Episode 039 Dragan Espenschied

Show Notes

This week's guest has been incredibly influential in shaping not just how art conservators think about preserving art on the internet, but also in building tools to help them accomplish things we never thought possible. As Rhizome's Preservation Director, Dragan Espenschied is responsible for the preservation of thousands of works of art experienced through the web, accessible to the general public 24/7, 365. As we'll hear, this very particular context has required Dragan to approach the practice of preservation from a fundamentally different angle than what has evolved in museum practice. Dragan's way of working, and his contributions to the field are vital and serve as a valuable counterpoint and compliment to the slower, smaller scale, shall we say small-batch style approaches we are more accustomed to seeing in conservation. Tune in to hear Dragan's story!

Links from the conversation with Dragan
> Rhizome: https://rhizome.org/
> Zombie + Mummy: https://www.diaart.org/program/artistswebprojects/olia-lialina-and-dragan-espenschied-zombie-mummy-web-project
> Emulating “Bomb Iraq”: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/jun/24/emulating-bomb-iraq-arcangel/
> Theresa Duncan CD-ROMs: https://sites.rhizome.org/theresa-duncan-cdroms/

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence, I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. This week on the show, we are chatting with someone who has been incredibly influential in shaping, not just how art conservators think about preserving art on the internet, but also in building tools to help them accomplish things we never thought possible. 

[00:00:27] Dragan: Hi, my name is Dragan Espenschied and I am the preservation director at Rhizome. 

[00:00:31] Ben: Dragan's task at Rhizome of being responsible for the preservation of thousands of works of art that are experienced through the web and are accessible to the general public 24/7 365 is a very particular mandate. And one that is quite different from say a museum with a few hundred time-based media artworks of which only a select few may be exhibited each year. This distinct difference required Dragan to approach the practice of preservation from a fundamentally different angle and I was so excited to sit down with him on the show, as I think his contributions to the field are just so vital and serve as a valuable counterpoint and compliment to the slower, smaller scales. Shall we say, small batch style approaches we are more accustomed to seeing in conservation. Before we dive in just a reminder that if you are enjoying the show, I would very much appreciate if you could leave a review. It helps other people discover the show and it helps in my fundraising efforts to ensure that we have a budget to equitably compensate artist, guests. And if you leave a fun note on your review, you might just hear on the air. Now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Dragan Espenschied. 

