Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The Archive


The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

8 comments:

avk said...

This is why we need the Public Domain to be revitalized. Our culture is disappearing out from under us.

Unknown said...

It's also a good argument for putting more funds into the Library of Congress and other government (or independent) organizations tasked with preserving culture.

w1ndst0rm said...

Does this assume it is all worth saving? Do we save it all anyway?

avk said...

Of course it's worth saving- if not just for the historical record, then as a resource for people who might want to, say, sample a recording or recycle a hook if it's music. Or take some crappy old movie or book or stageplay and reinvent it as something good or particularly relevant to some moment in the future. If the Bach Foundation had rights to everything he wrote in perpetuity, there would have been no other music for a couple of hundred years because almost all classical music owes something to Bach.

Also, what we consider to be the best we have to offer might not seem so to people 100 years from now. They should have the opportunity to decide what's good or, more importantly, what is useful to them to work through the issues of their day.

After racking up a ridiculous debt and breaking the planet, it's kind of the least we can do.

avk said...

Man, Tim. You got me.

I'm sorry. I think you confused the blog with the A.V. Club forums.

w1ndst0rm said...

Heh, after I laid that trap I sat on the toilet and thought some more. How many copies of late 1800's back porch washboard music from Kentucky do you keep? All of them or just enough to get the idea?

Unknown said...

Heathen. You preserve every damn one. Because the one you didn't save might have been the one to influence the novel that changed the world, or inspire a couple to have a baby or save somebody's life.

Fuck fetuses. Every piece of art is precious.

andrew said...

I'm a hoarder.

I am all for preservation.

However, first task should be preserving all the very early photographs and very early recordings of cultures that were later repressed for being different from the majority. For starters there are a ton of old photographs and wax spindle recordings of Native American languages us in the USA stomped into oblivion by forcing the kids into schools and whipping em with willow switches whenever english wasn't used, but there are plenty of other similar examples on every continent except Antarctica.

Money isn't infinite. Spend the resources we have in preserving as many cultures as we can, and then we can look at preserving every aspect of every culture.

Every Language is Precious

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