Lost Formats Preservation Society

Newton had supposed that “colour may be distinguished into its principal degrees, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and deep violet on the same ground that sound with an eighth is graduated into tones.”

From: The scale and the spectrum, Cabinet Magazine

Nasa re-entry suits are the same colour as Tokyo Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge: International Orange.

Or, not quite.

Lejaren Hiller

Algorithms I, Version 4 - The Decay of information

Also see:

Nightmare Music For Magnetic Tape (1961)

Computer Cantata (1963)

Computer Music: Decisively 1st Mov. (1968)

“On 4 August 1789, three weeks after the storming of the Bastille, the nobility surrendered their privileges, including the right to control local weights and measures.”

It’s been 250 years since the concoction of the metric system. Quite interesting to see that other numeral systems were considered before settling on the decimal system.

Setting Standards

Here’s a list of over 65 libraries that were set on fire. Yet, arguably, the library of Alexandria was not. This article makes a case for the library to have been destroyed by budget cuts...

“By some estimates, ninety-nine per cent of ancient Greek literature has been lost, and Latin has not fared much better.”

Using a synchrotron (particle accelerator), it may have become possible to read papyrus scrolls that were charred in Herculaneum, 2000 years ago. They were salvaged from a library in the villa of Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (Julius Caesar's father-in-law) in the 1700s. 

Among the first titles rediscovered are: “On Music, Book 4”, “On the Stoics” “On the Good King According to Homer”, “On Flattery”, “On Wealth”, and “On Anger” all by Philodemus, a member of the Athens school of Epicurean thought.

Thought to Shape

“For the lay reader the following brief description may be useful. A Chladni's sound plate (fig. 1) is made of brass or plate-glass. Grains of fine sand or spores are scattered over the surface, and the edge of the plate is bowed. The sand is thrown up into the air by the vibration of the plate, and re-falling on the plate is arranged in regular lines (fig. 2). By touching the edge of the plate at different points when it is bowed, different notes, and hence varying forms, are obtained. If the figures here given are compared with those obtained from the human voice, many likenesses will be observed. [...] But few perhaps have realised that the shapes pictured are due to the interplay of the vibrations that create them, and that a machine exists by means of which two or more simultaneous motions can be imparted to a pendulum, and that by attaching a fine drawing-pen to a lever connected with the pendulum its action may be exactly traced. Substitute for the swing of the pendulum the vibrations set up in the mental or astral body, and we have clearly before us the modus operandi of the building of forms by vibrations.”

“This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.” 

Dziga Vertov in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972)

Emerging magnetic data storage technology: BPM (bit patterned media) is a potential future hard disk drive technology to record data in magnetic islands (one bit per island), as opposed to current hard disk drive technology where each bit is stored in 20-30 magnetic grains within a continuous magnetic film. The islands would be patterned from a precursor magnetic film using nano lithography. (From: Wikipedia)

Starch grains on a photographic (autochrome) plate.

Offset lithography: overlapping halftone printing plates form a rosette pattern.

Perma.cc is an initiative that aims to cure the link-rot epidemic.

“When websites disappear or change, any piece of work – be it a blog post, book, or scholarly dissertation – that linked to those resources no longer makes quite as much sense. And some of these now-moldering links are structurally important to the fragile, enduring edifice of human knowledge: in fact, according to one recent study, half of the links in Supreme Court decisions either lead to pages with substantially altered content or no longer go anywhere, at all.”

Phonautogram

Optical Synthesis

Mycenae Alpha, Iannis Xenakis (1978). 

This composition was made on the UPIC, a graphical compositional instrument that turns drawings into sound. This system was devised by Xenakis. UPIC stands for Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu (Centre d'Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales).

Databending (or data bending) is the process of manipulating information from within a media file of a certain format. Different techniques of the process can be grouped into three categories:

Incorrect editing: Files of a certain format are manipulated using software designed to edit files of a different format. Reinterpretation: Files are simply converted from one medium to another. Forced errors: Known software bugs are exploited to force the program to terminate, usually while writing a file.

The story of Lena, the woman whose photograph became the standard test image of research on digital image processing.

“The image is often used to test techniques thanks to its mix of textures, shading and detail.” (BBC) The fact that she was naked had nothing to do with it, we’re sure.

“Dark repository: digital repository that has no public user access. A dark repository can be used solely for preservation purposes and be permanently dark, or it can be temporarily designated as dark while its contents are being added and verified prior to being made ready for public access.”