[00:01:42] Dragan: I grew up in the Southwest of Germany and I was exposed to computers pretty early through my father who happened to be a software engineer at Siemens. And he later decided to become a freelancer, which resulted in us having a Synnex computer at home. So Uh, Unix system and I have a terminal in my room and my father had one in his own home office and I had a green screen and he had a black and white screen. I think that was my introduction to variability. So I was playing games on that thing or writing short, C programs and I was really fascinated with the computer just in itself. Yeah and so my mother was a very musical person. She's from Yugoslavia and she was playing the electronic home organ so I had this fantastic toy as well. Later I got an Atari computer and really, was starting to get involved in this scene. So to say I was especially interested in demos that the demo crews made. Demo crews came out of cracking games more or less, and they would tag like a graffiti tag they would put that in front of games, like cracked by, I don't know, dynamic duo or whatever. These where like very fancy sometimes but very short and small programs in front of the actual game. And the demo crews then later, they just stopped cracking games and just made these little intros and expanded them to like more elaborate kind of like arty programs. And yeah, I was very interested in that because I thought like, these are such incredibly talented people, but they have the same equipment as everyone else. They have like some cheap Atari computer and everyone has the same computer, so everyone can basically do that. I found it very fascinating and I then started to write music for that computer. You would call this chiptune I guess and I was working with a friend Bernard Kirsch who together with another friend they were making their own music software for an Atari system and the scene was so small. So I just sent all the music I made with this thing on diskette I send it to Bern and then we decided, okay, we will form a band because we are both so incredibly talented. There were several friends that were pestering us to send our music to labels. And we were thinking that's like very unlikely that anyone will be interested in this. It was just like more of a scene thing, but yeah, in the end Reflex records from London agreed to publish like our debut double vinyl. In 1999, Maxi German Rave Blast Hits Three. We decided to start with the third part because people then think you're already much bigger than you are. That also happened at the same time when Micro Music appeared, which was a music community that was made by Karl a former Etoy member. Etoy is this Swiss net art group that formed very early in the nineties and it's foundational artwork on the internet. Everyone that I met through Micro Music was, I don't know, having their own web server in their basement or whatever. And Everything was super hands-on and very open and I don't know, you could just do a lot and make a big wave because there was nothing there at that moment. Also then for Reflex Records, we were introduced to other musicians and it seemed like one big hodgepodge of artists and musicians and internet activists and all these kinds of things. And with Alvar Freude together, we created a. Net literature project that is called Assoziations-Blaster, that was incredibly popular in a German speaking web. It was like um, I don't know, some kind of Wikipedia that had a lot of randomness in it. So we won a net literature award for that. And I was like thinking, you know, what's what should I do now? What's the next step and in the end also we want a massive art award for a work that is called insert coin. That was also more popular here in the German speaking web and it was about internet filtering and control and surveillance and everything. And I was working at a web agency, as a developer at that point in time and then the award notice came in and I thought, okay, maybe I don't need to work here any longer. So I did all of these things at the same time. I was a musician. I was a developer, I was doing a little bit of internet art. That's how it started. It was fun because I never thought of myself as like being part of the art context or so I was just like doing cool stuff with friends But yeah, I mean, definitely after winning this award, we got to know later the work was endorsed by Friedrich Kittler who was in the jury back then. Assoziations-Blaster was a big door opener and then insert coin was also a even wider door oppener. It was really nice getting to know all of these people that work in all of these different fields. Through reflex, for example, I met Emma Davidson, who was also a musician on reflex and she was like really building up this hub in London for our chiptune performance around the Micro Music scene. I was introduced also funnily through Reflex to Beige Records which was a, group that. Paul B Davidson, Cory Arcangel were members off which had a similar like way of working so we cross invited each other to perform in like Germany and the United States. In 1999 this also led to me meeting Olia Lialina, pioneer net artist. I first seen Agatha Appears in 1998 before My Boyfriend Came Back From The War. In 1998, I just followed some link and found this and I thought like this is this like outrageous. And one year later we . Actually met in Hamburg and, I'd seen this potential for the internet to be an actually, I don't know, authentic material that one could work with, because I think what was very year, much in the air at that time is thinking about the different aspects of media and what they mean and how you can bring a medium to shine how you can maybe not do exactly what is sold you. We are packaged software or something, but what is actually, what can you do artistically? What can you do in like an autonomous way? And I had first impression of the web that it was like some kind of secondary carrier thing but when I've seen that, I've understood it's its own thing and it's absolutely its own world that needs to be artistically exploited. And yeah so Olia and me started started working together and started teaching together here in Stuttgart at Merz Academy and also became interested in folklore culture of the internet, folklore culture of the web in particular. It seemed obvious to us that this like fun free phase off the web was kind of starting to crumble and that other interests would be coming in or already around there. We've just seen how things that users were building for themselves or that they were inventing for . Themselves were becoming ridiculed, or just laughed about or. Even looked at it from a nostalgic point of view, which I always think is very dangerous and bad. And so, yeah, we started, I think working together on the commission for the DIA Center Zombie and Mummy which was an online comic that we made together, which was illustrations for the rich, folkloristic material we collected from the web at that point in time. I guess in general, we were very interested in writing a history of the computer and networks and the web in particular from the perspective of their users instead of the perspective of the inventors or the grandiose men that I don't know, invented the Macintosh or whatever. 

[00:10:03] Ben: So your and Olia's interest in this kind of web folklore and preserving these histories and telling these histories, this eventually culminated in a book, this is before you went to Rhizome, right?

[00:10:20] Dragan: Yes, the book was published 2009. It was called Digital Folklore and had a unicorn on the cover. 

