Connect the dots... La la la la...

"The past may dictate who we are, but we determine who we become." - unknown

I recently attended a small celebration of the life of Nam June Paik, the self-described "world's most famous worst pianist", at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I immediately regretted the fact that I had not come to know this man better until now. It is rare to find a person so willing to embrace life outside the box so effortlessly and enjoy it so damn much from what I could tell. Nam June Paik was a pioneer of video-based artwork which still has a powerful impact today despite his passing. The speaker for this session, Russell Connor, was a colleague of Paik and found his own artwork heavily influenced by his encounters with the offbeat artist. To paraphrase this genuinely clever gentleman in his own right, he has come to see his own work as "before Paik" and "after Paik."

Nothing like a good head beating on a piano to get your point across... (8:40)

About half way through the presentation, it struck me suddenly how connected Paik experiments with electronic video signals were with the digital interactive art that I am so involved with today. But instead of using coding and keyboards, he used magnets on cathodic ray tubes, aka televisions. In essence, he had taken what had become familiar and turned it on its head. Whether playing the piano poorly from the perspective of his fingers or using commercials, animation, and movies to manifest sensory overload through works like Megatron Matrix, Paik twisted the senses and created an electronic (not digital) virtual reality that leaves a profound impact on those who allow themselves to be absorbed it. Today, interactive digital artwork allows the audience to become the one who alters reality as the they test the bounds of each new experience, whether in a video game or a simple interaction like in Camille Utterback's Text Rain. All of this was foreshadowed by this brilliant, eccentric Korean man who laid the ground work for digital interactive artwork to make its own way into the museums and humanities at large.

But what of Paik's own work? Names like Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys quickly pop up when talking about the art historical linage of Nam June Paik. These artists, like Paik, took the familiar and twisted it. Mass produced objects, oriented in a way that made you rethink what you thought you understood, once again pushing at the perceived edges of reality. The medium has changed but the creative forces driving the artist to twist reality remain as just a potent. In fact, in a twist of irony, Beuys has recently been announced to be the subject of a summer school at Moyland University in Germany that seeks to explore how digital technology can be used to re-engage the public with his collection of works at their museum, which were often performance based with the artist himself taking a direct role. A potential direct connection between mediums and eras that may have more in common then has been previously explored.

These connections of past, present, and future all root to something deep within ourselves as human beings. Our nature as insatiable animals of curiosity means that we will always look to challenge our reality and bend our perception of it. Art, with all its many forms, will always capitulate to those pioneers who look to take the lead and say "Look! Everything you think you know might not be wrong, but here is another way to think about it." Digital interactive art is an extension of that tradition, just as Paik, Duchamp, and Beuys before it. The dots are all there, sometime we just have to connect them ourselves to see the bigger picture. 

And for those of you who caught the title reference... Ironically, here is another way of saying all this...Tongue firmly in cheek. ;)

A boy and his sentient proto-type Ipad...

A mass produced, personal collection...

Well, its been a crazy couple of weeks but I'm back on top of it!

Part of the reason for my hiatus was a recent trip back to my home state of Ohio, which included a meeting with the parents of an old high school friend. As it turns out, this retired duo of educators were quite the Atari computer enthusiasts, starting from the mid-1970s until the company's untimely demise in the mid-80s. In turn, they asked me to take a look at their Atari 800 collection instead of trashing it outright. (Good call!) As I sat there and looked at the massive amount of old floppy disks and cartridges I transported back with me to my little apartment/room, I found myself thinking about my own, now small, personal collection. Particularly, I found myself thinking about a small shadowbox display I made that contains an original copy of the NES versions of Metroid and The Legend of Zelda. Neither game are particularly rare at this moment in time in this form and both are easily accessible on current video game systems or via emulation. So why did I frame them like a piece of artwork?

