The digitized afterlives of cultural objects.

Episode Transcript
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Daniel Scott Snelson (00:01):
I'm really interested in this double edged
sword of access to digitalmaterials. One hand, preserving
privacy or rights of of artists.On the other hand, the kinds of
creative use that that I know weall deploy, which also feels
very different now in 2025 whenthose same materials are being
absorbed and consumed by techoligarchs to produce their

(00:22):
endlessly growing and worlddestroying large language
models.

Vicki Bennett (00:27):
A lot of the friction that can happen in
chains of information andcutting people off in chains,
it's not really about the toolsthat are being used, it's about
our agency in our actions withthe tools that we use and the
knowledge that we have.

Craig Dworkin (00:42):
I never would have dreamed of language not
equal. These are things I don'twanna pretend to predict. The
absence of metadata, is one ofthe things I'm I'm also most
proud of.

Luca Messarra (00:54):
What your book does very well, Danny, is it
excavates that past tradition ofsharing that I think later
generations weren't necessarilyexposed to.

Hi, and welcome. I'm honored to be
hosting this conversation withthe University of Minnesota
Press podcast today. My name isDanny Snelson. I'm an associate
professor in the departments ofEnglish and Design Media Arts at
UCLA, where I also serve asfaculty in the digital
humanities program, thelaboratory for environmental
narrative strategies, and theUCLA game lab. In my research,

(01:26):
teaching, and creativepractices, I focus on unlikely
constellations of poetry andpoetics, experimental writing
and art, material texts, networkcultures, and emerging genres.
Today, I'm thrilled to be joinedby three personal heroes
gathered on the occasion of thepublication of my book, The A
Poetics of Media Formats,published by the University of

(01:47):
Minnesota Press as the sixtyfourth edition to the great
electronic mediation seriesedited by N. Catherine Hales,
Peter Krapp, Rita Raley, andSamuel Weber. The book is now
available in print as an ebookand an open access edition
hosted by the Manifold platform,which features the full book as
well as a wide range of expandeddigital materials that we'll

(02:08):
discuss shortly. But first, I'meager to introduce my
interlocutors, Vicki Bennett,Craig Dworkin, and Luca Massara.
From Craig's mentorship thatreaches back to the earliest
stages of my academic training,to Luca's inspiring work as my
student at UCLA and beyond, toVicky's multimedia practice as
people like us, which I'veadmired from afar over the past

(02:28):
twenty years.
I'm floored to be inconversation with these three
inspirations today. The projectis indebted to each of them more
than the they likely know, andI'm simply excited to have the
opportunity to learn more fromeach to enrich some of the
themes and concepts from thebook. I'll invite them to
introduce themselves beforegiving some summary comments on
the little database, which willthen open up a conversation to

(02:51):
put our various works andpractices in relation to the
book. So I think let's goalphabetical. Vicky, would you
like to start us off?

Yeah. I am Vicki Bennett and I work under the
artist's name People Like Us.I've been working with editing
and re editing, composing anddecomposing pre existing
material for my entire adultlife, so thirty plus years. The

(03:19):
work takes the form of movies,live performances, gigs, albums
and more recently I've beenpartaking in a PhD, which is at
age 55 I started it. So beforethat point I was not involved
particularly in academia, so Ikind of just jumped in the deep

(03:41):
end there.
Since then I've been writingabout my practice rather than
practising. But that said, a lotof my work has always been text
based because it's process led.It involves working with mind
maps and making transparent theway that I edit and bring things
together.

Wonderful. So much more to say on all of
that. But, Craig, can we turnthings over to you?

Yeah, Craig Dworkin. I'm at the University
of Utah where Danny told me itwas okay for me to come. I told
Danny it was okay for him tostay at Princeton, and he told
me it was okay to move to SaltLake City, where I teach
literary history and theory andthe history of the avant garde.

(04:28):
I'm really happy to be here.

Wonderful. It's great to see you, Craig,
and hear you, I guess, sincewe're on a podcast. Now, Luca.

Hi. My name is Luca Messarra. I'm honored and
thrilled to be in this company.I am a PhD candidate in English
at Stanford University. I'm adigital humanist, a media and
archival theorist, and aliterary sociologist of around
post 1960 US literary culture.
And more specifically, workright now and my dissertation is
on the advent of print on demandand how that technology has

(04:58):
changed the way we produce,experiment with, and receive
these things called literarytexts. I'm also a poet and a
bookmaker who operates under thelabel of undocumented press. And
if you look hard enough, youcould probably find one of those
books in your local researchlibrary.

Wonderful. Thank you, Luke. I know where
ours is hidden at UCLA, but I'llkeep that secret for now. I
wanna thank everyone again forjoining. Before launching into
conversation, I suppose it willbe helpful for the listener if I
offer some summary comments onthe Little Database project and
why I'm excited to discuss itwith my guests.
Generally, I think thesesummaries start with an origin

(05:34):
narrative. For me, the LittleDatabase has multiple entry
points. As a document, it firstcohered as a dissertation
submitted for my doctorate atthe University of Pennsylvania
in 2015, but it also containsworks made as an editor for the
sites I discuss in the book,including Pennsound, Ubooweb,
Eclipse, and the ElectronicPoetry Center, where I've worked

(05:56):
on and off over the past twentyyears. Or really, it could be
said to have begun when Istarted scanning, yes, back at
Princeton, scanning somemagazines for Craig as a work
study student in 2004. Sincethen, it's grown to include
creative media poetics projectsinterfacing with emerging
writing technologies like largelanguage models and other
ordinary media platforms in thepresent.

(06:19):
One of the things that I foundfascinating about a long term
research project like this oneis just how much it's changed
over the years. What began as aninquiry into what I saw as
cutting edge media practices inthe aughts has grown into a
historical reflection on anearlier time in the Internet
from two decades removed, whereI'm now returning to what I

(06:40):
think of as latent potentials inthese residual digital
repertoires that persist in theshadow of today's always on
social media driven, hypercapitalized, and increasingly AI
dominated digital networks. Moresuccinctly, when I began the
project, I was using the idea ofLidl to work against what was
then called and now soundsquaint called big data. Today, I

(07:02):
think the little more directlyspeaks to the largeness of large
language models whose massivecomputation are transforming our
relation to data more generally,and I should note most often for
the worse. These efforts, theselarge data efforts stake their
hopes for meaningfulinterpretation on the parsing of
enormous amounts of information.
In the humanities, the state,and the public sector alike,

(07:25):
this logic is consistent withpervasive data valence, fintech,
and medtech predictivetechnologies, and global systems
of neoliberal or techno feudalinformatic control. There's much
more to say, of course, on allthese developments, but for now,
I'll just say that the projectis directly responding to these
currents by turning to thelittle database as an
alternative and integral modelfor understanding our place in a

(07:48):
rapidly changing informationenvironment. More intimately, it
aims to make sense of theidiosyncratic collections of
everyday digital objects that weall carry around every day. You
can think of, like, a a few 100PDF files on your desktop, a
thousand neglected photocaptures on your phone, an old
collection of m p three or moviefiles on a hard drive somewhere
gathering the digital equivalentof dust. These ordinary

(08:11):
collections are at once far toolarge to read in traditional
sense as anyone attempting tomake sense of their own desktop
file hierarchies can tell you,while also remaining
significantly below thethreshold for significant
computational analysis.
But more on that shortly. If onehalf of the project is to use
the little as a way to resisttrends and massive computation

(08:32):
and analytics, analytic currentsin the digital humanities, the
other half deploys the little inrelationship to the little
magazine. Like the littlemagazines of the historical
avant gardes, the littledatabases that I examine in the
book offer what I consider adynamic forum for investigating
a global situation of politics,aesthetics, meaning in a time of

(08:53):
pervasive technological change.The methodological challenges
faced by periodical studieswhere full runs can number
hundreds of issues containingthousands of individual works as
well as ads, circulationhistories, and a range of
material, text, contexts. All ofthese things mirror the sites I
examine.
Importing the study of of thesesites into the context of the