[00:10:28] Ben: It's one of my most prized possessions. 

[00:10:31] Dragan: It turned out to be a very successful book. I think it was helpful in establishing this as a serious field for art-making and research, and not something that you would just look at and laugh about it or say, oh yeah, funny GIFs or something, but something that has to be taken seriously that took a long time to create, and that has its own rules and its own systems. Lots of the culminations of this research. are really more Olia's academic rigor than mine, Olia was really looking at different styles. There are also all of these amateur web design books that she has synthesized, which are usually called, jazz up your website in a weekend, which would tell you how to use the Java lake applet that would give you like a mirror effect under the picture of your car or so. Olia especially has really expanded on that and has also converged this with interface, design theory and. Many different things. Also like late 2009, we formed the Geocities research Institute, because at that point in time, the archive team started to release their Geocities torrent. Geocities was deleted the year before by Yahoo. Geocities was one of the most popular websites. At some point in time, it was a web hosting service where people would just upload their HTML and which has also become like a synonym for the amateur web of the nineties. And it didn't make Yahoo any money and like many other projects, they turned it off. And the archive team, which was led by Jason Scott was a distributed team of volunteers that were. Just copying everything they could get from Geocities and making it available through the Pirate Bay as a one terabyte download. This was also I think my introduction to really mass curation and mass restoration of legacy data. We were also designing a research interface for that and I had took mostly part in, I don't know, figuring out what doesn't work or where the archive team in their really hasty copying operation maybe did something wrong or copied the same thing three times. They had to work under a lot of pressure and it was like no tool available to them that would help them. So in the end we had like a complete copy of Geocities running at home, so to say, that we were not able to make public because we didn't have the technical resources this at that point in time. And so mostly Olia and now I think it's really her thing. She's still going through data, looking at websites that users made every day and just tracking down users, interviewing them, asking them, why did you make that website like that? Or what did this website mean to you? What does updating mean to you and so forth? The blog is still active and yeah, it's great. And I was thinking about, okay, how to work with the material and came to the point where it was clear that to present that material, it wouldn't be possible to just make this Geocities available. And also we didn't want to expose it to like search engines or something like that, but also represented in a way that is doing justice to the material that we had. I started experimenting with emulators and basically writing a program that would generate screenshots of every single Geocities homepage and published them on Tumblr, which funnily enough, Tumblr was then later acquired by Yahoo but this is also still running. We have basically 14 years of material because Tumblr has a once per 20 minute posting limit, which is actually good and around this Tumblr blog also a huge community has formed and is still active. They even are, talking on Discord, and you see these screenshots basically everywhere now when there is I don't know, some article in some online publication that talks about the old web for sure. There will be a screenshot in there from our blog. I've seen them everywhere. I also thought this should be the standard for how screenshots are made this process. We were really discussing this a lot in thinking about how to ideally do this and how to avoid that someone who would look at that material and start to take it apart and I don't know, take out the funny GIF and spread that I mean, that's valuable in itself and it's like continuing the practice of what users do online and should be doing online, but the assemblage would be lost. And all of the things that the users have built would have been lost. And we thought there's such a original and beautiful and crazy things in there we have to think about its survivability in a web where users don't make webpages anymore, actually, but they're just posting stuff on different social media and we wanted to have a indivisible unit, which was the image. If you separate the, the artifacts from their environments too much, there's lots of these things are implicit in the environment. That while you are sitting in front of them and you are actually using them, you will oversee them. But five years later it will look like the most exotic thing, because everything has changed. And something that was totally transparent to you at a certain point in time, later on, it becomes something very weird.

[00:15:46] Ben: It was so great hearing you speak about that collaboration and I think you, and Olia's collaborative partnership over the decades it's just like one of those perfect partnerships in a way that you both have very particular skill sets and they very much amplify each other in a very exponential way. Up until this point, you have been operating in kind of like an academic environment and collaborating with Olia and around, 2014 you move to New York City to take a role at Rhizome as a full on professional dedicated to preservation. I'm super curious to hear, you know, where did the drive to do that come from? That must've been a massive decision especially because I know you weren't able to like relocate your whole family and everything. Could you share a bit about what led up to that and that move and that change? 

