DISK UNREADABLE

In 2018, Christensen spent a week in residence at the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She brought hard copies from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s institutional archives to explore the possibilities of upgrading archival material using the range of obsolete hardware available at the MAL. Upgrades were made, but little difference was noticed between updated and older versions of the material. Disk upon disk was full of random files that were entirely irrelevant, and most disks were unreadable by most every machine. The experiment emphasized critical questions about the value of the upgrade: Does the relentless need to upgrade really stabilize fidelity or data quality? Does it really reflect  scientific/technological progress? We often think of our digital files as ephemeral, but given the sheer volume of obsolete material used to store our digital files, should we be more careful about what we save?