objects, museums, permanence
“Information wants to be free (but is everywhere in chains)”
McKenzie Wark, Information wants to be free (but is everywhere in chains)
“Digital Collections Objects can easily be changed or deleted accidentally due to human error. Procedure and workflow should be in place to ensure that digital information is protected from unauthorised change that can occur when the digital file is accessed or used”
The Collections Trust, Toolkit for Managing Digital Collections Objects Version 3.0
“still we think of the internet like this new kind Wild West place, and things are not in chains yet, so we don't care because everything will be OK anyhow. But that is not really the case”
Peter Sunde (PirateBay Founder), Interviewed by VICE
“A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage.”
The International Council Of Museums
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The continuous narrative of a teleological history creates permanence. We fight on its terms, ceding its grounds. We must preserve our stories, so that we can learn from them. Let the insurrectionists of the future learn from our successes and our failures – all of them. Yet, still, we operate in a framework where conservation, permanence, stability, are the priorities?
Story-telling is embellishment, it rewrites and overwrites and unwrites. When I retell you a story I heard, there are changes conscious and unconscious. It has been refiltered in ways I do not even realise, I could not perfectly reproduce what I originally heard no matter what I tried.
“There is no political power without control of the archive”
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
‘Change is the only constant’ is such a stupid phrase. Disgustingly glib. Fuck you. Do you think the predictability of entropy’s chilling static hum makes staring into voids any more pleasant? Covering your eyes is not the same as staring into the dark.
“Decay exists as an extant form of life.
can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters”
tumblr user personsonable
Decay and change are incontestable. Virtual and digital objects change too. The degradation as a JPEG is resaved, recompressed. Is that still the same object? Well…
The degradation as you cycle your magnetic hard-drive. The damage to the grooves of a disc. Metals rust. Chemical potentials even out and eventually, the battery dies. Energy is always lost. Energy is information.
Preservation is a lost game. This is not to say that we should not try. There are reasons to do so. But why this centrality of permanence? Do we fear death that much? I certainly do. I wish that I did not.
“Every process occurring in nature proceeds in the sense in which the sum of the entropies of all bodies taking part in the process is increased”
Max Planck, on the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Do my emails fear being deleted? Do objects fear death? Does the taxidermied gyrfalcon, its feet turning green over the centuries, fear the degradation of its corpse? Does it want to be the same object it was when it was first stuffed and laced with asbestos and arsenic? Does it want to live again? Maybe it knows it is destined to be the dust in the storehouses, its particles adorning whatever else we try to consign to eternity. Maybe it has made its peace with that.
What is a preservation strategy that comes at the expense of the planet? Physics dictates that the decrease of entropy in one place necessitates a greater increase elsewhere. Are we content to outsource our decay until we run out of room and it comes back to bite us?
How could we preserve the present, paradox that may be? What should we keep?
“As a thought experiment, if we were to storm the Louvre or Hermitage again, what would we do with it? Anything?”
David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky, Another Art World
If your first instinct upon seeing activists throw some soup at a painting is to fear for the canvas and pigment, you have some bourgeois tendencies that need interrogating. I was disappointed that none of the paintings have been harmed. Change is an inevitable part of an object’s history. I’m not saying there’s no value in preserving art. Merely that to seal it off from the society it exists in is, aside from reifying the private property form, an impossible and foolish aim
“this dual “gesturing at and beyond” will only be possible if we continually interrogate this historical moment, and whether our artworks are working against the grain within that context”
Cindy Milstein, Reappropriate the Imagination!
The strongest grain, as I see it, within the museum right now, is a bordering-on-religious attachment to permanence. We should not casually dismiss care of our material culture when our systems are antithetical to care for our planet, or for letting us truly exist with and within it, rather than seeing humanity as some superstructure that exists over the natural world. The object is tied to its people: who made it, used it, treasured it, loved it, hated it, ignored it, sold it, bought it, refurbished it, broke it in a fit of rage. Objects often (not always) outlive their people. But the project of their immortality must not supersede how we care for each other, for the world, and for those objects.
Sometimes we must let objects change. We must let them live out their lifetimes with dignity, and die.
i wrote this at some point in 2023, when I was studying the Digitisation of 2D Objects for my masters' degree in museum studies. much of my degree consisted of me feeling insane about some of the latent conservatism within the subject, and museums in general. i wrote my dissertation on an anarchist museology, for which letting objects live, change, and potentially die, to proliferate culutral practices, was a central theme