(09:15):
Little Magazine offers a kind ofbackdoor entry into a longer
history of textual studies andeditorial theory. This is a way
for me to approach the forensicmateriality that textual
scholars have introduced to borndigital objects or the
infrastructural turn in mediastudies. I call the operant
methodology of my projectcontingent reading, which is
built out of the contingentmethods described by Alan Liu as

(09:38):
a kind of postmodern historicisthermeneutic zigzag that
relational databases demand.I've recently published on this
framework in relationship to thespeculative video game Death
Stranding as a way to thinkabout the fetch quest alongside
ordinary search queries. In theLITTLE database, I contend that
every interpretive act is a kindof fetch quest attempting to
make sense of a shifting terrainthat's subject to unpredictable

(10:01):
and conditional situations.
Finally, one note on mediapoetics, then I'll stop. Instead
of, an academic paper, thatsimply addresses the media as a
kind of external object, I'minterested in how we might
imagine creative media practicesas performing scholarship in
their own right. This follows atrend in the digital humanities
toward building or constructingknowledge as a kind of scholarly

(10:25):
practice. Jerome McGahn and LisaSamuels perhaps best encapsulate
this approach with their termdeformance, which they define as
an academic performance workingwithin the materials that it
studies to surface unseenaspects of the work, a kind of
critical remix practice orscholarly making. So beyond the
chapters proper, I should notethat the book, the Little

(10:48):
Database, also includes a Pythongenerated work of remix, a
fraudulent generative magazinebootleg, an audio essay, a
database movie, and an indexicalexperiment with generative
writing.
So in this way, the Littledatabase attempts to offer both
creative tactics and contingentreading methods for making
meaning within thesecollections, drawn from the

(11:09):
print history of the Littlemagazine, the unlikely
afterlives of media specificworks of art and letters, and a
range of media poetics for thetransformative production of
knowledge. Throughout, I argueor attempt to argue the online
versions of works in thesecollections are not only
transformed at every point ofaccess, but that these versions,

(11:29):
these digital versionscirculating online transform our
understanding of each historicalwork in turn. Okay. That's more
than enough for me to getstarted. I was thinking it might
be great to start ourconversation with a concrete
example drawn from the where thebook ends with Vicki Bennett,
aka People Like Us, whosephenomenal compilation movie, We
Edit Life, has been aninspiration to me for years, and

(11:53):
to my students, I should add.
So Vicki, I was wondering if youcan just tell us a little bit
about that work and its originswithin the Prelinger collection
and the Internet Archive.

Okay, well, it's a celebration of the Internet,
but beyond that, it's acelebration of being able to
network with people near andfar, beyond the local basically.
One big part of it is that itoccurred at the beginning of
high speed computing and highspeed internet and also the
beginning of file sharing. Sothat would be things like

(12:24):
Napster, where you could go anddiscover what's in other
people's folders in theircomputers, which is a massive
thing in terms of reaching outbeyond the local and the mundane
of the local. But also as soonas I got broadband I knew that
there was this thing calledarchive.org and I'd heard that
someone had been persuaded toput a bunch of films up there.

(12:47):
And before that point I'd beenworking for ten years with audio
and a little with video, butgenerally kind of analog scratch
video.
And so it was just amazing tofind this archive, the Prelinga
archives. And I immediatelyemailed Rick and he replied
straight away, you know, afriendship started. It's a
celebration of that as well, ofnot just the archive, which can

(13:10):
mean all sorts of things, butthe archivist, the person who
helps you navigate the archive.And then I'm helping people
navigate the archive as well.And so it's a kind of a self
conscious journey through thatexperience.
And so it is a performativething where I'm acting out the
fact that I'm an editor. So weedit life. I'm editing my life

(13:36):
in that relationship with thatmedia with great joy and also
great joy that I was finallyable to use tools that I've been
dreaming of my whole life. AdobeAfter Effects for drawing around
things and Pro Tools Free. Andthe fact that Pro Tools was
available once for free is veryhard to imagine now.

Yeah, I sketched some of that the way
that the affordances of not justthe the nascent Internet
archive, but the Pro Tools andand these, like, the
democratization, I guess, offilmmaking practices that that
film deploys. But I love thispersonal angle to We Edit Life.
On one hand, that's one of thethings I've been trying to do is
how do you connect these publicpresentations or public
collections like the InternetArchive to these private

(14:21):
collections of of things that wehave on our our desktops. One of
the things I I I found reallyfascinating, I'm not sure if it
made it in the book, was was howmuch of the Internet archive was
actually generated by yourcalls. Like, he was actively
digitizing these films and youwere pulling from a catalog.
And so the the production ofthis film also produced the
Internet archive in some ways.Can you tell us a little bit
about that?

Yeah, so it was a commission by LoveBytes, who
were a media organisation, artsmedia, in the North Of England.
So I had a little bit of moneyto give Rick. He was just doing
it for me anyway. They gave mesome money to digitise stuff
with Rick. Rick would give mebits of his database which he
had in a document that you whatwas the name of something?

(15:04):
Edit. Anyway, you'll rememberthe name of the document in a
minute. And he had all his textdatabase and then I could word
search it. And then I would,because I couldn't preview it,
because I was in London and himin San Francisco, I'd say, well,
what's that one like? And thenhe would verbally explain it to
me.
And then I'd go, oh yeah, that'swhat I need. And then he
gradually got to understand whatI liked. And then he'd start

(15:26):
suggesting it. And then he'ddigitize it. And then if it
wasn't in the archive, he'd addit to the archive.

That's amazing. And I think it's that
search practice that I alsofound really inspiring about the
work that, you know, so much ofthe history of studying found
footage films is about this,like, metacinematic critique, or
you have these clips that arefrom some, like, impossibly
obscure sources, and you'llnever find them. So it's it's
not worth even thinking aboutwhere the samples actually come
from. I feel like that film thatyou made also was one of the

(15:55):
first times where I could searchfor every one of the clips. And
I could watch your film, butalso use your films a kind of
index or or access point to awhole range of, like, unlikely
industrial films, family homevideos, and so on.
It's one thing that I've wantedto know more is is how you
relate to the samples you use. Iknow you're you're researching
sampling techniques now. There'salways, a musical quality and a

(16:17):
sense of, like, playfulness inthe work you make. I'm curious
how you think about how itinterfaces with these various
historical dimensions rangingfrom We Edit Life all the way to
the new work you're doing withLibrary of Babel. There's a
notable clip where you're you'reworking with Barbie, for
example, and and kind ofanimating these these characters
bringing Barbie in conversationwith sci fi films from the
fifties and a really rich arrayof some very recognizable

(16:39):
sources and some that are quiteobscure.
And I'm curious about how youthink about the history of the
source material you use.

Well, when I was doing that, what was it, twenty
four, twenty three years ago, Ididn't think about it in the way
that I am now because I hadn'teducated myself to it. And I
think you said in your book thatyou were educated partly through
searching these archives. That'show I got educated too. I didn't

(17:08):
know what I was doing. I didn'thave any kind of idea or
critique what I was doing.
I was just doing it. In the sameway as many years earlier, I
didn't know aboutplunderphonics. I was just using
samples and someone told me. Andso there wasn't any kind of
explanation for why I was doingit. Then I just pieced it

(17:29):
together.
Actually, when you wrote aboutit, I understood it way more
than I understood it. Youunderstood it way more. And it's
quite funny to pick up on whatyou said then, because I'm
reading about all those peoplenow. Now I'm doing my PhD all
these years later, which justgoes to show linearity work in
various directions. What was thequestion again?

Oh, that was great. That was great. No,
and I think that the linearitythere, I wanted to connect maybe
with some of what Luca's beendoing. So much of my education
came from these collections andand from the archives, like
Internet Archive or or Uber Webor Eclipse. You know, having
been there as those things wereemerging was was one type of

(18:09):
experiment or or one type ofexperience where I'm I'm
interested, Luca, in in how yourelate to the you've been doing
a lot of research with theInternet Archive today, which is
less this kind of like openspace that's building something
brand new and and rather a kindof precarious collection that's
subject to to erasure, what youcall vanishing culture or

(18:30):
fragile records.
And I wonder if we can maybelike bridge some of these like
origins that that that, youknow, Vicky helping to generate
the the online prelingercollection to the type of
preservation and advocacy workthat you've been doing?

