book – Verlag Hochschule ür Gestaltung Offenbach – ISBN 3921997410
The perishability of electronic informations is one of the most ticklish questions of the digital era. New media are strongly tied to the availability of the hardware necessary to enjoy them, and the problem of data conservation is still unresolved and still needs a complex combinationof devices to support many different, sometimes defunct, standards and the supports are volatile. With so much uncertainty, the printouts of the proceedings of these conferences on media archeology are precious. The conferences deal with this theme from a historical and cultural perspective, from many different angles, such as the role of the body as a medium and the difficulties in documenting some works, such as performances. The limbo of recorded materials that can be accessed only recovering their initial conditions is compared to a lost continent. Indeed, if one thinks about the quantity of material recorded on magnetic supports, it’s easy to visualize a melancholic vision of a great and undefined number of works that, inexorably, are in the process of being lost, as if the museums were being slowly invaded by an unbeatable destructive parasite. The loss of memory, that is, of its physical replicability (organically, digitally or analogically) implies a loss of history whose price is definitely too high.