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Keith’s The Session, and now there’s Aisteach, the “Avant Garde Archive of Ireland – a repository and archive for historical documents, recordings, materials and ephemera relating to avant-garde artistic projects in Ireland since the 19th Century.”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.

Ceci n’est pas une publisher – a seminar I attended today on “the role of music publishers in tomorrow’s environment for art music.”

If the notion of the ‘work’ is on the way to being more action than object, and performers are increasingly creative partners, where does that leave libraries and publishers? Given that individuals now have so many channels available to them, where does that leave the institutions built up around orchestras, ensembles, and broadcasting?

I keep returning to Harry Lehmann’s analysis: The institutions continue, albeit in a weaker form.

Free agents collaborating with them can be healthy for both parties.

The audio files of the Cage and Feldman ‘Radio Happenings’ I’ve referred to recently are hosted on archive.org. That’s the Internet Archive, which is both a kind of backup of the internet and a digital library with the aim of providing “universal access to knowledge” (free of commercial interests). The Magazine has a short introductory article about their work and archivist Jason Scott had a long chat with Jen Simmons on The Web Ahead.

Brewster Kahle, its founder, gave a concise talk earlier this year outlining the values of an open distributed web, sounding an impassioned call to ensure its future.

Yesterday Unyazi, today some gems from the Lightning Notes interview with Paul Ford.

Is there a widely accepted convention we should stop accepting?
That you’ve failed somehow.

On a personal level I couldn’t agree more. Yet as societies there’s so much we seem to be failing at miserably – the Syrian refugee crisis for example. How are those aspects entangled?

Also, thinking back on some considerations made when starting this series:

All human effort is worth preserving if possible. That is one of the great things about living now is we can see more of what makes humans humans than ever before.