Yeah, I think that there's a lot of false
public sentiment aroundsomething like the Internet
Archive or on little databasesin general that thinks of them
as like these harbingers ofpiracy that are intentionally
just trying to steal fromartists and to not give them
their money's worth. But I thinkVicky's example here is great
insofar as it points to remixculture, something that's very

(19:07):
respectful of the originalsource material and that
utilizes it in innovative andcreative ways. And it's
something that is endangered,disappearing as a result of a
change in media distributionthat I talked about in this
report that I just publishedlast year with the internet
archive called VanishingCulture. In particular, that
report was focusing on atransition from file ownership

(19:28):
of, say, the early 2000s and the'90s and media ownership more
broadly to something likestreaming and licensing. And as
a result of which people aren'tas able to do this sort of
remixing of culture if they'renot able to actually access the
files themselves.
Of course, if you're like a verytech savvy person, there's ways

(19:48):
in which you could access thesefiles, but by and large, the
transition sort of inhibits thepublic's ability to play this
kind of critical role inparticipating in an archival
tradition and participating in aremixed tradition.

So the vanishing culture report, I
would just love to hear you talka little bit more about that.
And I am really interested inthis kind of double edged sword
of access to digital materials.On one hand, preserving privacy
or rights of artists. On theother hand, the kinds of
creative use that I know we alldeploy, which also feels very

(20:22):
different now in 2025, whenthose same materials are being
absorbed and consumed by theselike tech oligarchs to produce
their endlessly growing andworld destroying large language
models. So I'm interested,guess, I know this is something
you think about a lot, Luca, isthat the politics of use and the
politics of, in particular, theuse of these kinds of digital

(20:43):
objects.
Would love to hear you maybeparse some of how you're
thinking about access, piracy,things like shadow libraries,
but also permission basedarchives in the present.

Thank you, Danny. So we had a lot of conversations
when we were drafting theVanishing Culture Report around
this exact question of when isit bad for there to be maximum
access to materials? Inparticular, this comes up with
questions such as sacredknowledge and religious
knowledge that might notcirculate or should not
circulate more broadly. And soone of the purposes of the

(21:14):
report was to kind of critiqueagainst premature loss of
digital materials that have beencaused as a result of these
transitions into something likestreaming or licensing, or as a
result of extended copyrightlaws, which have been lobbied
for by big corporations likeDisney, which make it such that

(21:34):
publications that are thirty,forty, 50 years old are
essentially impossible to accessunless you actually go to a
research library. And so there'sa politics of access there where
what I'm interested in is abroader public access to
materials.
So long as that access is like,accept like the way the way I

(21:56):
define sort of a culturalpublication is just something
that's intentionallydisseminated and distributed to
a wider audience. And so Iwouldn't want something that
isn't intentionally desired tobe out there to continue to be
out there against people'swishes. But I do think that if
somebody intentionally putssomething out there, and they're
okay with it being out there,then it should circulate. I was
definitely seduced by thatinformation desires to be free

(22:19):
thing at a young age, assomebody who sort of came of age
with the early internet. Iremember being exposed to
quarantine when I was 10 andhaving no idea what exactly it
was, but just being sort of inawe of the fact that like
somebody could access all thesematerials online however they
desired.
I hold on to that sort ofutopian vision. And I think what
your book does very well, Dani,is it excavates that past

(22:41):
tradition of sharing that Ithink later generations weren't
necessarily exposed to, and whohave inherited an internet
that's fundamentally differentthan the internet of the late
twentieth century and earlytwenty first century.

Yeah. And I'm almost shocked that you even
you were torrenting at all. Ithink, you know, increasingly
with my students, they've had noencounter with that. And of
course, Luca's made, I'll justplug, an amazing book called
Seed that works with theartistry of various kinds of
hackers and whereas demo sceneproducers in ASCII format with

(23:15):
torrent distribution. But allthose repertoires are
disappearing, like, you know,downloading has moved towards
streaming.
And the kind of repertoires thatI developed, I think mostly with
Craig, and I wanted to maybeturn to you, thinking about just
how different it was to to bescanning and producing these
kinds of materials when it feltreally vital, I guess, in in the

(23:36):
year 2000 to surface a raresmall press poetry books and and
magazines that would beimpossible to access otherwise.
It feels really different nowwhen everything is there, like
it seems like everything isthere or, you know, to be like
an a kind of like amateurarchivist who's scanning things
in independently feels verydifferent now that, you know,

(23:58):
every library has digitizationofficers and JSTOR is releasing
these massive collections ofrare magazines somewhat
regularly. I'm interested in,you know, I think just across
the board, Craig and also Vicki,how you're thinking about your
relationship to these kinds ofcollections now versus how you

(24:18):
maybe were thinking about themas they emerged in the twenty
aughts.

I'm always amused by the fact that Eclipse and
Google started in the same year.I always remember this because
it startled me so much. This isback when telephones used to be
attached to the walls ofbuildings. And I had a telephone
in my office, in the basementoffice at Princeton, that I

(24:44):
didn't even know the number to.Never gave it to anyone because
I didn't want anyone to contactme.
But it rang one day. It scaredthe shit out of me. It was
really loud. And it was LarryPage who I'd never heard of, and
he had this company I'd neverheard of. But he and he had this
plan to scan so many books, itwould be as deep as the ocean.
We would swim in an ocean ofbooks. He said, he gave me like

(25:06):
this this two minute elevatorpitch. And then he said, you
know, could Google use theeclipse titles to start their
their collection of books? And,you know, there there were maybe
20 of them. This speaks to thelittle part of this at a point
where 20 books look like, wow,we could get a head start here.
The point being that obviouslythey were prescient. They named

(25:29):
it Google. I could have namedEclipse score. Like maybe we
will someday have four scorebooks on there. And they
obviously increasedexponentially and geometrically.
While you maybe even know howmany books are on Eclipse now,
we've grown incrementally,arithmetically. And I think the

(25:49):
one thing that feels differentto me now about the project is
what a collection means when therest of the internet is so much
larger just by these orders ofmagnitudes of data, and
increasingly commercialized,which is to also say
increasingly homogeneous.Somehow there's much more, at

(26:14):
least at a kind ofinfrastructure level. Whatever
interesting things people aredoing doesn't mean that there
aren't these interesting things.But they're all on WordPress or
they used to all be on Tumblr adecade ago or whatever.
And I I I think that that makessomething like Eclipse feel much
more eccentric than it used tobe. I think there's questions

(26:36):
about poetry culture that wecould we could throw in there as
as well that that that highlightthe same eccentricity. Does that
make sense?