[00:16:37] Dragan: Yeah, so of course I was following what Rhizome was doing and around the time, like 2012, 2013, I had the impression that Rhizome was building up and was becoming increasingly interesting. And I've also followed your work there. I thought okay, there is someone there who is taking this seriously and is starting to systematically think about long-term topics at such an institution, which I found very interesting. And then it turned out that Rhizome was looking for a new digital conservator and I thought this may be my last chance to get an actual job in life because I felt like what the skill sets that I have and the things that I'm interested in and where can I put this to use if not in preservation, but I also had the impression that many places had very locked down ideas of what preservation is or were in fact, absolutely anti preservation in a way. And I mean, I'm growing up in the vicinity of the ZKM actually, I'm a big fan of their collection and also the preservation work that they do there, but I was more interested, you know, in the internet. I think at one point I was at an exhibition at ZKM that was called app art when the iPad was just freshly introduced and I've seen this exhibition and I thought like, okay. I understood how this came together. There was a sponsorship happening by, some companies that were interesting in pushing the ideas of apps. But this looks like 90s CD-ROMS just with a higher resolution. So why is this not contrasted? Or why is there no connection made or why is this not something else, than nineties CDROMs. I think at that point in time, I made a decision. I need to work in this field. And Rhizome was just it looked like a great opportunity. When I started at Rhizome first of all, I thought the organization would be much bigger. I thought like I would come into a complete floor at the New Museum, which just speaks to the quality of work that Rhizome has been doing. I couldn't believe that this few people could achieve so much, first of all. And then I think I was always interested in the specificity of everything. Not only of a tool or an art making device or community or anything particularly, but also this institution. Thinking. So what are the strengths and weaknesses, the particularities of that institution? And I had seen a great collection that was really absolutely my thing, a very eclectic and built by a community and by curators and by many different processes. Also of course, resource constraints for a small digital art, nonprofit organization, but also the collection was in a good state. A lot of things were known about the different works. Everyone was aware of where every work was to be found. And how many works there were. and who did what, and when was it accessioned and all these kinds of things. This was all in place. then I thought, okay. So when I look at this as a system, what do I need to focus on? In my naivety I thought I would go there and I don't know, in one year establish emulation there and whatever else, and then go back to Germany. Turned out not to be so true because I was always interested in the longterm thing and I had not so much experience with institutional work. And what is the power of institutions? How can an institution be effective? How can you actually use an institution? I was more, I would even say coming from a anti-institutional background even then of course Rhizome is the perfect institution to go to, because it has its roots in anti-institutional perspectives as well. I was looking at all of these works and thinking about my work with the transmediale archive and with the geocities collection thought, okay I will never be able to look at all of these works and fix them all so that they run in safari or whatever was the version at that point in time or update all of these works, but I need to provide environments for these works that are familiar to them, that they were built for and make that accessible to everyone on the internet. So that was the plan. And um, by knowing Cory Archangel for a bit, I was remembering his work Bomb Iraq, which was some crazy model of a Macintosh computer that was also a TV, some failed product by Apple, by the way that he bought at a thrift store because it looked so weird. And when he turned it on, it's showed a game that a teenager made on that computer and that computer was never connected to the internet. It was really like a 1991 machine And I remember seeing this work exhibited, but the computer broke. And then I thought, okay, I want to use this for showing what emulation can do. so I, visit Cory he thought it's a good idea. And we took that disk from that computer and put it in an emulator and made it public for the first time, because of different concerns, this EaaS thing was never put on the open web before really, and not really promoted and so we did that for the first time and, seen a very good response from the online audience exploring that system and I wrote a little text about it, about the context that the operating system provides to that digital ready-made and what it tells about the creator of that work and like all this rich information that is just in that environment if you don't separate things, but try to keep them assembled but the Infrastructure wasn't there. It was not taking the hundreds of users that we wanted to be able to access it at the same time. When you post something on social media, like everything spikes and a hundred people want to see the link that you just posted at the same time, and then it's lunch break and 2000 more people want to see it, and we were thinking about, okay, how can we build that infrastructure so that it can handle that load. And then Michael Connor, the artistic director said we should use this Theresa Duncan CD-ROMs, these nineties games made by this artist Theresa Duncan which are really fantastic and build the infrastructure with that use case, because this is something that it would be possible to fundraise for. And so Rhizome did a community campaign raised the money, and we were able to work with emulation as a service folks, Klaus Rechert's team to build a cloud infrastructure that would scale like the first version of that. It always sounds cheesy to say it has to scale, it actually has to scale, yeah, people want to see the art and you have to give it to them. So that was the first version that would actually be able to scale on the club. And would also not be too costly to run because yeah, if no, one's watching all the machines are turned off and if a spike is coming, then more emulators are started up into cloud. That was quite a big effort, but it was also a big breakthrough. Sometimes people don't understand because they're used to streaming services where the reaction time is not so critical. If you're interacting with a remote computer, you can't buffer. You have to get the input from the user, like they're moving the mouse around, clicking on something. And then the system has to react within like an okay amount of time, so that you're not thinking something is broken or that you're not getting frustrated with using it. So that is a continuous challenge. 

