All my data, lost... NooOoOOooOooooo .. UKoffline ..... ah well

It has been mentioned that magnetic media should have their cassettes rewound at least once every few years and also to clean the cassette heads once in a while....seriously, who has time to sit there and rewind their collection of Ren and Stimpy or alike.  Being a retro freak, my days of the 48k rubber key Speccy have ingrained itself into the fibre of my childhood (this was after my short lived Commodore Vic-20 days).  Hours and hours spent waiting for the classic squeel of data audibly transmitted, hoping that at 7mins and 48 seconds, the Speccy would forgive the blip in the classic magnetic cassette tape in order to play a monochrome adventure with colour clash.  The teenage years were with the Amiga 500 with it's 3.5" floppy with 1.2 kickstart loader screen (actually I had 1.3)... I was always kind of envious of my brothers A1500 with the extra half meg of ram!  Although computers were a big part of my life, 33s and 45 vinyls were played on the trusty of record player - I still remember having to change various needles in order to play my mum's Procol Harum - A whiter shade of pale...ahhh.

Fortunately there are those out there who share the same interest in preserving the essence of something great even though the physical magnetic media will be now have degraded or would have affected itself.  Most of the commercial magnetic media has been carbonised as .rom files to live another year.

What about my own personal guff?  A lot of my personal memories from growing up have been stored on VHS, cassette tapes, 3.5" floppy, CDs and then in more recent years for my undergraduate days, again, floppies, CDs, Zip Disks, 32mb SD cards (oh yes, the availability of Solid State Media for the masses), MiniDiscs (recorded audio only - from previous lectures).  Not to mention the various inspirational articles from various publications.

Media is constantly changing.  On a personal note, it is now in reach that my short term goal could be a reality.  To buy a 2Tb NAS drive (Network Attached Storage) where I can eventually gather all my various bits of media, draw out the archived zip disks and CDs and the organise my life into photos and videos, research and education, home entertainment...  My entire DVD collection can then be backed up as complete .iso's and hopefully accessed from my ps3.  Being a NAS drive, hopefully all my data can be accessed by the wife's Mac, desktop, iphone, ipod, netbook and any other device we use......however, this could leave me with some serious issues.  Burn all personal photos/vids to a DVD and any other info that I don't want to be lost to the abyss of failed/unsupported media.  

Ubuntu are currently offering 2Gb of online 'cloud' storage that can be accessed and streamed from any computer.  I'm a little sceptical about this, only last week I found that after 17 odd years, my UKonline online data was lost due to their mergence with SKY.  At the time, UKonline were strong and one of the few ISPs for the Information Super Highway.  Ridley Scott's Blade Runner still had Pan-AM and Atari going strong.  Where are they now?  I am now forced to trawl through 3.5" floppies in order to find my first web page designs (albeit rubbish, but nonetheless mine), flash designs, even my current online portfolio is affected as the pictures were stored on UKonline's server and linked to Blogger, thank God Martin saw my portfolio for my Masters before this takeover!  Yes, Google are huge and Ubuntu are current market leaders, will they be around in 15, even 10 years' time?

Online and accessible media also brings issues.  Only recently Aaaaronus Barrus tried to identify the Anonymous group and had ended up loosing face not to mention billions of dollars, NAA security and FDI compromised (spelling mistakes intended).  Will my 'personal' data and draft animations from yesteryear be in reach of the various 15 year old genius whizz kids out there?........

References and links:

Procol Harum's - A white shade of pale

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbWULu5_nXI

Speccy archive

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/

Media Longgevity

http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/media/longevity.htm

Canonical's Ubuntu One cloud server

https://one.ubuntu.com/

How secure are we:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/how-one-security-firm-tracked-anonymousand-paid-a-heavy-price.ars

UKonline, the internet is closing
http://www.ukonline.net

My lost UKonline portfolio and more, now UKoffline

"What the heck is a JigaWatt?" - (Gigawatt), Marty McFly 1985/1955.

