The Future is Not What it Used to Be
Category: I
Year: Feb 20202
Location: Kobe, Japan
Artist: Dominic Fondé
What do you need to be able to read a book? At its simplest level the answer is visible light, just enough to allow the ink to be distinct from the page and allow the eye to appreciate the shapes of the letters printed there. With that, any and all information is accessible. It is a gateway to another realm, another universe, another reality. But for all its brilliant simplicity the printed page is under threat. Digital publishing, cloud storage, the internet, the ipad, the kindle, all of these things pose an existential threat to the physical printed book and by extension to the libraries that hold them. How very space age. how very futuristic. Digital formats save space. You can carry hundreds of books with you and delve into them using a smart phone if you want to. All well and good, however there is a catch. You have to keep the batteries of your electronic devices charged if you want to read in the digital age. Lose your phone or your kindle and you lose your whole library if you are not backed up, not to mention the cost of replacing an expensive electronic item. Worse still is the fact that digital formats change. The hardware we use to access digital files are subject to a constant upgrading and even if the hardware endures software changes often mean the information held there is unreadable. In the last twenty years I have seen 3.5 inch floppy discs replaced by zip drives, zip drives replaced by cd, cd replaced by thumb drives, thumb drives replaced by cloud storage. Yet I have books on my shelves that are approaching one hundred years old and every bit of information inside them is still accessible. Nothing seems to have much longevity anymore.
My book started out as an instruction manual on how to navigate and use the internet. It was published in 1999 and is hopelessly out of date. Each page has been scanned and re-rendered in ASCII, an archaic computer language used to encode text for computers and made up of 95 printable characters. Here they are used to arrange the page scans as low definition monochrome images highlighting the fact that digital information is transient and easily rendered unusable by the passage of time. The shiny futuristic world of digital information where everything is easy and instantly accessible has obsolescence built into. It's not how imagined things to be when reading Neuromancer. Put simply, the future is not what it used to be.
In an ironic twist the original copy of my reclaimed book became lost in the post and never reached its destination. I was however able to print it as all the original ASCII images were backed up on my computer. Having tried to make a point about the transience of data in the digital age it is exactly that which has saved me. To ensure against loss a second time the entire volume of data was transferred by an email service from Japan to UK meaning there are now digital and hard copies of my reclaimed book in existence.
Year: Feb 20202
Location: Kobe, Japan
Artist: Dominic Fondé
What do you need to be able to read a book? At its simplest level the answer is visible light, just enough to allow the ink to be distinct from the page and allow the eye to appreciate the shapes of the letters printed there. With that, any and all information is accessible. It is a gateway to another realm, another universe, another reality. But for all its brilliant simplicity the printed page is under threat. Digital publishing, cloud storage, the internet, the ipad, the kindle, all of these things pose an existential threat to the physical printed book and by extension to the libraries that hold them. How very space age. how very futuristic. Digital formats save space. You can carry hundreds of books with you and delve into them using a smart phone if you want to. All well and good, however there is a catch. You have to keep the batteries of your electronic devices charged if you want to read in the digital age. Lose your phone or your kindle and you lose your whole library if you are not backed up, not to mention the cost of replacing an expensive electronic item. Worse still is the fact that digital formats change. The hardware we use to access digital files are subject to a constant upgrading and even if the hardware endures software changes often mean the information held there is unreadable. In the last twenty years I have seen 3.5 inch floppy discs replaced by zip drives, zip drives replaced by cd, cd replaced by thumb drives, thumb drives replaced by cloud storage. Yet I have books on my shelves that are approaching one hundred years old and every bit of information inside them is still accessible. Nothing seems to have much longevity anymore.
My book started out as an instruction manual on how to navigate and use the internet. It was published in 1999 and is hopelessly out of date. Each page has been scanned and re-rendered in ASCII, an archaic computer language used to encode text for computers and made up of 95 printable characters. Here they are used to arrange the page scans as low definition monochrome images highlighting the fact that digital information is transient and easily rendered unusable by the passage of time. The shiny futuristic world of digital information where everything is easy and instantly accessible has obsolescence built into. It's not how imagined things to be when reading Neuromancer. Put simply, the future is not what it used to be.
In an ironic twist the original copy of my reclaimed book became lost in the post and never reached its destination. I was however able to print it as all the original ASCII images were backed up on my computer. Having tried to make a point about the transience of data in the digital age it is exactly that which has saved me. To ensure against loss a second time the entire volume of data was transferred by an email service from Japan to UK meaning there are now digital and hard copies of my reclaimed book in existence.