Daniel Scott Snelson: Absolutely. And I I love this. (26:44):
undefined
There's two things that makes methink of. One, I I love the, I
didn't know this history aboutLarry Page and the the 20 books
of Eclipse potentially being atthe origin of of Google Books
and and their massiveaccumulation of literature. It
it does remind me of what whatreally inspired the interlude to
chapter two, which is a a kindof fraudulent bootleg of

(27:07):
language magazine, which I knowis the most accessed magazine in
the collection.
Very, very important documentthat Craig has worked on quite a
bit, infamously under readdocument in literary history. I
discovered at a certain point,the Allen Institute for AI had
done this research around whatwebsites large language models
had absorbed. And I discoveredthat they had absorbed on the

(27:28):
other side of Google Booksstarting alongside Eclipse, that
all of Eclipse had somehow beenabsorbed by these large language
models that do produce this kindof plain Internet vernacular in
general. But somewhere in likethe dark heart, say of Chatzi
BT, the entirety of the Eclipsearchive is there. Like, it knows
language poetry.
It knows these like experimentalapproaches to the politics of

(27:51):
language. And so in that work,I'm trying to resurface that in
some ways and put that back indialogue with some of the
original print materials. Theother half of what I found
really interesting, what youwere just talking about, Craig,
is just how exciting the thehand coded Internet is becoming
for for young artists andwriters. I've been interested in
this, what what people arecalling the web revivalism.
Young artists are are usingthings like neo cities to

(28:14):
produce these, outlandish, handcoded websites as a kind of
rejection of the filter bubblesthat I think, you know, most of
these young artists have havegrown up entirely within their
entire lives.
What might have been like anintuitive practice or a a matter
of necessity in hand coding theHTML of Eclipse, which has
remained really quite constant,has somehow transformed over the

(28:36):
course of a quarter century intomaybe a really exciting
potential for new forms ofcreative practice on the
Internet. It's like a returnlike, I don't know, as a kind of
like retro process, but alsolike returning as maybe a kind
of digital practice that hasresistance built into it or has
more control in a digital space,which is swiftly decimating what

(28:57):
was once known as say, like thethe commons or the digital
commons to become a hypergated,hyper controlled space.

Ken, I wanna say one one thing about it, and then
I wanna ask you about it becauseit strikes me as being, you
know, really perverse to handtype these plain text files.
Feels like we mentioned theXerox machine, but it feels more
like I don't even know what theyuse crystal set ham radio
operators or something likethat. There's really no good

(29:28):
reason to do it, I think. Thething I wanna point out that I
do like about it is every time II log on to the Bluehost down in
Orem, I have to click throughpop up ads about whether we're
gonna optimize Eclipse in insearch engines and and how I'm
gonna drive commercial trafficto this completely noncommercial
site. And what I like is thethere's basically no metadata at

(29:51):
all because, and this goes backto something, you know, Luca was
saying that I don't wannaimagine what people will do with
that material, when I make itavailable.
I never would have dreamed oflanguage not equal. These are
things I don't wanna pretend topredict. And so the absence of

(30:12):
metadata is one the things I'mI'm also most proud of on this
site. But I wanted to ask youwhat some of the latent
potentials you see in theobsolescence, because I'd love
for it to be something otherthan just perversity and
ineptitude.

I love the almost the occult practice of
handwriting HTML files. Yeah. Ithink that there's a number of
things that are latent or thelatent potential. And I like
this rejection of metadata. Youknow, one of, I think, the most
sad developments in digitalhumanities is think about all of
the hours people spend doing,like, textual encoding, like the

(30:49):
TEI initiative, and these sortof, like, hours and hours of,
like, producing the metadata tomake a rich text that imagine
somebody's going to use it.
And I don't know how many humansactually use TEI, but it it
certainly helps train largelanguage models, and and it
certainly helps make some peoplebillions of dollars. And I think
it's, like, within that space,like, in in relationship to the

(31:11):
current landscape of theinternet, which is driven by
these like five major companies,that the idea, like the very
empowering idea that one canactually just write a web page
by hand, it's almost shocking, Ithink, my students. Like, they
they don't know that that'seven, like, a possibility. And
once they realize, well, it'sreally not that hard. Like,
it's, you know, a CSS tag is isreally like you can make the

(31:32):
background change its color oryou can drop a GIF in.
Maybe more more troubling in theother side of that is my
students are also, like,producing these NeoCities
websites by vibe coding. Sothey're prompting large language
models to try to write thingsthat look like they were
handmade in the nineties. And II think it's like those, like,
historical disconnections orit's like putting those things
in relationship to each otherthat has a kind of charge. I

(31:55):
think when writing the littledatabase, was really returning
to these things that wereproduced in the aughts or the
late 90s and finding all kindsof ways that they just offer
different models or differentimaginaries to what the internet
could have become, what it mightstill be, different modes of
empowerment for users to producethings or make things out of

(32:19):
these materials. When you'rejust streaming movies, for
example, you're not able to cutthem together and and key them
up in the way that Vicky does sobrilliantly.
And and so I think, like,Eclipse is also something that
can be downloaded, moved around,and then used in any number of
ways that the user might wantto, from being able to read it

(32:40):
on the device they like to beingable to remix it to produce
something entirely new.

I just want to add in because you mentioned the
vibe coding of these sort of oldschool websites. I'll age myself
a little. I had an old schoolHTML website back in the day.
And what I appreciated about itis I was aware who I was
stealing my HTML from when I wastrying to learn how to do it.
And there was sort of a politicsof like, oh, yeah, at least for

(33:06):
me, should recognize who it is Iwas taking my HTML and my CSS
from.
And that's something that's kindof masked by the LLM, right,
when you're kind of vibe codingand you're just trying to
generate this old school lookingwebsite. You miss this kind of
like, I guess we could call itan infra thin care politics of
like, oh, we should probablyrecognize the people we were
taking from in the first place.And then more tangentially, I

(33:29):
think obsolescence to me atleast promotes opportunities for
nostalgia and mourning. AndDanny, what I kind of want to
ask you is like, is the LittleDatabase as a project a kind of
nostalgic and mourning projectin itself?

Oh, that's really nice. In some ways, yeah,
I think, you know, mourning thepractices where one had, say,
more sense of agency or wherethe internet held this kind of
sense of promise. My colleagueChris Kelty writes about being a
historian of the internet thatcould have been. And I think,

(34:04):
you know, in looking back tothese models, that Internet that
could have been remains avirtual possibility for other
forms of connection in thefuture, forms of networking or
connection or creativeproduction that are more
agential, that are able to workwith real context and real
histories. I think that erasureof context that large language

(34:27):
models invoke is one of the mosttroubling aspects.
Right? So there's famous AIpiece, this person does not
exist, where every time you loada page in the browser, you get
another face that, like, quote,unquote, doesn't exist. And and
that that made a lot ofheadlines when it was released.
But, of course, all those facesreally do exist. It turned out
that really it was just sort oflike slightly tweaked, actual

(34:50):
photos of people, that thatreally do exist.
It's just that their theirhistory and their their context
have been removed. And and sowhen I when I look at whether
it's the magazines that arehosted by Eclipse, on one hand,
you have the bibliographic datathere, Craig, so I can go back
and I know where these materialsemerge from. I can learn about
the the material history ofthese documents. But I can also,

(35:13):
and this is the argument I'mtrying to make in the book,
think about the context of,like, language magazine as it
lives on Eclipse. And that's oneof the things I was really
trying to do is to, like, takethose digital objects and those
experiences seriously so thatthey're not just some kind of
indexical relationship to, say,like, a film that that might
have screened at some point oncelluloid, and I just happened

(35:35):
to be having this degradedexperience in, a shitty flash
video file.
Instead, I was trying to thinkas somebody who grew up in rural
Utah and and accessed avantgarde materials mostly through
my browser, I had verymeaningful experiences seeing,
you know, as as distorted as itwas, seeing Stan Brakage on
YouTube. And and I wanted tothink, can I take that Stan

(35:57):
Brakage film on YouTubeseriously and and think about
its context? And and and so Ithink it's an additive process
throughout that that that thesethese files carry their
histories, but their theirmeaning or our way of
understanding them has layers ofhistory and context that can be
parsed and traced and searchedand found. And this is really,

(36:18):
you know, to go back to where webegan with We Edit Life. One of
the things I found sofascinating about that is I
could like access both like thehistorical, the distant
historical production of theseworks and their circulation on
the internet in a specificmoment.
So it was context additiverather than context subtractive.

