!!Con West 2020: Sarah Nguyen - linkRot!! Dancing the patterns of digital decay

(one-second bursts of unintelligible human voices glitching in and out) (discordant computery bleeps and bloops) (electronic beat joins the chaos) (percussive glitchy machine-gun-like beats) (whistly static) (applause) Thank you. Okay. Hi! Okay. This is gonna be breathy because… I’m catching my breath. My name is Sarah Nguyen. Thank you for watching and being a part of linkRot, Dancing the digital decay. I’d like to start with a big thank you to Rameen Rami. He made the music to accompany this piece. The music was streamed from Brooklyn, New York, and live generated from his Octatrack. Based off of…

09:20 - (applause) Rameen! (applause) It was based off of all of yesterday’s talks. So you might have recognized some of the voices throughout the piece. So we rely on links in order to share information, make data into something understandable, and create some sort of relatable knowledge base. When these relationships are broken, we lose access to data. Information is incomplete. And knowledge is lost. This can be seen through 404 error pages, broken redirects, irreproducible systems, and decaying magnetic tape.

09:55 - This performance is an analogy for the bitrot and obsolescence that can happen over time as we upgrade and update technologies. Yesterday I recorded the audio from all the talks and sent it to Rameen. Thank you for letting me use that CC-BY. Got you there! And the music was intentionally made to start off as if we’re building the internet. It gradually builds up to represent the supposed utopia of links, relations and connections. The music gradually breaks down as people begin to exploit and disregard. As those connections decay and become obsolete. The piece ends with a storm of irrelevant connections that have not have been made, should not have been formed and closes with a lone hard drive spinning distant memories. I danced this because physical movement and dance is the most ephemeral medium. To me, at least. We cannot easily recreate, document, or backup a muscle tone, a dancer’s breath. Wherever that breath is. Or, the dancer’s relationship to the audience.

10:53 - I’m a graduate student for libraries, information science, and archives. And I’m interested in the rate of obsolescence of our digital ephemera and how we can, or if we even should emulate or recreate technologies. I’m curious about what are the systems, codebase, environments, or maintenance that are needed to ensure that people have access to this knowledge in the future. How can we document, package digital objects, so that even aliens in the future are able to reproduce what has brought us joy? In the end, it’s also important to consider that not everything needs to be preserved and everyone and everything has the right to be forgotten. Thank you so much for watching and listening. And support the UCSC student strike. Thanks! (applause) .