In 1985, Robert Zemeckis brought to his audience an amazing glimpse of the future and what it could bring.  2015 saw hover converted cars, intelligent clothing and large flat screens.  Two out of three ain't bad although i'm not sure sticking a solar panel on a t-shirt counts as intelligence. See this link of 'Nano Wires - power dressing'.

Scientists claim the arrival of the digital age was in 2002 when this was the first year that digital storage capacity overtook analogue capacity.
From today's post on the BBC news site:

The study, published in the journal Science, calculates the amount of data stored in the world by 2007 as 295 exabytes. One exabyte is a billion gigabytes....

"The Human DNA in one single body can store around 300 times more information than we store in all our technological devices" according to Dr Hilbert.

It is now estimated that in 2011, there is over 600 exabytes of data in the world.  So what the heck is an exabyte? One exabyte is a billion gigabytes.  That's a lot of stuff to store, yet the human DNA is so sophisticated that even in today's modern wave of data overload, the complexity of a single cell dwarfs any technological advancement.

Is intermediality becoming integrated into a biotechnological form? It seems a little scary that we ourselves can be a walking storage medium where information is absorbed rather that up/downloaded.

Reference links and further reading:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12419672

Special Online Collection: Dealing with Data:
http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/data/

Listen to an interview with Dr Hibert here:
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/11/133686000/Defining-A-Data-Deluge

Hmmm, the cover from 11th February's special edition of the Science online collection looks familiar..

Media Discourses - Reader.....

Narrative and stories have a wonderful way of transcending through time.  The long honoured tradition of knowledge passed from generation to generation through stories, fables and rhyme.  

The beginnings of animation with the earliest forms being sketches found in caves told tales within themselves.  Within the western culture, there have been many booms in advancement throughout history.  More recent events include the invention of Gutenberg's Printing Press and the industrial revolution. War radically advances technology in order for each culture to survive and the research & development of mankind's technological advances.  

Communication theorists such as Shannon and Weaver, Edward DeBono (ok DeBono is more a lateral theorist, but still relevant), Marshall McLuhan and Lev Manovich challenge the way we think and the direction where we as a society and also a civilisation are heading.  Some say that it's in mankind's nature to push for the total destruction of ourselves, others say we are on the brink of becoming a global empahtic civilisation. 

Animation has also evolved from scores in rock, ink on papyrus to the modern times of cel ink and paint and now the digital realm.  Technology improvements seem to be faster, with more storage and forming smaller devices.  The audience now has an opportunity to respond and connect with the world through the web and pocket sized smart phones.  Everyone has an opportunity to become an instant reporter, blogger, twitter or facebooker.  The modern world is now interconnected.  

Whilst growing up, CGI in animation in home entertainment was watched on a trusty old VHS.  The acceptance of DVD has allowed the audience to see how special aspects of the movie was made.  The internet and Blu-ray / HD formats now allow the user to interact with the movie as it is being played, with trivia, movie techniques and filming methods are becoming part of our culture.  Where is animation in media heading?  

The vast range of formats allow us to carry movies not only as a physical DVD media but also the digital spreads to portable media devices, laptops, mobile phones and other devices that have successfully fought their way as part of our every day life.  Soon we will be streaming all sorts of data from 'the cloud'. Could we? (play on words - in many respects, think about it).  Friedrich Kittler states in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter:

The general digitalization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface … Inside the computers themselves, everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice. And once optical fibre networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized series of digitalized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other. With numbers, everything goes. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping – a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an absolute loop.1

This would be the premise underpinning my research.  There are reports and papers outlining how scientists are now able to transcode 90Gb of data within 1g of bacteria that will manage to survive radiation from a nuclear fallout.  Is this a new era of intermediality? Are we going to be able to absorb information and breakdown the proscenium between the audience and director.....?

 The journey is just as important as the final goal or performance.

 1. Friedrich Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford 1999, pp.1–2. 

Further interesting reading:

Ed Krčma - Cinematic Drawing in a Digital Age

 http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/10autumn/krcma.shtm

 Bacteria notes: http://www.bluesci.org/?p=632

 Note to self....make blogs much smaller!!

Poster thoughts