variable media
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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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Tags: Americas, art, biotechnology, DIY, education, hacking, presentation, sharing, variable media
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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Tags: art, indigenous, LongHouse, memory, New Media, New Media and Social Memory, presentation, preservation, Still Water, University of Maine, variable media
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 mainstream model for conserving cultural heritage.
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Tags: art, digital curation, europe, memory, New Media and Social Memory, presentation, preservation, press, Re-collection, sharing, variable media
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 Still Water’s ongoing research into reinterpretation as a means of prolonging or resuscitating the past.
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Tags: Americas, digital curation, europe, New Media and Social Memory, presentation, preservation, University of Maine, variable media
In 1994 artist Douglas Davis hit upon a surefire way to write a preposterously long sentence. He and his collaborators created a page on what was then a fledgling World Wide Web through which anyone could add words and phrases onto a growing string of HTML. Two decades later, it fell to digital conservator Ben Fino-Radin to restore this landmark of Internet art. He described the process–along with his work to recover the earliest Macintosh icons and manage digital collections at the Museum of Modern Art–in a teleconference this spring with students of the University of Maine’s Digital Curation program.
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Tags: collection, digital curation, emulation, migration, museum, preservation, reinterpretation, variable media
Once dusty storehouses of antique patrimony, today museums are forced to re-imagine themselves for an age where culture is shared from smartphone to smartphone. Recent Still Water publications on reinventing museums for the 21st century are cropping up in anthologies like the International Handbook of Museum Studies and in interviews from The Library of Congress.
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Tags: art, collection, digital curation, digital humanities, museum, New Media and Social Memory, press, publication, Re-collection, variable media

Ludwig Museum Budapest
In 2015 Re-collection: Art, New Media and Social Memory continued to gather attention from libraries, universities, and the press. This just-published MIT Press book by Richard Rinehart and Still Water Co-Director Jon Ippolito surveys new paradigms and techniques for safeguarding culture for future generations in the face of imminent technological obsolescence. Since last summer the tour included presentations in Aachen, Brussels, Budapest, Lewisburg, Oslo, Taiwan, and Toronto, as well as a webinar for the National Information Standards Organization.
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Tags: Americas, digital curation, europe, memory, New Media and Social Memory, presentation, preservation, press, Re-collection, variable media
If you’re over 30, chances are you’ve stumbled on a CD-ROM, game cartridge, or floppy disk in a box that you’d like to access but can’t, because you’ve long gotten rid of the hardware that went with it. Maybe you imagined your local library or museum has been stockpiling vintage Ataris and Mac 512s, but even they will be hard-pressed to keep obsolete hardware running in the long-term.
What if running those old programs were no harder than launching a Web browser? Last week Dragan Espenschied presented this option in a teleconference organized for students of the University of Maine’s Digital Curation graduate program.
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Tags: digital curation, memory, preservation, variable media
The German town of Karlsruhe is no stranger to advanced technology, as home to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the ZKM Center for Art and Technology Karlsruhe. In his keynote for the November 2014 Digital Archiving conference at the ZAK Center for Digital Tradition (CODIGT), Still Water Co-Director Jon Ippolito presented advanced technologies as both the means for and object of novel preservation techniques. Emerging in Europe and the Americas, these new strategies harness everything from emulation to crowdsourcing to virtual reality.
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Tags: 3D, art, digital curation, europe, New Media and Social Memory, presentation, preservation, Re-collection, variable media