such as mine, that house important Archives of Documentary Heritage as well as “current/contemporary & relevant for all times”, productive Art Operations, was essential in my conception of the major problem in human civilization so far: The lack of fidelity — the insertion of errors — in the intergenerational transmission of the “Cultural Treasure”.
II
The original authors of the greatest texts in human history, which are extant and therefore were resilient and survived against “The Forces of Time,” designed their writing systems and documents, I think, as we would today design engineering systems to be “fault tolerant” and “robust” against “system failures”. They were all-too-aware of the potential degradation or outright potential destruction of the entire documentary heritage of humankind.
The so-called Original Message is nothing more than what I have called The Cultural Treasure, namely, Culture with a capital C, which is our lifeblood, i.e.“the indispensable factor or influence that gives something its strength and vitality.” Culture, the epigenetic code of human civilization, is simply “that which is inherited across generations that isn’t strictly genomic.”
Since, as I mentioned in the beginning, I have had my life’s work vandalized, stolen, lost, damaged by water and other elements, and unfortunately and literally thrown into the garbage bin of History, by the side of the road, I have had to adapt to these conditions or else have my work perish for all time. Redundancy is therefore one of the foundational methods in my practice. Here is how I use it, in practical terms.
III
First, it must be said that I suffer from an impairment or disability called hypergraphia, where I have the inescapable, and great, compulsion TO WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN. I have produced tens of thousands of pages of text, if not hundreds of thousands, in the 30 years that I have been writing every day (usually for several hours a day, when you count all the separate Acts of Writing). Surprisingly enough, I think I have only really lost A SINGLE TEXT, something I wrote in 1994 about Angels. I was writing on the computer for the first time and never foresaw that a computer could crash BEFORE THE FILE IS PROPERLY SAVED, or that files could become CORRUPTED. This losing of a work that was truly Inspired caused a sort of trauma in my mind, and I vowed to never again lose another file in this way. So I designed, after that point, a “system” robust against destruction.
In practical terms, I keep several copies of every digital file, everything from textual documents to images to audio files and also video files. I haven’t lost much since I began keeping digital logs in January of 1994. My corpus of work, digitally, takes up about 460–480GB of space.
This is my Digital Archive. I also keep a physical archive which is relatively massive for the small space in which I live, the dwelling-place which houses the Archives and also my Art Operation, a Workspace and Lifespace which I call The Historiotheque. As with my digital archive, my physical archive has lost almost no information in 30 years. I lost some old song lyrics from the early-to-mid 1990s, and as I mentioned, many of my paintings in Large Format had to be thrown by the curbside, because I was moving into much smaller spaces and couldn’t bring them with me, nor could I find anyone in my entourage willing to take them, preserving them.
IV
My basic work methodology in terms of redundancy not only means that I keep LOGS of ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING, online in various different places — in case of the Collapse of Google (and Google Drive and other services where I keep dozens of gigabytes of content), etc. — but also on physical, external hard drives kept also in various physical locations, some far away from home, one for instance kept inside a sort of bunker reinforced by concrete walls. I back up my files regularly, and never leave the house without my entire digital archive on USB drives, on my actual person, and without ensuring that I have also backed everything up online.
The reason for this is that my work is THAT IMPORTANT to me. What I do is of such great value TO ME, AT LEAST, that I will do EVERYTHING IN MY POWER to secure my Archives. The thing is, the physical archive in my Historiotheque, is a great LIABILITY, i.e. it could all-too-easily go up in flames, which is why I have been working, of late, in digitizing all the important works of painting — roughly 300–400 individual works of painting and drawing, collage, and so forth, including photographs and the like.
This work is painstaking, to say the least. Redundancy is also designed in my Refcards-System of conceptual note-taking and logging on actual index cards, where I have been building my own version of Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum, or “Museum of Modern Antiquity”, though at a much smaller scale than Otlet’s Grand Vision For The Preservation of The Documentary Heritage of All Humanity. I also write a great deal in notebooks, and I have several separate notebooks that I write in, in different parts of my apartment or Workspace, so that if any given notebook were lost or destroyed, I wouldn’t lose my Train of Thought, which is essentially in maintaining the Flow State or Optimal Experience That is My Art Operation in a Nutshell.
