By: Vidya Gopal

An Instagram Timeline

Keywords: Instagram; platform design; history; monetisation; attention

Project Statement

Instagram has been around for 12 years, and in these years, it has changed considerably in its features, target audience and focus.

Last June, company head Adam Mosseri said Instagram was no longer ‘just a photo sharing app’, and they were shifting focus to video and entertainment.

When it started, Instagram was a photo-editing app that let you go back in time through its retro film filters. You could only upload square photos from your phone. It almost seemed like the app was stubbornly minimal and light, the algorithm was chronological, and at some point, the app told you ‘that was all, nothing more to see’.

Things slowly started to change with time. The algorithm got more complex; the app unsettlingly seemed to know you better. Earlier, it was a limited carousel of visuals that ended at some point, but now you can end up scrolling infinitely.

I explore how Instagram has evolved and how time within the app has expanded over the years.

[end]

BIO

Vidya Gopal is a visual storyteller from Bangalore, India. She freelances for an ethnographic research consultancy and does editorials for business magazines. She considers herself an ‘intense window seat person’ and loves documenting the mundane daily through comics and illustrations.

REFERENCES

^[1] Mosseri, Adam (@mosseri). 2021. “Changes Coming to Video.” Instagram, June 30, 2021. https://www.instagram.com/tv/CQwNfFBJr5A

^[2] MG Siegler. “Distilled From Burbn, Instagram Makes Quick Beautiful Photos Social (Preview)” https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/20/instagram Techcrunch, September 21, 2010.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] “Facebook Buys Instagram For $1 Billion, Turns Budding Rival Into Its Standalone Photo App” https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/facebook-to-acquire-instagram-for-1-billion/ Techcrunch, April 9, 2012.

By Nicky Broekhuysen & Mine Kaplangi

When the Dust Settles

An unsettled experimentation on a 2016 exhibition The Digital Archaeologist

Keywords: media archaeology; binary code; collaboration; digital archive; experimentation

How do we remember [ex]hibitions? Feelings of the day, [art]work, space? 
Time runs in various ways in digital realms. I always wonder how we will recall the space when it’s [meant to be] temporary.  

As an independent curator and art practitioner, my understanding of digital event programming, archiving and recalling previous exhibitions changed drastically in the last years, mostly due to the pandemic, an event which has consequently changed many previously held perceptions. As a means to further explore this change, I offer Nicky Broekhuysen’s exhibition The Digital Archeologist, as a pathway to guide us as we meander through these far corners of the digital realm in our search for understanding. 

I wrote this text Dig Deep^[3] in 2016, three years after the Gezi Movement in Turkey, where due to the political situation, digital spaces became safer places to gather yet still we tried to hold on to the physical as long as it was due. Since then, many things have changed in my hometown Istanbul where various [art] spaces have closed and been forced to move or transform themselves—a familiar phenomenon currently occurring in London, my new hometown, thanks to state-led gentrification, the financial crisis and other inhumane policies put forth by the current Tory Government. 

What is our responsibility with these memories, then, these artefacts? Just because you remember them, will you be able to hold them when the time comes or when they are urgently needed? Or should they perish into the [in]visible archives of the digital? Does the past become present when you recall them? Who has the keys to the ongoing archiving of the internet lockers? Mckenzie Wark rightfully and beautifully suggests that “we need another worldview, one drawn out of what is left of the actually collaborative and collective and common practices via which the world is actually built and run, a worldview of solidarity and the gift. A worldview that works as a low theory extracted from worker and hacker practices, rather than a high theory trying to legislate about them from above.”^[4]

Sustainability works differently regarding individual memories and storytelling, yet websites need budgets for eternal open-sourcing. We all do have our open and private libraries of knowledge productivity in the arts, yet when shared in social media, newsletters, forums or even diaries, one can lose their way in the maze even with the help of keywords. The Matrix is expanding, and binary codes are now similar to recipes; all we need to do is to cook with the taste of our own hands.^[5] Therefore experimentation, iş birliği^[6], collective-collaborative practices and repetitive acts of making kins are essential for our times to bound the time with the work and resist the destruction of our worlds in the making.

How our paths were crossed with Nicky Broekhuysen
a short story within a story

BLOK art space, where I first worked with Nicky, has been closed since I moved to London, right before the pandemic started in the winter of 2019. The Bumiller Collection’s studio, which generously hosted The Digital Archeologist, has also since closed its doors to contemporary interventions instead of continuing as a nomadic space. So we follow a phantom of stamps that echoed inside the walls of an Islamic Art Collection’s project space that no longer exists. When I think about apparitions and recalling archives, I always find myself thinking about artist Patrick Staff’s work, The Foundation^[7], which takes place around the iconic Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, an archive dedicated to protect erotic arts. Even though the preserved art and works are different, the methodology of Staff’s response to this archive as building relations and stories between objects, artworks and the foundation’s space rather than categorising them is quite spellbinding, a term I frequently use to describe Nicky’s practice.

It was a vociferous Istanbul afternoon when I met Nicky; we found our peaceful moment in an antique shop next to BLOK art space, where we would work together in the following days. Nicky had a Turkish coffee; I made a silly joke to break my social anxiety by offering to read her future [reading one’s future from the coffee cup is a way of saying for future-telling]; Nicky accepted it gracefully as she is always ready for a midday seance. She closed her cup, turned it upside down, and handed it over. I put a cold 1 Turkish lira on it and waited for a while; we talked about our passions, families, and many others. Time passed impatiently; I opened the cup and immediately realised it was not just another exhibition experience with a temporary companion. Nicky was quite special, and so was her cup, showing me a giant ‘0’ next to ‘1’. Such a poetic way of starting a journey with a magical artist like Nicky, who works with binary codes, intuition and repetition as methodologies that create magic when combined. I smiled and laughed for the entire day as the proper grinagog of the project space I was working at the time couldn’t handle the flow of emotions I was receiving through Nicky’s presence. 

