Digital Dilemmas: Archiving and Preserving Culture
Sound & Culture Summit
“The totality of our digital records will vanish as soon as the technological infrastructures built by Westernized modern civilization collapse.”
These words by Italian philosopher Federico Campagna neatly sum up one of our world’s great dilemmas. While the digital sphere has provided us with sheer endless possibilities of storing and archiving, we have simultaneously created the most fragile archival system in history. With 24/7 accessibility to all types of cultural products, practices of collecting and archiving have seemingly lost meaning. At the same time, sound practitioners and music lovers long for a deeper relationship to their favorite cultural artefacts. With cultural memory becoming increasingly dependent on fragile digital infrastructures, questions of how to archive, protect and pass on music have never felt more urgent.
Bringing together multiple distinctive perspectives, Femke Dekker (aka Loma Doom) speaks with Mariam Otarashvili of Mutant Radio (Tbilisi/ Berlin), writer Shawn Reynaldo, whose First Floor newsletter has become one one of the most trusted voices in electronic music, and Dmytro Nikolaienko, co-founder of Muscut Records and Shukai, an imprint that revives lost Ukrainian tapes from the 1960s–90s.
Facilitator: Femke Dekker
Speakers: Dmytro Nikolaienko (Muscut / Shukai Record Labels), Mariam Otarashvili (Mutant Radio), and Shawn Reynaldo (First Floor)