Two Miracles in Three Minutes

Here on this table is a bottle a water: a non-digital object. If I hold it, then none of you can hold it. If I want to have it in another room in this building, I have to carry it there, and that takes time and effort -- and it means that the bottle will not be in this room anymore. If I want to carry it back to London, that's almost impossible, unless I pay Ryan Air £15 extra for checked baggage -- and it will take days and not be worth the effort, so I'll never have it in London. And if I come back to Vienna, this real object will probably not be here, and eventually this table won't be here and eventually I won't be here -- that's how it is with real objects.

Digital objects, however, are very happy to simply violate all the laws of physics. They travel at the speed of light, they can be in many places at once -- and if we do our jobs, they can last indefinitely. They have ubiquity, and immortality -- so that's surely miraculous.

Unless for whatever reason your institution sets limits to access, and says "to see my digital object you have to come inside my physical building." In that case, the special powers are lost: no instantaneous travel, no ubiquity -- might as well be an ordinary object instead of a digital object.

So that's miracle one: digital objects break the laws of physics -- and lesson one: but only if we have digital access to these digital objects -- and aren't prevented from having that access by legal barriers, or cold feet, or some other limit that denies access. How great a crime is that: interfering with a miracle!

The other thing that is miraculous in a different way is the file -- the common ordinary file that we all have lots of, thousands of.

I've never actually seen a file. Can you show me a file? Do you know what a file really is? Where it really is? Files are sort of miraculous because they remind me of matters of faith: we all believe in files, and so we convince ourselves that they exist.

I had to think through all this in preservation discussions with video art collections. We came to the conclusion that video art was more like dance or other performing arts: it was a performance that had to be preserved, not just bits or analogue signals. That led me to realise that all files are a performance. We never see the actual thing that we talk about holding and migrating and preserving. We see the result on that thing of a whole lot of technology, from storage systems to computer operating systems to, finally, the rendering application that makes the file do something, and complete its performance.

We click, and the file performs, like a ballerina en pointe and here in front of us, performing. [This is when I tried to be a ballerina, to show my point; there are no pictures of the 63-yr old bald man on his toes with his hands over his head; I did hear a remark later: surreal.]

We hope the file performs, and continues to perform, and doesn't fall over. All our preservation work is not just about capturing the file, but about capturing the performance -- of the file under certain conditions, within certain systems -- and somehow capturing it in a way that we can still have the performance under future, changed conditions and systems.

The miracle -- number two -- is that so much technology, running on so many files, almost always works. We're gathered in this room because of that word almost: to understand how big it is, and when and where we get the almost, and what we can do about almost. And lesson number two is that we're here to preserve performance, not just bits.