[00:23:43] Ben: You know, one of the things that I think is a testament to your contributions to the field is the fact that there's like numerous projects that you have built and led at Rhizome that have gone on to have their own very successful lives beyond Rhizome, Emulation as a Service is one of those, but Web Recorder also comes to mind. And that's something that I know began at Rhizome as something that you were leading. So it was curious if you could share with us how that came about and what that project was?

[00:24:16] Dragan: Oh, yeah, sure. Another systemic issue with Rhizome's collection at the time when I was starting in 2014, was that there were technical barriers for its growth. Social media, were so dominant in everything that happened on the internet and social media means that artists working on these platforms cannot give you a copy of their work because they can't give you a copy of Facebook or a copy of Instagram and even if they could, we probably wouldn't want it because it takes institutions of the size of Facebook to run Facebook. So we needed some kind of way to capture or to accession new work that was happening on social media at that point in time. You could do screenshotting and I think this is what is still a common practice for social media. Everyone is screenshotting everything like all the time and posting it on all the platforms now, which is good. But there's definitely something missing. I'd rather have a screenshot than nothing, but I would rather have a web archive of something then screenshot in most cases. So Zach Kaplan, who was the community manager at that point in time at Rhizome encouraged me to write an article together with him about how could this be. Approached this project, what could a technical solution be to that? And I had already, written several proxy services before and so I was suggesting there would need to be some kind of proxying thing that would capture websites while you are looking at them and then playing them back through that proxy, giving you access through that proxy, because that would capture everything. You wouldn't need to use a wget crawler or something like that which just fails at social media. And so we made a very bad drawing about that concept. It was like three boxes. One was the internet, one was proxy and one was browser. And said we need that box in the middle, and then Ed Summers who is a digital archivist, social media researcher, and academic, he wrote to Rhizome and said, Hey, do you know Ilya Kramer? he developed a prototype of such a tool you should get in touch. And so we got in touch and did a prototype project, which was Excellences & Perfections by Amalia Ulman. We captured that from Instagram, which now, especially when you look at Instagram from 2015, you look at it today it's like a completely different world. So I'm very happy we actually have a very good web archive of that work. And then in the situation we thought we should incubate this project this is so valuable. Not only for preservation of net art, but for preservation of digital culture at large, and we were able to make the case towards the Mellon Foundation and they funded this project for four years. Which also seeded a few incredible tools that are now available as open source software for everyone to use. I was immediately struck by the Webrecorder tool set because I could install it like myself and read the code and understand it. So it was not like you would need three Java MBAs to get your web archiving program working. When you were looking at the web archiving landscape, at that point in time, everyone was running on Heretrix crawler, and the Wayback machine, which are like ly complicated Java projects that were built for like the petabyte scale. And I felt like just this impossible to work with as an institution of our size, we would also not be able to influence the development of these tools because they're just too big and too complicated. And there are so many stakeholders from other fields and they would have completely different interests from us like national archives and national libraries that are just crawling everything on the.uk domain. And they are not so much interested in some artists social media performance is preserved. We were very lucky to be able to influence the project in a certain way and now have a whole thing available that makes that really democratizes web archiving. I think we've also able to embed the technical development of these tools with an interest in artistic programming. For instance the ethics and archiving, the web conference comes to mind that Rhizome was doing, which I think also surface these topics that are usually not discussed when you are going to your regular digital preservation conference where people are discussing XML, schemas and stuff, or like how to scale it from five petabytes to 10 petabytes and so, forth. And yeah, we are using these tools still every day.

