variable media

Ken Jacobs inspecting one of his projectors, ca. 1995

Ken Jacobs and Preserving the Immaterial

This week we lost a figure known as “the dean of American avant-garde film.” Ken Jacobs was renowned for his ability to turn the humblest materia prima of cinema, including 16mm projectors and dusty reels of found footage, into optical sorcery. In so doing, he also turned time-honored assumptions about media preservation on their head.

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2022 Isea Frontispiece With Headshots

Wrestling with NFTs and TikTok in 2022

NFTs and TikTok, two of the biggest digital trends in recent years, came under fire in 2022. Research by Still Water researchers helped to explain their advantages and vulnerabilities in over a dozen venues, including publications from Wired to Forbes and presentations from London to Shanghai.

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Jason Scott

Jason Scott of the Internet Archive returns for public webinar

UMaine’s Digital Curation program is thrilled to host a free public webinar with “free-range archivist” Jason Scott on Wednesday 5 May at 2pm EDT as part of its regular teleconference series. Anyone interested in attending can register for free.

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Code, recipes, and spells: DIY DNA extraction at Colgate

New Media alumna Margaretha Haughwout invited Still Water co-directors Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito to explore the connections between different types of code and how they can be open-sourced, digitally and biologically, in a series of talks and workshops at Colgate University in November 2018.

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Yale keynote asks whether art can be permanent in the digital age

  At Yale’s May 11th symposium “Is This Permanence?”, Still Water’s John Bell and Jon Ippolito help curators and historians plan for a digital future in which “archival material” could be a contradiction in terms.

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“Right To Unmake” CAA panel examines Lego-like creativity

While the maker movement continues to gather publicity, one of its most critical dynamics seldom makes the headlines: the right to unmake. Now the College Art Association has published a call for presentations on unmaking and “Lego-like” creativity for its next annual conference in Los Angeles in February 2018.

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Is reinterpretation the new emulation?

Reinterpretation as a preservation strategy has been called “radical” and “dangerous,” yet this unconventional approach has seen a surge of interest in preservation communities in the past year. In a departure from conventional wisdom about conservation, a group of European preservation experts recently invited Still Water’s Jon Ippolito to reassess this controversial technique as a

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Reinterpreting the past with 3D scans and DNA

Interpreting the past has long been the province of historians, but reinterpreting it has recently become a concern of conservators. This most powerful, and most controversial, of preservation strategies can demand techniques not found in the traditional conservation lab, from 3d scanning to DNA computing. Several international conferences from Mexico City to Amsterdam recently spotlighted

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