As Long As Possible 2018 Project.Indd
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As long as possible AS Long As Possible (ASLAP) A GIF animation loop, 2015 Duration 1.000 years Started in Helsinki 28 March 2017 at 12:00:49.154 EEST An art project by Juha van Ingen The animation was created in collaboration with Janne Särkelä The GIF Player was programmed by Jani Lindqvist Contents 16 Introduction Juha van Ingen 22 The Itch for Eternity Pontus Kyander 30 AS Long As Possible 100(0) years of time-based media Sanneke Huisman, Gaby Wijers and Jan Robert Leegte 32 AS Long As Possible from a conservation perspective, Part I: On restorability Cécile Dazord 38 AS Long As Possible from a conservation perspective, Part II: The role of format in the conservation of digital artworks: ASLAP and the GIF format Alexandre Michaan 46 A MESSAGE FROM HUMANITY TO ITSELF Kari Yli-Annala 52 Biographies 60 Credits 1. Cumulus congestus clouds over the Atlantic Ocean, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. 2. A fossil of a marine reptile Temnodontosaurus acutirostris, with ammonites. 3. Arctica islandica. 4. Mayfly (Baetis sp.). 5. Central part of the monolith of the Stone of the Sun, also named Aztec calendar stone (National Museum of Anthropology and History, Mexico City). 6. A 1024-bit core memory module from the Apollo Guidance Computer. 7. Water Clock Decorated with a baboon 664–30 B.C. 8. Clocks: various types of clock mechanism. Engraving by J. W. Lowry. 9. Flying on board of Voyagers 1 and 2 are identical “golden” records, carrying the story of Earth far into deep space. 10. View from the Window at Le Gras, the first successful permanent photograph created by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. Introduction Juha van Ingen ..OCEAN, as a theme, is not a limitation, but an opportunity to dissolve borders and boundaries, to”become like water”, to submerge a rigid landmass, to look at OCEAN as a way of action, a philosophical paradigm, a world of folklore, post-human ecology, or as a mass of water... In 2015 I participated in an online exhibition part of The 5th edition of the Papay Gyro Nights Art Festival in Hong Kong. The festival was titled OCEAN by its organizers Sergei Ivanov and Tsz Man Chan. The technical limitation given to the artists was that the file size should be under 800 KB. The theme made me think of the endless water cycle driven by the sun, the long journey of water evaporating from the oceans and Earth, and transpiring from plants until it turns into rain or snow and falls back to the earth, starting the cycle all over again. The task of making a long looped animation and keeping the file size down was difficult and it seemed that whatever I did, the file became too heavy. Then it struck me: What if I slowed the animation down? I had used GIFs in my art for quite a while and like many other artists I had always wanted the animation to be as fast as possible. It was exciting to suddenly find this new quality in the medium. As I worked on Plunge, a 90 minute GIF animation loop for the festival, I started to dig deeper into the slow mode. What if I made an animation which would take months or even years to run? Even longer than a lifetime? Immediately after returning to Helsinki I took to work. First the goal was to make a GIF animation loop which would run for hundreds of years. I soon realized that technically it was beyond my competence, but luckily Janne Särkelä, who had helped me before by coding some web works, agreed to help me to build the file. I decided that the loop should be 1000 years long, so even if it would be extremely long the duration would still be something people could relate to. The visual side was also a challenge in the beginning. At first it was tempting to add more content to the animation, but as a part of the technical problem of large file size it soon became obvious that the animation had to be simple and the focus should be on the essential: time. I named the artwork AS Long As Possible, ASLAP, as a homage to John Cage’s famous composition ORGAN²/ASLSP (1987). The abbreviation of Cage´s composition included an instruction to the performer of the piece: As SLow aS Possible. 16 ASLAP In September 2015 the animation was ready and at that point I was faced with two questions: first, how to keep it playing for the next 1000 years, and secondly, how to present it to the public? 1000 years is a long time and because ideally the loop should repeat itself infinitely there has to be a survival strategy. The first idea was to have it on the Internet and secure the file in a block chain. The size of the animation file came to 12 GB, which though surprisingly small was still too large to be played by web browsers. The question also rose, what will happen after Internet? I decided to clone the file into five copies and place each of them in a separate unit. This way each of them could continuously and simultaneously play in five different countries. So if/when one loop would for any reason stop, a new replacement could be created and the loop would still play in all the other units. As an extra backup we produced time capsules with written documentation and digital files to be stored in steel boxes. I was very eager to present the artwork immediately, but at the same time I didn’t want to stop the loop once it had been started. For that reason I needed to find an institution with resources and long-term reliability to help keep it playing. I had a slot for a solo exhibition in September 2015 at the artist-run FISH Gallery in Helsinki and decided to exhibit the file and the idea of the artwork as an installation, hoping to get somebody interested. I knew that two years later, in 2017, the GIF format would turn 30 years old. It would be a perfect year to start the loop and it would give me two more years to find the resources. Janne Särkelä built a short preview file (a 30 day loop) that we could play at the FISH Gallery exhibition, and the actual file of AS Long As Possible was displayed in a Raspberry Pi single board computer along with some screen prints from the animation. The usual crowd came to the opening, among them curator and critic Pontus Kyander, who wrote an excellent essay “The Itch for Eternity” on the artwork. The exhibition might have gone unnoticed, if the New York based cultural blog, Hyperallergic, hadn’t published an article by Claire Voon about it. The people of KIASMA in Helsinki heard of ASLAP and came to see the exhibition. As a lucky coincidence the artwork fitted into the theme of their upcoming ARS17 exhibition, and the museum even offered to acquire one loop for their collection! It was an interesting process to draft the agreement with the National Gallery, which maintains the collection of KIASMA. Many issues came up, like how the artwork might be modified in the future when our current computers will have disappeared, and what would happen when the hardware or software would undergo maintenance? It soon became obvious that the playing ASLAP loop, to be safe, should always remain on the museum premises. For the showing of the artwork in other locations or exhibiting it at temporary exhibitions I should additionally have one transportable version made. Meanwhile the first time capsule was deposited in the collection of the KUMU Art Museum of Estonia. The sealing event took place on 18 March 2017 at KUMU. ASLAP 17 The first version of the ASLAP player was coded by Jouni Miikki. The final ASLAP player (2.0) was created by Jani Lindqvist. A simple and reliable program that works on Linux, PC and Mac. If the computer crashes or is destroyed, the player of the animation detects the clock of the new device it is installed in, and it continues to play the animation from the frame which it would have reached if played continuously. Finally all was set to go and the ASLAP animation was started on 28 March 2017 at 12:00:49.154 EEST in KIASMA, Helsinki. It was exhibited at the ARS17 and will after the exhibition be kept playing until 3017 in the collection of The National Gallery of Finland. The task is now to find homes for the four remaining loops and for the time capsules. I am going to exhibit the transportable version of the loop, hoping to generate some discussion on the questions the artwork raises. Although some of the questions surrounding our digital culture give cause for worrying, I myself see AS Long As Possible, ASLAP, as an optimistic work, in the sense that it trusts the maintenance of the continuing animation in the hands of future generations. 18 ASLAP 11. The ASLAP file under construction. 12. Testing materials for the time capsule. 13. The Raspberry Pi prepared for the exhibition in FISH Gallery Helsinki, 2015. 14. Photographic prints of ASLAP frames in FISH Gallery. 15. A 30 day loop was playing from the same computer which contained the original ASLAP animation. The Itch for Eternity Pontus Kyander The half-life (t1⁄2) of Uranium 238 is approximately 4,5 million years. It is good to know that something is left when we all are gone.