[00:28:35] Ben: It's so funny to talk about your work at Rhizome, because, when we started, you were like, yeah. You know, I thought I was just going to set up emulation as a service and, be done in a year and go back to Germany. Meanwhile, you have stood up, scaled, and created these incredible projects that have gone on to have their own lives. You've collaborated on making these tools that have been just invaluable for the field. And we're not done, I remember, in my kind of like last year when I was at Rhizome, just being so frustrated with our cataloging tools and it's something I feel like I never really completely answered. And it's something that you have just really leveled up in such an incredible way. And you've been working with Wikidata and linked open data as a way to catalog and describe Rhizomes collection. So I was curious if you could share a bit about that.

[00:29:25] Dragan: There were several challenges with Rhizomes collection especially when you look at it from a long-term perspective. Rhizome started as a community archive as a I would say futuristic archive. But over time, so much has changed in how new media art, as it was called first or digital art or net art is interpreted or seen or described, and I figured out it is not sustainable. each time something new comes along or a new idea is claimed. That you completely change your collection management system, or redo your database because that's basically what would be required each time. And so I was looking for a different way of doing that, also researching what linked open data is doing, which is a W3C standard which is using triples that describe subject predicate object. So I would, for example, say, Agathe Appears was created by Olia Lialina and so these are three parts of this information. And the data is kind of structured, not so much. It's a big soup of triples. You get the information out of it by querying it and by formulating these triples in a certain way, that fit to your idea of what the things that you've described should be how they should be described. And so you can change the meaning of terms over time. You can work with your own terms. You can adapt over time and have it like an ontological sandbox in which you can try things out and see, does that work? Do we want to go with this term? Do we want to provide two terms for the same information or things like that? And while I really liked the idea the software that was available at that point in time was crazy academic bio-science Java interface, toolkit software that no one would ever be able to use. I believe. They were all designed in a way that before you start describing anything, you already need to know exactly everything you need to know the structure. You need to know what you want to describe. You would always need to define the ontology first and along came Wiki Data, which was started by Wikimedia Deutschland as a, I don't know, I think a complete naive implementation of triples because when they started this project, they didn't know much about linked data or they thought like, oh Yeah that's like some fad that never took on we will make something better. And so they just thought about it from the community perspective, how do we make a system that is as easy as editing a Wiki, but creating triples and triple information about everything that's on Wikipedia that was the original idea. In 2014 I was introduced to the project and felt like, okay, this looks actually usable I want to use that for Rhizome and for describing digital art and describing all the complex relationships that artworks have like how they are manifested, a digital artifacts, what kind of environments do they require? Who made them, what other things did that person make? How are these artworks related to each other? So in 2015, I think Rhizome was the first institution outside of Wikimedia to run their own instance of Wiki base, which is like the software that runs Wiki data, because it was also clear that we wouldn't be able to use Wiki data for like a publicly editable source for contemporary art, because they're just it's not about facts, institutions of contemporary art, make statements. You're saying, this is what should happen, or this is what you should be thinking. Or this is what we think is right. I mean, you can't debate certain things like the gender of an artist or so, which constantly happens on Wikipedia or Wiki data. There is a certain thing that we want to publish. So we need our own linked open data space, basically. There was a certain interest by a community person named Jens Olic at Wikimedia to make this more of a thing like Media Wiki, which everyone is using for running their own internal Wiki and it just took seven years and now we have a pretty nice Art Base that runs on linked open data that is queryable, that can be merged with data from other museums that can be merged with wiki data too on demand and has all this information available in Art Base in an open format that researchers can put together in any way they want without us having to provide templates or whatever it's all based on standards. None of this of course would have been possible without Lozana Rossenova, who was a researcher who worked embedded at Rhizome for many years and worked with art historians and artists and researchers to figure out like how we should build this thing. And yeah, now it's in a stage where I'm happy to say, like this is actually usable. For us it has been a game changer because we have made it available online and just last week I received two research reports from outside researchers that I've had no connection before I said, okay, here is like your representation balance of your collection. And we compared it with MoMA's collection. And this is what I want to enable. I believe that this is also a major thing for digital art and in particular net art to have its own terms and to not have to, I don't know, list the duration of a website somewhere. And this is something that always makes me shiver. These things need to be regarded as what they are and not to be squeezed into some existing format and that even includes Wiki data, because if we think net art needs to be described with a certain term, you should be able to just use that term. And if we don't like that anymore, we should be able to discard it too and we can do this now.