Lastly, in my note-taking and logging in actual, physical notebooks, I also use redundancy, i.e. I continuously rewrite, rephrase, recapitulate everything, so that if a given note-book were partially destroyed, you could still DERIVE THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE FROM THE FRAGMENT, which, as I have said above, is how the ancient scribes DESIGNED WRITING ITSELF.
I always use a timestamp at the beginning of any writing session on any medium, notebook, digital note-taking app, audio notes on my portable recording device, etc. That way, if, say, a notebook was heavily damaged, it’s likely that some of the pages would survive, and there would be timestamps on any given page. So in essence, even with “missing information”, I could still RECONSTRUCT THE NARRATIVE.
I called it a Narrative, but really it’s not all that linear, as a narrative usually is. My thoughts are moving with extreme rapidity in my mind and my work mainly consists in writing my thoughts down on paper, or on the computer, or else in paintings and music and so forth. My “work” therefore essentially goes at the speed of light, and writing of course, Documenting, etc., goes at the speed of physical matter, with all the “resistance in the materials”.
I am constantly working IN and OUT OF MY ARCHIVES, deconstructing and reconstructing Lifepaths and Workpaths. It’s of utmost importance to me to be able to do that for any given time period in my history as person and artist-researcher. I have had periods where my thoughts and actions were disorganized, and so the “archives” for that period, the folders and jottings are also disorganized. I either throw out that “Dark Age” or else I reorganize it to try to find out what Path I was on back then, reconstructing the History, in a process I call The Self-Presentation of One’s History, which was the basis of my History-Project, circa 2001–2004.
CONCLUSION:
The real problem in/with History Herself — rearing her ugly head! — is what I call The Faithful (“hi-fi” or “High-Fidelity”) Transmission of The Cultural Treasure (“Signal” or “Message”) Across Generations (“Historiomes”). It seems to be what EVERY SCRIBE OR SAGE since The Birth of Writing was actually writing about. It seems to be what the original Biblical texts were writing about. They were telling the story of The People, and the People in question are essentially ALL OF OUR ANCESTORS/ANCESTRY.
We basically all come from the same place, the same ancient ancestry. Sure, some families come from Africa originally, some from the “northern” Scandinavian countries, some from the Middle East, some from North and South America and so on. But the further we go back in time, the more our genealogies Converge to an eventual Last Common Ancestor.
The message or the “signal” of The Cultural Treasure is simple: Culture is the wellspring of life. The Human Historiome tells the story of our civilizing mission. This “Mission” and its “Message”, are the simplest thing that could possibly be expressed through language and literacy. They came from an oral tradition going back millennia. There was only One Message that it was necessary to pass on, namely, that we are on Planet Earth for a purpose!
THE REAL PROBLEM => A Grand Vision, a Simple Message, and Complex People with Simple Minds. The fundamental experience of “being-in-the-world” and of existence itself is what we could call a pre-literate experience. We developed writing and literacy, that’s all fine and good, but the fundamental experience of Existence and Being is a pre-literate experience, a direct experience of “being connected directly to the SOURCE”. This is why our ancestors worked so hard to promote the virtues and values of Culture with a capital C, and why REDUNDANCY was conceived of and designed into all language media. Because the recursive nature of the writings of the ancient scribes, and the recursive nature of human languages themselves, ARE THE MEDIUM/MESSAGE ITSELF, period, full stop.
Hence, my interdisciplinary art studio and research + sound design laboratories, and ARCHIVES, collectively called The Historiotheque, is what the etymology of “historiotheque” means: It is based on the Greek ἵστωρ (hístōr, “witness”) and θήκη (thḗkē, “box, chest”), essentially making it a WITNESS-BOX. And I am The Historiotheque, the ancient Witness-Box!
A.G. © 2023. All Rights Reserved.