Yeah, I think context, as you've said, changes
all the time and there's neverone context, it's always
relational. And I think a lot ofwhat we talk about is the way
that things are relational andhow they can stand next to each
other. They can overlap in the,you know, like an imprithin. But
also what you're saying aboutauthenticity. Authenticity is a

(37:01):
weird one because we can oftenassume that authenticity starts
with our knowledge of it orsomeone else's knowledge of it.
Whereas you know something fromtwo hundred years ago, they
weren't having those problemsthen. Suppose you've got a
public house and you try andmake it look like an older

(37:22):
public house, I mean like a pub.Supposing you make a bar look
like a diner. Someone goes inthere and they go in there and
they have the authenticexperience in the diner and then
they find out it wasn't a diner,it was something else. What bit
is authentic and what isn't?
Who's lying? And so what I'msaying is, even with the LLMs,

(37:46):
it's not really what you'redoing, it's what's your
intentions? Is it a knowingintention or that you just don't
know which is okay as well? Notknowing, we've all done the not
knowing, we don't know mostthings. We only know what we
know.
So what I'm saying is a lot ofthe friction that can happen in

(38:07):
us talking about chains ofinformation and cutting people
off in chains, it's not reallyabout the tools that are being
used. It's about our agency inour actions with the tools that
we use and the knowledge that wehave.

Can I tie something together that Viktor
was saying about knowing and notknowing and that Luca was
saying, and that I think speaksto a kind of social prehistory
of the technologies that led toeclipse and a dynamic that
you'll have something smarter tosay about? But I just wanna note
the dynamic that I'm thinkbecause I'm still thinking about
the Xerox machine, whichtechnologically does one thing.

(38:48):
But the social and politicallife of the Xerox machine in the
late '80s and the early '90s,which was part of sharing with
people that you knew, or I thinkof we used to have Kinko copy
shops. And in Berkeley, I wentto grad school, had Krishna
Copy, which before they got hitwith a huge copyright

(39:11):
infringement lawsuit, which justwould, for a few dollars would
copy entire books for you in theafternoon. But you did that to
share with your reading group,or you did that to make
pamphlets that you would handout at a you'd exchange with
people at poetry reading, or youwere in seminar and you wanted

(39:32):
to share an article with people.
And now I feel like there's lotsof sharing, but it's indexical.
You say, have you seen thisstreaming here? And that
obviously and this is theobvious part that maybe you can
say more about that I knew thosepeople. And part of what's great
and not great about the onlinearchive is I don't know who. I

(39:54):
all the people, like, I don'twant to imagine what they're
going to do with this material.
I also don't know who they areto begin with. And I wonder if
that dynamic is something thatanimates these databases for you
in some way.

Yeah. That's a really rich set of
things. I wanna pick up on onboth of these. I was thinking
about the not just, say, maybenot authenticity or or agency,
but experience. Like the thequestion of, like, and the
performance of of culturalencounter with, you know, say a
diner, like a pub that's dressedup like a diner so you have a
diner experience.
Was reminded of this greatanecdote that Bruce Sterling

(40:31):
used to tell when defining theatemporal, what he called the
atemporality, which is he was hewas this was like early Internet
right after, say, you couldorder anything you wanted on
Amazon. But if you wanted tolive as an astronaut, it'd be
really easy to just, buy upthings on eBay and and produce
an astronaut station in yourhome, like eat dried food, and

(40:54):
like walk around in a spacesuit. And you could like
experience the life of anastronaut from home. And he
found this to be like a reallyinteresting like interruption to
like historical time, and thatwas like actually like produced
by the Internet. And I thinkthat that that kind of, like,
temporal dislocation, Craig, hasa lot to do with experience,
encounter, and and connectionwith these digital materials.

(41:16):
For me, you know, I have somevery cherished dot m p four
files that I keep kind of closeat hand that are more valuable
to me, say, than than a VHScassette tape or of like a video
art piece. In the same way that,you know, my printed version
that I made when I was anundergrad, where I just printed

(41:36):
out those, the entirety oflanguage magazine, and I
annotated it, you know, by hand.It was just on like, shitty
eight and a half by 11 paperthat's all, like, crumpled, and
it has all this age. Like,that's to me the most valuable
edition of language magazinethat that that I know about. And
and so I think that there issomething interesting to to pick

(41:58):
up on both of these thesethreads and and trying to, like,
take digital experiencesseriously, and and two, to to
think about them within thesesocial contexts.
So those are also the links thatI send to people or sharing a
file is very different than theindexical reference, like have
you seen X streaming on Y, asopposed to what I like to do in

(42:21):
my grad seminars, for example.Here's a zip file with 300 books
that we're going to study. Andand, like, you know, what kind
of strategies can we all developtogether to unpack these 300
books together? And I think it'sit's you know, so it's always in
that kind of, like, connectionor in the the social space in
which culture lives that I thinkthat meaning is most potently
felt. Even these things thatfeel kind of like anonymous,

(42:43):
like non social media objects,like Eclipse that are SEO
resistance, that are hand coded,that aren't trying to optimize
for shares on social media, theystill have rich social lives,
and they have profound effects,I think, on one, how we
encounter these historicalobjects, but how, you know,
increasingly, my students aregoing to encounter these

(43:05):
objects.
They've been not going to beable to access most of these
materials in person. We all knowhow rare it is to see I'd love
to hear your thoughts on this,Vicky. How rare it is to see
celluloid in person. And, youknow, how do you teach, like,
the history of, structural filmwhen you can't actually see the
celluloid? And and does thatjust mean that my students will
never have a meaningfulexperience of those films?

(43:25):
Or or are there ways in whichthose meaningful experiences can
be articulated otherwise? I'mnot sure if that was a question,
Vicky, but I'd love to hear butyou do so much with mediation in
your work. It's one of thethings I love is you have all
these really smart ways up to inLibrary of Babel where you
process these historical filmcharacters where they look like
they're walking in and out ofthese digitized pixels, where

(43:47):
you bring these, like, reallywild different points in history
together, but you keep a lot ofthe noise. You keep the static
and the hiss and the, thescratches in the celluloid in
your films. And I guess I'd loveto hear your thoughts on like,
yeah, how do you think aboutplaying, I guess, media history
in that way?

I think actually, I like other people to play it
out for me. So what I do is Ishow the connections between
things. So if someone said, whatis the main thing you're trying
to do?' is I want to show thateverything's connected,
everything's relational, thatthere's no duality and
connection, that we can create aduality. And what people

(44:30):
experience might be somethingelse. So you will have a lot of
people being indexical going,oh, what's that movie?
What's that movie? Did you seethat movie? Oh, who's that
actor?' actor? But my aim is tomove beyond that with something
that I'd call the overwhelm'. SoI use all those things in the

(44:51):
same way that if you meditate tostart with your mind's going and
then it gets to a point it goes,no.
Like that overwhelm, no. And itmight be overwhelmed, no. And
that's what I want people toexperience is this sort of
sublime feeling of the overwhelmwhere they give up and surrender

(45:13):
from their chattering mind intoan experience that is a deeper
experience of a lot. And I alsothink I don't know if this is
answering your question, but Idid unmute so I was going to say
something. So it probably isthis: we are always overwhelmed
with information and we've gotour own filters that actually

(45:35):
have to focus us.
Because I mean, for instance,everything around us in the room
could get to us. You know, likemy cat keeps meowing behind me.
That could drive me insane rightnow. And the same goes when I
was making three sixty movies,which I still do, where the
audience sit in the middle.You're dealing with the fact

(45:55):
that you're making movies thatonly 180% of it can be seen.
And then I was thinking, well,how do you deal with that? How
do other people deal with that?How does the indexical deal? You
overwhelm them. That's what youdo.
You actually throw the whole lotat them and then let them sort
it out. So actually I'm notsorting anything out for anyone.

(46:16):
I'm just laying it there and I'mfinding as much of it as I can,
putting it all together, showinghow they can navigate all
through these doorways andthrough the pixels and make it
into a psychedelic experience ofmoving through all these
narratives, all these differentactors in actor world, a bit
like Christian Marclay's theClock'. I feel that you enter

(46:37):
into the world of narrative, theworld of actors where they are
all the time, and then he's madean edit of their world. And I
like to think of it in this kindof fantastical, magical way.
Certainly not any kind ofmourning of anything, although I
understand hauntology, thepurpose of all that kind of
thing. But what I'm saying is Ijust want to present a really,

(47:00):
really eloquent picture of thefact that everything is
connected and also thateverything is a copy but not in
a hierarchical way. So in a nonlinear, non temporal way or
temporal way, there's no copy,there's just another one. That's

(47:21):
what I'm trying to change thelanguage of the way we think,
that we don't have to countthings. And I make massive
lists.
I make massive lists. Do it aswell.

