“Bar Code Hotel” 1994
Great piece by the BBC about the German museum for interactive art and digital art conservation. Curators try to keep as many pieces as possible working for as long as possible. Over 500 pieces are currently running on all sorts of obsolete hardware. I worked on dozens of early digital art projects in the nineties, and can only imagine what a nightmare this must now be.
The BBC piece is great: terrific photos and stories about how curators trade cigarettes for old-school technology from local dumps. The actual ZKM website is Ceefax-style dull, though, and looks like a parody of what you’d expect a German, EU-funded retro technology project to look like. Except it’s not.
