<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV class="MsoNormal">Shelf life. I sigh just hearing the words. Turbulence did well in maintaining early work – for awhile. From ’96 to ’05, we “lost” only a few of our works – The first was a work called “Not Walls” which made use of Apple's QuickDraw 3D and a 3dmf plug-in like Whurlplug to create 3-D constructions. Quick Draw 3 D and the plug-in are no longer available. And if you do happen to have them (I do), they will not work with newer browsers or on newer operating systems. “Not Walls” was made for Netscape Navigator 3.0.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN><O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> <O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">One of my very favorite works, “Radio Stare” (’97) became inactive soon thereafter.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>“Radio Stare” was designed to receive and play a MIDI file and a RealAudio stream at the same time, along with a Flash animation. When the piece was created this was possible. New generations of the various media players handle only the one media type they are intended to play and ignore others. The main culprit here was RealPlayer which grabbed the computers' audio card to play its stream, and locked out other players from playing MIDI. Without all three streams/loops running, “Radio Stare” is not the piece the artist intended.<O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> <O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">But it has been recently that the truth of survival has come home. Turbulence has a new server. And of course we’ve upgraded … MySQL, Tomcat, and so on, all new versions.</DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN><O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">Transitioning the older work has been hell, with only a few of the artists so far agreeing to update their work. And yet the price of leaving it on the old server is costly. A recent air-conditioning failure at our host site set the fan in our old server working at unaccustomed intensity. It died and with it went our media disk. You can no longer hear the RealAudio files on Turbulence, which means our multi-location performances (as well as an archive of New American Radio works) are no longer available online… unless I can find the original recordings and transfer them to another format. Real no longer offers a 15 stream server for free as they did in '96. What they do offer (with the exception of a 5-stream server) is much too costly.<O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> <O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">As an exhibition (as well as a commissioning) site, we have run into other problems as well. Chief among them: the absence of funding for equipment or administration. If you’re trying to maintain a site with many works on it and are not “institution-affiliated”, the outlook is not good.<O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> <O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">I wish I had better news to give on the subject of shelf-life. <O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"> <O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal">PS. Some organizations have the resources to think about preservation (here’s an excellent review of the <A href="http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/education/newmedia/index.html"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">New Media and Social Memory</FONT></SPAN></A> symposium and associated project meetings at the <A href="http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive</FONT></SPAN></A>--sponsored by the NEA-funded <A href="http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about_bampfa/avantgarde.html"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Archiving the Avant-Garde</FONT></SPAN></A> project, part of the <A href="http://www.variablemedia.net/"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Variable Media Network</FONT></SPAN></A>—by Matt Kirschenbaum: ( <A href="http://turbulence.org/blog/2007/02/02/shall-these-bits-live/">http://turbulence.org/blog/2007/02/02/shall-these-bits-live/</A>); for us, it would mean no longer commissioning work because we can’t manage to do both. We’ve opted for the latter.<O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#FF0000"> </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV></BODY></HTML>