Yeah, I like that they're all copies.
But also, all the copies areoriginals, I guess, in Boris
Groys' sense that each of thosecopies then becomes a new
original. I wanted to pick up onthis, you know, both this idea
that you're saying like therhythm, right, where you bring
something up and then you getoverwhelmed. So like having like
a rhythm to those productions,but also being able to produce

(47:54):
the kind of affective feeling ofbeing overwhelmed, which I I
certainly get in your work,especially as, like, say certain
sounds start mounting and andcrescendoing, and and you have
this amazing way of playing withrhythm. I don't know.
I don't think I've ever beenoverwhelmed by, say, an academic
essay. Like, that there'ssomething you can do in those
movies that that, like, an essayjust can't do. And Craig taught

(48:15):
me to to, like, actually sit andand read things that that seem
unreadable. And and, like,having an experience of, say,
Craig trying to read your parse,and I spent a long time reading
parse, would be is profound youknow, profoundly different than
any essay about parse couldproduce. It produces a different
kind of affect, a different kindof experience, and builds a

(48:37):
certain a different kind of,like, knowledge for me.
And I know I'm I'm gonna connectall three of us here, all three
of you here, Luca withundocumented press, that as a
kind of performative activistpoetics, you're able to do
things with that press that thatyou you couldn't do in in, say,
white papers or or forms ofscholarship. So I thought maybe,
you know, as we get toward theend of our recording session, we

(48:59):
can start having some kind ofopen conversations around some
core questions that I've beenthinking about and would love to
hear you say more about. I amobsessed with this idea of
creative scholarship. Bring itforward in my classes. I'm very
interested and mostly justbecause the normative forms of
academe are so pervasive thatanything that escapes them is

(49:20):
really exciting for me, I feellike I'm always hunting them.
And and I know all three of youthink quite a bit about forms of
of creative scholarship or or orpoetics. And and I'd I'd love to
hear, yeah, your your thoughtson on how maybe you see your
practices reflected or or or notin the work that I'm trying to
do with the LITTLE database?

I'd just like to say that what I said about
duality is that sometimes youget the person explaining and
then everyone else has got tolisten. And that's where the
performative aspect is reallyhelpful, because you take the
audience come with you. And soif you're making a text or audio

(50:06):
visual piece, If they're presentin the process, it's no longer a
closed end product because thereis no beginning and ending
really. These ideas that thingshave to have an introduction and
an ending and index and I'd loveto hear you talk about the index
index later. I think it'simportant to find these ways of

(50:26):
performing within your medium.
Since starting my PhD, I had noidea that my PhD was going to be
performative, but it could notbe. I had to make it this
really, really long text that Istarted making where I was
actually giving examples of whatI was talking about within it
and then making it more like akind of rhizomatic diary. And I

(50:49):
didn't know I was going to bedoing that, but I had to because
it's so tedious doing it anyother way. Full stop.

It's a great stop. I'll pick up on the
index index really quickly. Itwas the last piece of this book
and I think it really only cameout with the Manifold Edition. I
became really obsessed with theindex as a format. It's like the
last thing you have to do withan academic book, because you
have to go back to the pages andtry to figure out what are the
good key terms, what are thekind of subject clusters that

(51:20):
someone might use.
But it's such an anachronisticform. Like, you know, it's very
good, I guess, for the codex.But I imagine most people will
encounter this book digitallyand ideally in some kind of
rogue archive or shadow librarysomewhere where they can search
for the terms that they might belooking for. So I got into this
deep history around the indexand how it was formulated and

(51:43):
realized that it's one of thesethings that always comes after
that books come first and theindex has to follow a book. Was
like, oh, but I I wonder and Ithink increasingly generative
AI, that that relationship isexactly flipped on its head,
right, where large languagemodels are these massive index
indexes that generate books.
So the index is writing the kindof outputs that we all

(52:05):
encounter. And so I was tryingto come up with a form that
would be able to express that.And again, it's one of those
things where I felt like itcould only be performed. So what
would it look like in materialpractice for an index to
generate a book that precedesit. And so I compiled 16 indexes
into this massive index and thengenerated term accurate pages

(52:25):
using a range of large languagemodels to write book that would
be accurate to an index.
And, you know, the experiment iswhatever, right? Like, I think
you're saying, like, you know,it can land or not with
audiences. I think you could doa lot of different things with
it. I haven't even read theentire thing myself. But, you

(52:47):
know, I think it's able to Ithink it opens a kind of
dimension or advantage, I guess,on indexicality in the present
that I would find reallyimpossible to articulate
otherwise.

I think it's brilliant. Really, it's just
wonderful. I got really excitedwhen I saw that because I love
the idea of turning around,know, all the hierarchies of
beginnings and ends and where isexactly that we think we started
with this thing. If you have a,you know, the Codex book, know,

(53:20):
you've got to have a certainamount of pages and size and all
of that thing. And at the sametime, you don't want this vast
kind of labyrinth.
What I love about that is theidea that it's a recipe and it's
prescriptive, you know, and youget to make what you want, but
you don't know what it's goingto be if someone else finds out
for you because they found outalready. But that's what a book

(53:42):
is anyway.

I want to pick up on the creative scholarship
thing. So I'll begin by giving abrief outline of what
undocumented press is and why Ifind your book really helpful
for me right now, particularlyas I'm going on the job market
and trying to think about waysof professionalizing myself and
describing the work that I doand feeling like a kind of a
sellout in doing so. But I thinkthe little database helps me for

(54:04):
thinking of things in not somuch sellout terms, but as like
different media instantiationsof these objects having specific
meanings depending upon thedatabase that they're in. So I
started undocumented press as aproject in a class of Danny for
electronic poetry. And inparticular, it was founded to

(54:24):
publish one book in particular,which was called Poetry of
America.
And what I did is I took thishorribly racist anthology of
American poetry from thenineteenth century by William
Linton. And then I ran itthrough I took a PDF of it from
Google Books. And I ran that PDFthrough a website that was gonna
translate it using GoogleTranslate in the languages of

(54:46):
the colonial domination of thenew world. So English, Spanish,
French, Dutch, Portuguese, andthen back into English. And so
it kicked up a lot of linguisticnoise.
It became this weirdmultilingual document, as well
as this like kind of glitchystrange document as a result of
the PDF and codings. And then Irepublished it as a print on
demand book with Lulu that lookslike the hardcover copy that's

(55:08):
at Young Research Library atUCLA. And because I was working
at the library at the time, Ihad access to call number slips
and magnetic strips. And so Ifixed a call number to it and I
fixed a magnetic strip to it andI shelved it at the research
library at UCLA. And at the timeI didn't necessarily think of it
in terms of creativescholarship, I just thought of
it as like a synthesis ofeverything that I'd been doing

(55:30):
at the time, A sort of way toescape like the board monotonies
of like my work study job too,which is an interesting thing to
think about.
The like sort of intersectionsbetween like making something
playful out of the labor thatyou're kind of required to do in
order to pay rent. Since thenI've sort of like published and

(55:50):
distributed these books. AndDani I remember when I first did
it you were like, make sureyou're documenting it. And I was
like, well I don't understandthe point in documenting it, why
would I document it? And nowthat I'm on the job market I'm
like, oh man, should reallydocument these things.
But this is all to say that thelittle database helps me because
like I've been thinking aboutthe terms that I use to kind of
describe the work and the ironyof like documenting an

(56:12):
undocumented press as like afugitive press that shouldn't
really be documented in thefirst place. And the point that
I'm kind of getting at is thatlike the work has different
meanings when it's on a CV, whenyou encounter it randomly in a
library, or like when youencounter it as a PDF that's
hosted to the internet archive.And thinking specifically about

(56:32):
those little databases helps meto be a little bit less anxious
about like me quote unquoteselling out by like uploading
this, like attaching it to my CVand saying this is like a work
of creative scholarship versusthis is a work of activist
literature.