[00:34:47] Ben: One of the things that I have just always really cherished about your approach and unique contribution to preservation is that you have what just feels like a very, for lack of a better term principled approach. You seem to have almost a set ethics or morals or beliefs as a professional who works in preservation that leads to you approaching things in a very different kind of way. And what has perhaps been the reason for you having so many contributions to the broader field in, a very relatively short amount of time? Is that something that is very conscious for you? Do you have a manifesto of sorts? 

[00:35:32] Dragan: Yeah I do have one, I would say, but how to say it. I think what mostly led to this or shaped my approach to preservation is the two most influential backgrounds for me were being educated as a designer and being an electronic musician. So as a designer I'm always looking at things on a systematic level and how to bring something across through certain means that I have available. And as an electronic musician, I have a relationship with software that is I trust the software, or I see it as the product of someone's idea or as a incredibly complex thing that is delivered as a very simple product to me and there's definitely a level of trust or like an idea of objecthood of what software is that I think very much comes from music. I think we had this discussion on Twitter at one point that the people who are good with preservation, they always have to do something with music or instruments or something like that. Not always but, I see a pattern there, I don't know. So I believe that most definitely the systematic approach is the thing that enables collections of digital art to grow adequately with what is happening in digital art. Ideologically, I would say this is a thing where a lot of things are happening, there's a lot of different practices, a lot of different practitioners, many of them are not fine art artists or full-time artists. Many, are researchers and are artists for some time then I don't know, authors, and then they go raising goats somewhere or whatever. and I saw like a systemic mistake in how our preservation is approached, that it cannot adequately represent this. I thought there needs to be a systematic approach and that also means that you need to kind of state clearly of what you're able to do and what are your capabilities, not only as a person, but also as an institution and as a community in as infrastructure overall. This is what I can offer as a preservation specialist and let's see how far this takes us. I hope I will develop in a direction that is able to capture as much of this like rich culture as makes sense. So I'm not so interested in working on individual artworks, if I can avoid it. It's incredibly fun. It is so fun. But it's also something that perpetuates a little bit this idea of heroic artworks and genre defining artworks. And so I think that is something that really shapes my view on this. I want to be someone. That not goes to an artist and says, well, okay, so what should I be doing together now? So let's do a three year project around preserving your artwork. But I want to say, look, this is what we can do. How do you like this web archive version? How do you like this version with the emulator? Maybe we should just use both. One is maybe not showing all the nuances, the other's not showing all the nuances about emulation is only getting better over time web archiving is only getting better over time. And usually artists are super happy when they can see some software that they wrote in 2003 and it works again and it's not such a huge lift. Even if they are like tiny flaws in it, but you will be able to look at that work again and understand why it was so important at that point in time or what it can say to us today and in what environment it was running and all these like amazing things. And I think that this historization or this idea that historization actually works is important is that I don't believe that any of these artworks, even the most abstract and most conceptual new media artwork that you could think of is located outside of some material reality. Even if you're some very conceptual artists and you're just instructing over the phone, let's say a computer programmer to do something for you. Of course, your idea of what a computer is and what it can do. And that computer programmers ideas of what the artist was probably meaning when talking on that phone call, and the computer available at the time and all of these things, they all shape the artwork. And so I would rather capture as much of that as possible then thinking about how can I translate this to the latest technology or whatever, because I have seen