Media Archaeology Lab Residency: MALFunction
The relentless current of the future seems destined to forever pulls us ever farther from the past, relegating once cutting-edge technology to the dustbin of obsolescence. The work at this Media Archaeology Lab Residency, or MALFunction, forces a retrospective pause by way of playful inquisition into the ephemerality of computing’s formative decades. Indeed, this same transitory experience is one of the main critical issues facing digital art today if for no other reason than the present echoes the past; we moved on too quickly, perhaps, and I’d like to reverently look back to see what we may yet learn.
In the work, I created a rich media narrative based on marginalia and artifacts of usages, examining the evidence of how touch, sight, and sound signified a larger connection. From this, the gilding of various computer devices is a nod to the religiosity of our current culture of the screen. There is an archaeology of the immanent at play – the imagining of a future landscape latent in the present.
An overarching aim was to play the role of digital forensic examiner, asking “what material memory is evident” in this still fertile, if forgotten, space. To compliment the dive into ephemerality, I examined the differing roles of hardware and software; is there a difference between objects designed to be updated and thus the code impermanent, and objects whose design edges closer to permanence.
The MAL is the ideal setting for such an exploration as it provides not only ample, still-functioning, resources but, more importantly, it operates in the same spirit of this proposed work, “the past must be lived so that the present can be seen”.
