When, and how, to stop?

Jason Snell and Myke Hurley talk about this on a recent episode of Upgrade.

A few years ago Craig Mod and Chris Palmieri started a website that came to be known as Hi. Building on the idea that memory is closely connected to a sense of place, they built a platform that enabled users to capture photographs and snippets of text while out and about in the world – sketches that could later be expanded into published stories. I have some moments up there, but never really got to do anything on the site. Though Hi.co is beautifully done, I have my own site and have been more interested in doing things there.

I receive an email from them each Sunday – two stories selected from the two million words they now have collected. One of the stories in yesterday’s mail was a moment by Luis Mendo. About finding energy in taking time to connect with the world even when deadlines are pressing.

Hi has also announced a deadline of its own. It will be closing September 1. They do however have a somewhat unusual closing strategy: The entire site will be archived on five two by two-inch nickel plates made to last 10.000 years.

Irish music has a history of being collected. There was O’Neill’s 1001. There is Jeremy Keith’s The Session, and now there’s Aisteach, the “Avant Garde Archive of Ireland – a repository and archive for historical documents, recordings, materials and ephemera relating to avant-garde artistic projects in Ireland since the 19th Century.”

A favourite, after a quick sample of those parts of the archive that have already been digitised, is the 1910 wax cylinder recording of a performance by Ultan O’Farrell – an early exponent of drone music cited as an influence on Pauline Oliveros.

The site does however come with a disclaimer.