this also fail in many cases, first of all, it's very expensive to do, but some things that were incredibly difficult to do 10 years ago, even when you think about installations and projections and sensors and things like that you can see this in a mall today. Basically you walk into some like flagship store and then, you know, stuff happens. But if you look at it with the original equipment or the original software environment, you have much more chance of understanding, like why was that important at that point in time? Or what was the artistic intent? It makes it much more readable. So I believe that this is definitely what I want to do and how I want to work. And of course I also like to, in many cases, go into an artwork and fix up the broken VRML code or something, but as much as I enjoy that, and as much as I'm proud of these skills that no one needs, except like this tiny field, I understand that it's very dangerous and it's a risk in itself because it's tied to my person kind off and it's on a very non- abstractable level. I don't identify myself as time-based media conservator actually. I don't think that's adequate and I don't think that many of the techniques apply. They're super variable and have led to fantastic results in counters cases. I don't think they work for software in the same way. If you think about this whole field as a community where different folks are focusing on different things and building out different specializations and you're all friends with each other and you're exchanging information and you are helping each other out and you're making projects together. I think that can benefit the field as a whole. And that's what I think is the most important thing right now, because I'm like there's too much case studying going on instead of, I don't know, meta studies, perhaps, which would be an interesting next step. But I also understand that there's also a certain expectations of how preservation is talked about and how the story of preservation is told. And usually the most enticing case studies involve, getting some old media from the attic, some old hard disk and going through the code because nothing works anymore. And just like all these super exciting stories. And I really loved them, but also why is it not an exciting story and said, okay, the artist was very well organized. They sent me a tall bar. I dropped it in the emulator. It worked, I was done in 10 minutes. That's the success But I also feel sometimes the pushback from like the outs community and saying like, you're like normalizing everything and you're like looking at, you're not looking at the art and. Sure. What I just described, like I put something in an emulator and it wrecks and the artists looked at it and say, oh yeah, fantastic. It works. This is really a question of like, how much do we actually want to know and how much, there is some kind of art appreciation performance that is required from a conservator. I don't want to sound like I'm not appreciating art. I don't want to work in any other field. I only want to restore art basically. 

[00:42:37] Ben: I think this is a super important point. I see your work and just you as a professional, very much as a conservator that is like of the internet, like your approaches are like of digital culture. You came at it from not these traditional models that do work when, you're a museum that has 40 artworks and that's all fine and good. But when you are a collecting institution of the internet that is collecting things on the scale that Rhizome does, it really calls for a different approach. And I think that contribution that you've brought to the field is just so vital. So I think that's so great that you talked about that.

[00:43:14] Dragan: Thanks for giving me the chance. 

[00:43:16] Ben: Dragan Espenschied, my friend, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. We've known each other for many years, but it was really great to hear the rest of your story that I didn't know.

[00:43:25] Dragan: Well, Ben, what can I say? It's so great to be on your show.

[00:43:28] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's show. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, and you want to help support our work and mission of equitably paying artists, like I mentioned, at the top, you can join us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence. Or if you are interested in making a one-time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for The Arts you can do so at artandobsolescence.com/donate and there you can also find the show notes and full transcript as well as highlights on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence have a great week my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.