What is fascinating about objects in museums is their materiality. The presence of the keys — their shape,form, presence– for me evokes a greater sense of Gould’s manic genius. It helps me imagine what his physical and material environment looked like. And Warhol’s crusty pizza? Equally evocative in its decay.

I love digitization. It facilitates a certain transience: I move frequently and throw a lot of things out. But I doubt I would have the same deep feeling of absence about a lost web page as I do about the vintage prom dress I gave to Value Village in 1996.

now I do think we are disagreeing.

I think the one thing that separate humans from animals is that we remember, remember?

forgetting is an anullment I think.

But in my culture we were taught that memory is an act that gives value.

so perhaps we come at it from different places.

I get angry when poeple around me forget stuff that I think is important
just like I get angry at myself for forgetting importanat stuff.

remember I had that freak attack about steven speilberg going and taping survivor stories and you thought I was sbeing a prick. I was being a prick.

we have the space and the technology to hold pretty much every metaphorical old pizza there is.

I think if its a question of assigning value, lets just remember it all and leave it for the librarians and archivists of the future, they will have a much better idea than we do right now.

(and I am not even drunk)

why don’t you? You are part of a culture that is trying to archive *everything*. It is as much your responsability to justify archiving as it is to justify "what get’s remembered".

That’s what aggravates me – people assuming that "remembering" is good. and forgetting is bad. Or that remembering is a state of existance and therefor positive and forgetting is an annulment – when it is nothing of the sort. It is it’s own affirmation. Of space for new stuff – new visions, new creations. You should have to justify your archiving much more strenously than your forgetting – because forgetting is the natural order.

(possibly that is a drunken rant. time will tell.)

But really, what I liked about the internet was that I could "erase" my webpage by overwriting it with a new one, and now the Wayback Machine has screwed that whole thing up. I don’t want there to be copies of my early dabblings on the web to be out there – and yet, there they are! What a suckerpunch. Who wants to see my website as it was in 1999? I think you can request your items be removed from the Wayback Machine, but how do they verify it’s you and that was your website you are asking to be taken down…. is it as bad as proving you are you to Network Solutions when you want to update your domain (god forbid)!

I guess I am a control freak, because I think if I were Andy Warhol, I wouldn’t want people analyzing the dumb pizza I saved on a yuk for any kind of meaning. I wish someone who did their PhD on Andy Warhol would pipe in with a quote about how he did or didn’t create those boxes for us to paw through, and everything in them does or doesn’t have immense meanning.

Gould being such a recluse/ham is a bit more difficult, but I could safely imagine him feeling creeped out that people want to go to Ottawa to hold his mittens and hotel keys.

And now even little old me, I have to think about what the Wayback Machine will capture, where my comments on other people’s blogs will end up, etc. I wish I had more control and could erase more, or at least revise. Still haunting me in my Google, to this day, is a post I made to a listserv when I was 15 years old or so, that is also a funny connection to this post, since it was some comments about a particular recording by Glenn Gould.

All I can say is thank goodness I wasn’t out on the web waxing ecstatic about New Kids on the Block recordings, or something. Because then I would be screaming for the erase button.

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

the wayback machine – see the iterations of your favorite web sites over the years.

archive.org itself is exactly what you are talking about – an overblown repository of stuff.but, it’s amazing.

a-har that was a joke I am not actually spurious at all.

I am sort of disagreeing with my previous comment here, which wasn’t meant to be in defense of forgetting but in fact in defense of remembering.

i don’t think I have the right to dictate what gets remembered or what gets passed on. I would rather be sluice gate of information than a trickle.

I have started to refer to Jane as my virtual hard drive because she keeps remembering random stuff that I did way back when, and I have started doing the same thing for Lauren lately too.

We certainly don’t remember everything ourselves but that’s why we make communities and families, to expand our capacities for memory.

how does this relate to archiving and old pizza.. uh…

I don’t know but this hot chocolate sure is yummy

ps: maya I think sorting s one of the most fascinating human attributes. We shoud discuss or you should do a lit review of papers on sorting on MuchLess and I will crib it for my MA application.

Mike I totally hear you on the value of forgetting and the idea that liberation from previous ideas/objects allows us to create something new, in the distorted image of the past we carry around with us. I think there is a lot of deep meditation going on about things that potentially (a) don’t matter, or worse, (b) are bad data. For example, if everyone is examining Warhol’s pizza for all kinds of clues about his diet, his character, his favourite pizza parlour, and trying to get all CSI on it and infer a bunch of things, the whole operation could be totally screwed up by the simple fact that maybe Andy didn’t even buy the pizza! Maybe an assistant dropped it by, trying to be thoughtful, and it was neither Andy’s fave pizza nor pizza parlour, maybe he wasn’t even hungry, and so it went into the box whole.

But we will never know, and so hanging onto it simply because Warhol threw it in a box is questionable. We can infer very little about it. The data the pizza gives us is nearly worthless, unless a pizza story can be discovered through testimony from one of his contemporaries.

Furthermore, perhaps Warhol is bad example here, since clearly something was going on with this obsessive collecting. The box system was pretty well-defined. But what happens when you are curating your life, in a way? When you’re someone like Warhol, who figures, "hey, I’m a famous artist, someone is going to be interested in all this shit I’m keeping someday", does the burden on you to weed out potentially spurious data that a future archivist will collect weigh on you? Do you even think about it? Perhaps you should, or we will be doomed to pass a mummified pizza around wearing white gloves.

Now look who’s ranting….

not doing a good job of getting my point across, am I.

okay – think of Wicca. Current Wicca/Witchcaft as well as Druidism pretends to be some kind of ancient tradition that was surpressed for a long time and now – to the delight of 22 year old female college students everywhere – has been "rediscovered".

That’s not true. There is no connection between current Wicca and any non-christian practices in meidieval europe.

But people were able to take a poorly remembered idea (witchcraft) and fashion it into something new and relevant that was helpful for people in our culture/time. If we had better archives we wouldn’t have been able to do that creation. We would have been tyrannically forced (I like the word tyranny these days) to slavishly follow the exact same version and therefore wouldn’t have been able to re-fashion/re-create.

okay – thanks for the ranting space MK. much appreciated.

So, is a sorting instinct, in addition to a taste for creative juxtaposition that stirs our minds and souls a virtue of a curator?