Preservation in the digital era

The intergenerational challenge to preserve our culture from loss and obsolescence.

1960. Grace Brewster Murray: American mathematician and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy who was a pioneer in helping to devise the first commercial electronic computer. Image: Unknown (Smithsonian Institution)

The existence of civilisation is in itself astonishing. The level of collaboration required to pass down artefacts and ideas over centuries and millennia is a remarkable feat. While we experience wonder when gazing out at a dark sky filled with planets, stars, and nebulae, it seems no less incredible to look at water running from a tap, a public school, or the complex architectural landscape of a city. We naturally take this for granted amid the mundanity of day-to-day life, forgetting that our civilisational era is the exception in humanity’s 300,000-year history. Civilisations have grown only for the last 11,700 years of the temperate Holocene epoch.

A significantly shorter timescale is our current Information Age, which some estimate to have begun in the 1950s. This era presents opportunities as well as challenges, not least of these being the vast intergenerational transfer of digital ideas and artefacts. Just as democracy depends upon an orderly and peaceful transfer of power, civilisation depends upon an orderly transfer of culture.

Take this cautionary tale from NASA. In 2006 the organisation admitted it had lost the original moon landing recordings. An internal investigation revealed that the recordings had been added to a massive batch of 200,000 tapes which were erased and re-used to save money. The most important film footage in human history was casually wiped by an organisation capable of putting a person on the moon. They were so fixated on the live landing that they forgot to plan for the legacy they were creating.

Several years ago I attended a fascinating conference on digital preservation. Speaker after speaker stood up and pointed out the intractable challenges in preserving digital artefacts: constant software upgrades and the need for backwards compatibility, hardware that is expensive and fragile, and the cataloguing, maintaining, and contextualising of digital artefacts within an ever-changing internet. The consensus was clear: our digital artefacts would disappear without committed custodians.

Though the similarities between the printing press and the digital revolution are often highlighted, there are significant differences too. A book can sit unnoticed for decades or centuries only to be retrieved in a functional state, but digital artefacts that are not consistently maintained essentially evaporate.

I recently raised the issue of digital preservation during a meeting with professional generative musicians (people who write programs that create self-generating music). One responded that they thought generative music was inherently ephemeral and would live and die within a few cycles of software updates. Initially, this struck me as humble, but the more I reflected upon it the more I felt it unsatisfactory.

Ephemeral digital realms offer future generations little to build upon, forcing those who follow to start from zero and repeat otherwise avoidable mistakes. Passing down our intellectual and artistic wealth — far from being a vain desire for immortalisation — can be generous and motivated by the hope that those who follow might go further.

Preservation is a challenge. Whether we are attempting to preserve a video of our child taking their first steps, or a complex artistic installation built from code, each requires thought and planning. With digital music — and probably many other digital art forms — it helps to clearly distinguish algorithms and code.

An algorithm is simply a series of instructions e.g., a series of instructions for building a car. Algorithms can be written out in plain language or simple diagrams. They can be printed and preserved as physical artefacts, and, if designed well, can be comprehensible in the future.

Code is more complicated. Code is used to program machines to execute algorithms. Using the previous car analogy, the code would be the assembly line, conveyor belts, and robotics building the car. Code by its nature is arcane, ever-changing, and often rapidly becomes obsolete.

Here is a great example of a simple musical algorithm written by the New York composer Steve Reich in 1967, which took a quarter century to be realised and completed.

‘Slow Motion Sound’ from Steve Reich’s book Writings About Music

Its instructions state, ‘Very gradually slow down a recorded sound to many times its original length without changing its pitch or timbre at all’. Through this algorithm, Reich predicted a technique called time-stretching, where audio samples are extended to many times their original length without altering their pitch.

It is an interesting example because Reich wrote the algorithm in 1967, but despite his best efforts, he could not realise it with the technology of the time. By 1994 time-stretching technology had advanced such that the British musician and producer Chris Hughes took the opportunity to interpret Reich’s composition using a recording of a blackbird, which he gradually slowed down as described in the instructions.

Reich could have ditched his idea in 1967, or kept it private, but by writing it down and sharing it he contributed to its preservation such that Chris Hughes could realise it a generation later. This is in keeping with the last millennium of the Western classical tradition, where scores are treated as the quintessential documentation of a composer’s musical desires.

Once realised, Reich’s composition was comprised of three components: the algorithm (the instructions on the paper), the code (the time-stretching software), and the audio recording (the music Chris Hughes released).

Though I do not know what software was used to time-stretch the audio, it is the least durable component. Software by its nature rapidly becomes obsolete, and it would not be surprising if the code is already lost or incompatible. The audio is more durable, as the digital file can be saved in multiple locations and physical copies created (vinyl, tape, CD etc). The most likely of these to remain preserved over a long period of time is the algorithm as it only needs to be written down and kept safe.

In considering the challenges of preservation, I do not wish to imply everything should be recorded or preserved, but to highlight — as the overwritten NASA moon landing tapes demonstrate — that we can easily destroy or lose precious artefacts if we do not recognise their value and take steps to protect them, especially in an increasingly digital world.

Though everything by its nature is impermanent and will eventually turn from ashes to dust, our participation in the ancient transfer of ideas, art, objects, and buildings, requires us to acknowledge what has come before and what might lie ahead. We cannot predict what will be valuable to the future, or how ideas and tastes will transform. We can simply locate what we deem to be valuable, preserve it as though it were a gift, and pass it on, with generosity and hope, to those who follow.