A personal collection

In one of my earlier posts, I made the argument that the durability of a digital object may have little to do with its physical incarnation. From an empirical point of view, this still stands true. However, when you start talking about people's personal collections, something of considerable note happens. Each of these Atari 800 objects become more than another copy of Q*bert or Microsoft Basic II. They each come to have a story of their own. Raiford Guins states as much in his recent book Game After: A cultural study of video game aftelife when he effectively argues that mass produced digital objects, such as an original arcade machine for Space Invaders, each have their own story to tell and identity. The Space Invaders cabinet sitting behind glass at the The Strong museum's eGameRevolution exhibit is not the same as one you might find at the local Barcade in Brooklyn, NY. This is no different for personal collections as well.

Returning to the donors of the Atari 800 collection, their story was integral to understanding their collection as a whole. Both played a strong role in setting up computer learning programs for my home county, which is rather rural by Ohio standards, and was something quite cutting edge at the time. These donors often attended meetings with other local, like-minded educators in barns and homes to discuss and compare notes on the latest developments. At a time before the internet was in wide usage and computers were often looked at as a passing fad and viewed with suspicion, this was how you got business done. In turn, they also took in upon themselves in innovate and do their own programming, a necessary skill since many computer magazines at the time would provide written programming code for new ideas that expected the reader to manually enter into their own systems and disk drives. (And we complain when the app store doesn't download something correctly!) This innovation went well beyond their own software experiments, as they also modified their computer hardware in significant ways, some officially sanctioned modifications... some not. As I began to document and list their collection in preparation for donation, I began to see this story unfold. Not only did I come to understand "what" they had, I also began to comprehend "why". These objects told me as much about the donors as the donors' story told me about them.

I have some sorting to do....

Now in the midst of my conversation with them, one particular innovation of theirs was particularly impressive in my mind. Dubbed the "Puff and Sip", this custom interactive game controller was designed and programmed to allow a disable individuals to play video games or generally interact with a computer. The software for this amazing invention was programmed using some of the very computers and programs I am currently documenting for donation. Collectively these components tell a far more compelling story than another copy of Microsoft Basic II or an Atari 800 computer system alone. The "Puff and Sip" was never intended for mass production but its significance, considering the time and place it was created, is an important commentary of the early days of mass distribution of computer technology, despite the fact it never reached a mass audience. This is a concept that often escapes large software and hardware companies who often hold their own in-house collections of failures and misfires in contempt, which are often intentionally destroyed or lost as time moves forward.

Enter the most recent discovery that has set the gaming preservation world on fire: The discovery of the Sony Nintendo Play Station Super Disk System. (If you haven't read about it, check it out here.) This piece of hardware represents an key moment in video game history that has repercussions even today. Only 200 of these prototypes were ever produced. Sony's management ordered them all destroyed in the wake of the embarrassment they suffered at a trade show by Nintendo, who was originally their partner in the project. Through a series of mishaps and a bit of serendipity, one found its way into the closet of a former custodian and only re-emerged, via YouTube video and pics, a few days ago. Only a few are have though to have survive Sony's purge of the hardware and even fewer are accounted for today. Yet, it is the story of how this particular piece of hardware survived that purge that makes it even more interesting. (You didn't read the story link, did you? Do it!)

A wild Sony Nintendo PlayStation appears...

So the questions I ask you to consider are this: In light of these stories, are personal digital object collections any different than any other kind of personal collection? Does it really make a difference if an object is mass produced or not in this regard? Finally, what is more important? The object itself or the story behind it? These are just a few of the questions facing those of us looking to preserve digital history in all its forms and ones that are far too often overlooked. This is our heritage, both personal and as a culture and its up to us to make sure that it so future generations can truly understand how we got here in the first place.

This is why I have those two, seemingly unexceptional game cartridges framed in my room. It's not for concern of the games themselves as physical or digital objects, but their role in my own personal journey to becoming not only a museum professional dedicated to the preservation of our collective digital cultural heritage, but also a clue as to why I am who I am as an individual today. I am a part of their story as much as they are a part of mine.