I mean, absolutely I I also write about
this book. It it really is justsuch an inspiring project. And
I'm really, you know, one, I'mhonored and and delighted to
hear that. The big purpose of oftrying to produce this book is
I've been interested in theseweird forms of making. And I,
you know, I was lucky enough tohave mentors in my graduate
study and, you know, perverselibrarians like Craig to

(57:09):
encourage me from, you know, theearliest point in my academic
study to explore these theseother modes and and experimental
ways of making.
That that I really wanted thebook really dedicated to, you
know, my students and andpotential future students that
might feel enabled and empoweredto to make make academe stranger

(57:31):
and and and produce these kindsof things and and find new forms
of value. Of course, in thedigital humanities, we're we're
still thinking quite a bit abouthow to articulate, you know,
various kinds of works one hasfor credentialing systems, for
processes of tenure. I certainlyhad my own challenges here at
UCLA around a lot of that. But Ithink that's changing. And I

(57:53):
hope that the book adds, Iguess, to that change and
enables those ways of making.
I I know that it's I I don'tknow if I'm pushing too far in
that direction. Like, you know,my colleague, Johanna Drucker,
she keeps her academic work andher poetry completely different.
And and she says, you know, shedoesn't want any of her
colleagues to know about hercreative writing and and vice
versa. And so I kind of amcurious, I feel like I've been a

(58:15):
perverse reader of Craig's for along time. I read this amazing
chapbook that he wrote,Signature Effects, as an index
of Deleuze and Guattari'sThousand Plateaus, like my first
time reading A ThousandPlateaus, which I know you're
interested in as well, Wiki.
It was through this weird littlebook of poems that Craig had
written that kind of exertedfrom the text. But I don't know
if you think of that as a kindof, Craig, you have a prolific

(58:37):
academic writing practice aswell as a prolific experimental
writing practice. I'm thinkingof works like Strand or Parse in
particular that take theseparaacademic spaces. But I'm
curious how you think about, Iguess, the I don't know, is
calling those works scholarly insome way wrong for you? Is that
something you want to try andkeep at an arm's length?

(58:57):
Or how do you think about thosepractices?

Well, I mean, unlike the rest of you, know, my
my scholarly work is is notcreative. It's really it's
tedious and scholarly andacademic in all the bad ways.
But the perverse paracademiccreative books and the boring,

(59:22):
tedious academic articles oftenstart from exactly the same
place. I'm a little embarrassedthat you found that book, which
is, you know, all over theplace. But I'll say two quick
things about it.
One is that it goes back toquestions of technology and
obsolescence. It was composed ona pirated copy of what was

(59:42):
already then an outdated versionof Aldus PageMaker. I was
trained on letterpress. I wastrained to handset metal type
and ink it up because you coulddo things that you couldn't do
in word processing programs atthe time, like WordPerfect,
which is what I'd been typing mypapers on. And Aldis was this

(01:00:03):
way of doing this is a book thatreads down through the z axis of
of the page.
It would have been terrible painto try and get the registration
right if I were printing this ona on on the Vandercook. So Aldis
was great for that. And I thinkit's the opposite of continuing
to hand type HTML into plaintext files. I should get

(01:00:24):
whatever our version of Aldis isand make my life easier and
cleaner. But the other pointabout the academic part is, I
just completed what thescholarly version of what that
book began as, which was tryingto think about Stephane
Malamais, Jean Caudadet, andwhat it would mean to read and
compose by the sheet rather thanthe bound page.

(01:00:47):
And so as I started thinkingabout that thirty years ago,
however long ago that was, oneversion is this kind of terrible
chapbook that's trying to do toomuch. But I've just now finished
the other part of that, which isthinking about page space in the
Stavusian Qatarian way viaMallarme's printing and binding

(01:01:08):
practices. So they start in thesame place, but I think they're
they're pretty siloed for me, Ihave to admit.

Daniel Scott Snelson (01:01:14):
That's great. That leads into I feel
like I'm just gonna voice myconcerns about the book with
everyone. So if on one hand, youknow, I'm concerned with
thinking about this argumentaround creative scholarship in
the book and what it affords oror or doesn't, I'm also really
interested in in trying toconnect these collections online
like Eclipse and Google Web andPenSound to personal hard
drives. On one level, I'm I'mtrying to look through these

(01:01:35):
publicly accessible collections,which to my mind really mirror
how my personal hard drive is isproduced. These old websites and
Craig or anyone who spent a lotof time in those file
hierarchies writing those pagesby hand, it's just a series of,
like, files and folders thatthat one nests, just like we all
do with our own hard drives andpersonal data collections.
As we're beginning to to maybewrap up, I'm I'm interested to

(01:01:58):
hear, one, if you see your ownpersonal collections reflected
in some of these onlinecollections, or two, yeah, how
you're thinking aboutdownloading right now in general
or or having personalcollection. As book collectors,
film collectors, we have, like,a lot of material artifacts. But
are personal hard drives thesame kind of thing? Are they are
they something quite different?What is your relationship to

(01:02:20):
your personal hard drive?
And otherwise, if that's not toobold of me to ask.

Vicki Bennett (01:02:24):
I have so many hard drives that all the
cataloging is completely futileat this point. And people keep
saying, oh, you know, you couldmake a server. But then I think,
well, if it's all joinedtogether, it might all just die
one day. So I keep all thesebits separately and I've got
about 50 hard drives. But yeah,I download everything still,

(01:02:46):
even though I know it'savailable in places, because I
don't trust that it will betomorrow in the places that I
look again.
I mean, instance, I use Anna'sarchive to get all of my PDFs.
And I love PDFs and they'retactile to me. I love seeing the
scans and the colours andreading them in that way. But I

(01:03:08):
don't want to just stream stuff.I kind of want to have it in my
house and if I could I'll put itin a vault somewhere.
When something becomes lesspopular it will disappear. In
the same way that when you lookat video archives on Pirate Bay,
even a TV series will disappear.That might have been really

(01:03:28):
important but no one wanted toshare it anymore. So yeah, I
grab everything and I downloadeverything and I keep it myself.
And when I get a new hard driveI copy it across again in case
the hard drive stops workingwith the operating system.
So I'm working with the obsoletethe whole time and there's no

(01:03:49):
hope in hell that I'm ever goingto read all these books. We know
that isn't why we do it. Why dowe do it? Why? I don't know, you
say.

It is. Some guard against erasure in
the future. You're you're right.And, you know, I'm thinking also
of, Vint Cerf's statement thatif, you know, if you wanna
preserve anything, if you wannapreserve a photo Vint Cerf, of
course, the founder of theInternet, provocatively said,
like, you have to print it out.Otherwise, you know, if it's on
a hard drive, it will die, willdisappear.
And and and that's one of thethe the things that I find so

(01:04:22):
inspiring about thesecollections is that they often
disappear. Like, they'll they'llcrash or or, you know, a server
will go down or a universitywill will will oust you from
their servers. And it requiresjust a massive amount of these,
like, repertoires of of care, ofof downloading, of re uploading,
of maintenance, these thesekinds of, like, smaller
activities that I think are,like, less flashy than just sort

(01:04:45):
of, like, posting somethingonline, but but are actually
just a lot of labor and and alot of time and and and care.
And I know that's something thatyou also think about, Luca, in
in your work and thinking aboutlabor, especially in
relationship to contingency andand academe. What is your
personal hard drive like?
And and what kind of labors doesit invoke?

