
The Mission to Save Vanishing Internet Art - prismatic
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/arts/design/the-mission-to-save-vanishing-internet-art.html
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Figs
One of the things I'm really concerned about personally is the archival of web
comics. A number of comics that I've read over the years have already vanished
from the net like Ugly Hill, Simulated Comic Product, and Minus (once linked
to by XKCD! Now it's gone...).

archive.org, of course, has partial copies of some of these -- but it often
seems to have trouble with comics and is usually missing _years and years_ of
content as a result.

~~~
msandford
I've actually been working on-and-off for the last year or so to make a site
which makes it easier to keep up with webcomics. As a part of crawling the
sites to see if there are new comics, it's pretty easy to also archive them to
be able to show partial thumbnails.

Part of my motivation is similar to your worry that these things will
disappear forever, despite having been a huge part of our culture. And I
figure one of the best ways to get help on archiving comics is for people to
complain "hey your site doesn't do comic X" and then I know that it exists and
can get it into the system for crawling.

I know saying "hey I'm working on it" isn't much better than "hey I thought
about that too" but if you're interested I can attempt to let you know when I
get far enough to put it up on the web instead of my workstation at home.

~~~
markild
Have you seen this project[1]? It's a pretty customizable piece of software
that has support for a lot of web comics out of the box.

Obviously, re-hosting web comics is a murky, at best, territory, but this will
easily allow local only access for your personal benefit.

[1]: [https://github.com/jodal/comics](https://github.com/jodal/comics)

~~~
msandford
No, I hadn't seen that yet. Thanks!

I think rehosting is pretty bad, copyright infringement at best and not very
nice to boot. That's why I decided that cropping and thumbnailing would be the
way to go; enough of a picture to let someone say "yeah I saw that one
already" but not so much that they don't go to the artist's site to see new
comics.

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0xcde4c3db
Link rot really is a bastard. There's a ton of pre-2000 Internet culture and
history that is, as far as I know, simply gone. Even stuff that was popular is
somewhat tough to dig up in its original version rather than getting a bunch
of remixed variations.

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telesilla
An excellent long-form thesis on this topic:

[http://aaaan.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/archiving-the-
di...](http://aaaan.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/archiving-the-digital.pdf)

With links to
[https://www.incca.org/articles/aktivearchive](https://www.incca.org/articles/aktivearchive)

~~~
adamweld
Also relevant:

[http://idlewords.com/talks/deep_fried_data.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/deep_fried_data.htm)

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aikah
The demise of Flash killed plenty of online interactive art project,
unfortunately. HTML5 didn't replace Flash as a medium for artistic experiments
on the web, or it performs so bad on decent computers it's just useless.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
To me the big thing is that even if it had been pulled off beautifully, the
HTML5 transition doesn't say anything about the existing corpus of .SWF
content. Contrary to seemingly popular belief, it wasn't all streaming video,
spinning logos, and mystery meat widgets; people actually made stuff in Flash
that was meant to stand on its own, not just be a component of a website. Open
source .SWF players exist, but are tremendously under-resourced and have been
struggling with compatibility and performance problems for years. Basically,
.SWF is the .DOC of interactive animation.

~~~
cableshaft
I've got several Flash games I made a long time ago that I'd love to update,
but it seems that HTML5 just isn't up to snuff for the art and animation heavy
games I had (not to mention it would take forever to export all of that art
and animation).

It sucks, because as I get older I have less time and energy and more and more
competing projects that compete with that limited time.

~~~
sp332
I heard Adobe's authoring tool now has HTML5 export. I hoped that would make
the transition easier.

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tracker1
I'd love to find the original Napster Bad video... all I can seem to find
online are the re-edit, the 2nd and 3rd ones. Not the first one. The napster
bad you see online wasn't the original I remember.. I seem to remember another
take of it before, that was changed and re-released.

~~~
venomsnake
I think I have somewhere the 1999 original in flash format ... but so many
brilliant AMV are gone :( Like Rammstein evangelion

Can we create a tube clone in some copyright haven ... the culture belongs to
humanity.

~~~
sp332
Sure, if you're in Antigua and all your users are in Antigua.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/business/global/dispute-
wi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/business/global/dispute-with-antigua-
and-barbuda-threatens-us-copyrights.html)

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mirimir
Anyone remember hell.com ?

There are many snapshots on [https://web.archive.org](https://web.archive.org)
but no actual content. Because it was only available to approved guests.
Except for some enigmatic abuse, and pushing hell.com addresses. So it goes.

~~~
spinchange
I can't think of another website that made quite the same impression on me as
that one did. Maybe it was my young age, or the newness of the medium, but it
was like a brilliant magic trick. Like the kind that actually scare you, even
though you know better.

~~~
mirimir
Well, it was all Javascript and Flash, so maybe really scary. And some of
those web artists considered malware as an art form ;) But not the hell.com
folks, I think. That was more 0100101110101101.org style.

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jcoffland
Only 100 works of art? I guess the highend art world thrives on artificial
scarcity.

~~~
sp332
They only have $200,000 to make a permanent archive.

~~~
jcoffland
At that price I could archive a few million online works of art, at the least.

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mccoyspace
Rhizome is an art organization, and they are approaching it in the context of
art, rather than online culture. They began implementing an archiving project
in the early '00s called Art Base that contains over 2000 works. These new
efforts are an extension of that, bringing in current thinking on
virtualization and emulation.

It is a challenging project. Many of these project have both client and server
side technologies that must be recaptured, so it is more than just Flash (or
Director/Shockwave). I made a project called Airworld that may be part of this
Rhizome initiative [1]. It was originally commissioned by the Walker Art
Center in 1999 and ultimately involved two different servers that used Perl
CGI scripts, mySQL and RealServer on the back end, HTML and RealMedia plugin
on the client side. The museum lacked the infrastructure and personnel to keep
it alive and it slowly died over the course of 10 years. Even though it's
still in the institutions collection.

It is a big problem for 'off-line new media' too. Artist's CD-ROMs, for
example. The Rose Goldsen archive of New Media Art at Cornell University
Library has made a huge effort to maintain these works [2]. And physical,
sculptural 'New Media' works also take massive effort to maintain. I know from
experience. [3].

Museums are experts in conversation. They are beginning to think about the
challenges that digital technologies bring. But there is a lot of work to do.

[1]
[http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/airworld](http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/airworld)
[2]
[http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/general/cd.php](http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/general/cd.php)
[3] [http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-
art/2002.274a-e/](http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2002.274a-e/)

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hellbanner
Wasn't Mozilla working on a browser with automated micropayments to content
creators? Combined with distributed content.. something like storj.io which
promises distributed (bittorrent) encrypted storage for files & cryptocurrency
payments to those opening their harddrives.

[https://brave.com/about.html](https://brave.com/about.html)

[https://storj.io/](https://storj.io/)

~~~
sp332
Not Mozilla, but Brendan Eich, who used to be at Mozilla.

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DamnInteresting
On a donor-supported website I operate, people can download an e-book version
of our entire catalog of writings in exchange for a modest donation. A large
part of my motivation for this approach is so that these DRM-free files may
serve as a distributed archive in the event that our project perishes.

The reception has been positive, I recommend the strategy to other content
creators.

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hellbanner
Related: "It's Just Emulation!" \- The Challenge of Selling Old
Games[http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023470/-It-s-Just-
Emulation](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023470/-It-s-Just-Emulation)

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realworldview
This isn't a new phenomenon [http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/once-
lifetime](http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/once-lifetime)