Luca Messarra (01:05:08):
My personal hard drive is an absolute mess. I
would say that it is acollection of folders that just
say desktop dump, and it'susually everything that was on
my desktop at the time. And Ithrow it into a folder, and I
throw it on a hard drive, andthat's pretty much it. There is
no other good organization forit at all. But that said, these

(01:05:30):
are the repertoires that I thinkare absolutely essential if we
want things to continueexisting, as you were saying,
Vicky.
And it's something that I kindof advocate a lot for in the
report is for people to havetheir own little databases that
they keep on their hard drivesso that one day, when these
things that we think of as toobig to fail, like the Internet
Archive, which very well mightfail one day, we don't know for

(01:05:51):
sure, because of the lawsuitsthat they're facing, There will
be this rhizome of people, ofCedars, who have continued to
maintain their little databases,and then they'll upload the
materials again one day andthey'll sprout out and people
will have them again. At leastthat's the utopian vision,
right? But I also think it'salso a true vision if we think

(01:06:12):
about the history of sharingdigital files over time. This is
a separate thing, but I want toreally quickly cut it in because
we brought up the InternetArchive. One of the deciding
factors in the Internet Archiveversus Hatchet case was the
question of whether or not ascan of a book was sufficiently
transformative of a publisher'sbook in order to make it not a

(01:06:34):
copyright infringement for theInternet Archive to do.
So the Internet Archive hadscanned all these books that
were technically stillcommercially available, and they
had made them available throughcontrolled digital lending. And
publishers, Hatchet and otherbig groups sued and said that
this was copyright infringement.And the court failed to
recognize that there is somefundamental transformation that

(01:06:54):
happens when you scan a physicalbook. Craig, I'm sure you
understand this as well,somebody who does Eclipse. These
are fundamentally differentobjects, the physical book, the
scan of the physical book and apublisher's ebook.
And the court failed torecognize that. And as a result,
there's been like a great blowagainst both the internet
archive and the accessibilityand availability of digital

(01:07:15):
resources more broadly. So thereare like these very real
political stakes to the kind ofwork that you're doing, Danny,
where you're paying closeattention to file types and
formats. Not the least becauseif we don't pay attention to
them, then courts might not payattention to them. And that
means down the line that peopledon't have access to them across
the world.

Oh, that's really nice. Yeah. I think
that's one just so true and soimportant. And of course, access
is is always a challenge. Right?
These paradoxical vicissitudesthat digital culture is subject
to where they they build thesame corporate entities that
they're attempting to resist.These shadow libraries and and
Joe Cargatis and and others havewritten about, you know, quite a
bit about how important that is,say, for the global South to be

(01:07:56):
able to access or or anyoneactually outside of
institutional bodies that haveaccess to things like JSTOR to
to be able to do research and beable to access these kinds of
materials. It goes in bothdirections. I think just taking
those those transformativeeffects seriously. And on one
hand, was thinking, yeah, the,like, transformative effects are
really strong argument for theleast the way the Supreme Court

(01:08:18):
has litigated copyright aroundtransformation, especially if it
comes to media specific works.
But otherwise, I I I kind ofhave avoided a lot of those
questions of copyright in thebook just because I feel like so
many of these conversationsabout these digital materials
often just boil down tocopyright and that they have
these, like, rich, meaningfullives outside of just those

(01:08:38):
moments. I'm I'm even justthinking about desktop dump.
One, would love to see whatwhat's in that folder. It might
be a great that's a great ideafor, like, I don't know, like,
digital magazine that's justdesktop dump that that releases
these desktops. And and you seea lot.
Like, I feel, you know, everydesktop is also a kind of memoir
or or a kind of autobiographyand and, you know, more akin to,
say, like, a writer's librarythan than anything else we might

(01:09:01):
have at present. Speaking ofwhich, because I know that,
Craig, you think about librariesand you also stay so organized.
I've always been curious. Imean, Eclipse is is meticulously
organized on the back end. Doyour own personal hard drives
mirror Eclipse?
Or conversely, does has Eclipsealways mirrored your own
personal hard drives?

Craig Dworkin (01:09:18):
No. They're much closer to the dump. I'm like
Vicky. I I back up the backupsof the the backups because they
do I mean, as we know fromEclipse, the CDs, that contain
the original scans have alreadydeteriorated in what looked like
they were going to be thearchive of the archive has
already crumbled. So this is nota paranoid fear.

(01:09:42):
It's just what happens even tothe gel inside those CDs. But
let me just make a plug for theadjacent conversation that
memory of the world has hadaround amateur librarianship,
which is one way. I like theshadow archive arguments, but I
think the case they make foreveryone being an amateur
librarian, which is is just justcorroborating what Luca said, is

(01:10:05):
is very rhetorically verypowerful.

Excellent. Yeah. And thinking about Memory
of the World, Anna's archive,which also I think what makes
Anna's archive so great is thatthey have, like, rich metadata
finally, right? That you canlike, the searches are accurate,
the titles are accurate. Like,there's an enormous amount of
work to make it highlyfunctional, to to make a space
for for users that's alsosupported by the community.
It's one of so many shadowlibraries and and these kinds of

(01:10:30):
collections that I didn't get towrite about in the book, like a
book is a bounded thing. And asmuch as I wanted to, like,
radiate out into all thesevarious source materials, there
there's only so much that Icould access. So as we wrap up
this podcast, I I thought maybejust as one last question, and
this is inspired a little bitmaybe by by Al Bill Rees, who
always ends his podcasts with aa gathering paradise, a chance

(01:10:51):
for everyone to just point tosomething that either you want
to plug, if there's, like, weirdor unlikely or favorite little
databases that you might havethat are worth mentioning or any
other work. For my part, themiddle of Not Equals, which is
currently up on Eclipse archive,but thanks to Craig, transforms
what what Language Magazine usedto do is list all the other
little magazines that that wererunning, and and they would be

(01:11:13):
very hard to find in these kindof underground Xerox networks of
experimental writers. You wouldget the the name of the editor,
the address, the cost, and you'dable to write to purchase a copy
directly from those editors.
In my updated version, I Iproduced a list of a few dozen
little databases that I wish Ihad a chance to write about. So
I I will direct potentiallisteners to that section of the

(01:11:37):
not equals language project. AndI think as I I put it in the
book, little databases thatmight be able to test some of
the arguments that I'm trying tomake or even better refute them
or or resist them in ways thatthat I can't imagine. I'm I'm so
grateful for this conversation.I I wish that I feel like
there's already dozens of thingsthat I I wanna follow-up with
each of you on after ourofficial recorded space.

(01:11:59):
But perhaps we can make just onelast round if there's anything
that you would like to plug orpoint to before we bid our
listeners adieu.

Luca Messarra (01:12:06):
I'd like to shout out the Future Knowledge podcast
that's ongoing right now withthe Internet Archive and Authors
Alliance. Anybody who'sinterested in learning more
about issues of contemporarycopyright could check that out.
It's rolling out and it's reallygood.

Craig Dworkin (01:12:18):
Also saying that it's maybe going to seem
unrelated, but I think isactually deeply related to what
we've been talking about, whichis a book by Rory McCartney and
Charlie Morgan called Searchingfor Mysterious Typefaces, the
cultural history of faux, blackletter, iron on letterforms that

(01:12:41):
were part of youth culture inthe '70s. And I'll leave the
obliquity there, but everyoneshould read it anyway.

Vicki Bennett (01:12:50):
Okay, I've got one. It's not brand new, but
it's not that old. In Praise ofCopying, Marcus Boone. I've got
so many bookmarks in that book.It's just a great inspiration
and I like the way he ties it inwith Buddhist thinking as well,
which is something I've notmentioned.
But so much of my thinking comesfrom non duality and

(01:13:11):
interconnectedness. So MarcusBoone, In Praise of Copying.

Wonderful. Well, thank you all. And I'll
just conclude by sending myheartfelt thanks and, and and
plugging and pointing to the theworks that that all three of you
continue to make, and continueto inspire my own practice. This
has been a a real delight to beable to join you in
conversation, and, wanna extend,gratitude also to the University

(01:13:37):
of Minnesota Press and inparticular Margaret Sattler for
helping us record and producethis podcast. Thank you for
listening.

Narrator (01:13:45):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book, The LittleDatabase, A Poetics of Media
Formats, is available fromUniversity of Minnesota Press.
It is also available in an openaccess edition at
manafold.umn.edu. Thank you forlistening.

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