Every year following the summer of 2013 was getting stranger and weirder for Istanbul; I was already convinced that Nicky and I were meant to know each other beyond time and space. Our journey was not for or about us, but for both of us to have the courage to face and to reveal something immense that you would rather prefer to have company while it unfolds.

When we make exhibitions, we respond to certain things, experiment and create spaces and stories, but these come to life through various spatial, emotional, and temporal relations. I have recently grown more tempted and interested in these relationships, more so than even at the beginning of my [art] journey. It took us a couple of years to become close friends. After Istanbul, Nicky invited me to her Berlin exhibition at the Bumiller Collection and to write about her work and practice for the exhibition catalogue as well as to moderate the artist’s talk alongside the exhibition’s programme.

Later on, we had our first lengthy dinner in Berlin and talked about parallel universes, our family secrets and how our generation should be more caring and giving, especially while working together and collaborating when it comes to queer loving. Then we published an interview^[9] where Nicky shared the details of her relationship with her grandmother and her life generously; later on, we decided to call each other and have the same conversation^[10] in a podcast format. It was during the first lockdown, and we never felt closer. It was not the physical boundaries that kept us apart; the limitations of our stories were seeking expansion, fluidity and more space. And we decided to let them have their contagion. 

The Bumiller Collection held a contemporary intervention exhibition twice a year and invited an artist to exhibit their work alongside the collection, creating new understandings and relations between the works, artefacts, objects and their time. Using binary code as ‘her artistic language’ Nicky created these incredible messages that calmly ask roaring questions about language to the collection objects, the space, and the exhibition visitors. There was only one screen placed in the exhibition space that shows the video work of Nicky Broekhuysen (see video II) – ‘inserting the digital space into the physical room as part of the exhibition’s exploration of media archaeology.’ The rest of the works played their parts in fracturing our understanding of time by inviting all to meditate in front of this new language that we usually take for granted as machines and computer systems read before and for us. I never thought that binary code belonged to the machines; it is the universal code of a rudimentary understanding of time and system makings. Taking the codes out of their current use and representation and creating lustful, physically-driven languages out of them is very queering and alluring to our already complex relationship with the digital, which can still be distancing for many due to lack of sweat and spit. The objects exhibited from the Bumiller Collection were related to the early times of writing,  tools of writing, manuscripts, and experimentations which were uniquely loose, open to change and to flux yet remain well-preserved in the passing of time. Inspired, Nicky recalled this freedom by reconstructing some of those methodologies yet maintaining supreme craftsmanship and experimentation. I believe the paper will hold the ink as long as it can and we will trust the printed materials as the continuation of the digital realms, which might give us new ways of looking at digital archives and their sustainability. 

Watching The Matrix for the third time from Nicky’s perspective is a caring experience; Nicky uses binary code to open up [time] portals in our short yet wired existence on this earth.

[end]

BIOS

Nicky Broekhuysen was born in 1981 in South Africa. At the age of 13, her family moved to New Zealand where she completed her studies. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Auckland University, she moved to Shanghai, China, in 2006. It was in Shanghai that she first began working with binary numbers 1 and 0. In 2008 Broekhuysen moved to Berlin, Germany where she continued to develop her language of binary code, exhibiting both in Berlin and internationally for the following 11 years. Recently, in 2019 she relocated her studio to The Pyrenees in France to be closer to nature and where she continues to create and exhibit. Broekhuysen is represented by Davidson Gallery in New York.

Mine Kaplangi (they/them, 1987, Istanbul) is an independent curator and art mediator based in London. They are the co-founder of the curatorial collective Collective Çukurcuma (2015) and KUTULU (2021). They worked as an artist representative and curator at BLOK art space Istanbul between 2014-18. Together with Collective Çukurcuma, they have been curating public programmes of exhibitions and running their reading group events as an ongoing transdisciplinary project since 2016. They are currently working as a freelance editor for the Berlin-based contemporary art platform Artfridge, and publicity manager at a cross-cultural, multilingual, experimental publisher, Pamenar Press (London).

IMAGE CREDITS

Figure 1. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Map is Not The Territory III, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 2. Photograph of a Turkish coffee cup, taken at the antique store right next to BLOK art space, Istanbul [Photo by Mine Kaplangi]

Figure 3. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Digital Archeologist IV, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 4. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Digital Archaeologist V, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 5. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Map Is Not The Territory V, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 6. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Digital Archaeologist III, Oil on paper, 2016

Video 1.  The Stonebreakers, 2015, A collaboration by Nicky Broekhuysen, Maria Kamutzki and Martin Keane. Originally exhibited as part of the exhibition ‘The Stonebreakers’ at Blok Artspace, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015

Video 2. The Digital Archaeologist, 2016, A collaboration by Nicky Broekhuysen, Maria Kamutzki and Martin Keane custom-built physical modelling program and sound piece

Figures 1-4 and Video 2 are the selected works from The Digital Archeologist exhibition that took place in Bumiller Collection, University Museum Islamic Art in Berlin between 10 September – 15 October, 2015.

REFERENCES

^[1] Kaplangi, Mine. “INTERVIEW: NICKY BROEKHUYSEN.” Artfridge.de, 2018, www.artfridge.de/2018/10/interview-nicky-broekhuysen-mk.html.

^[2] Hernàn’s band is called The Depth of Delusion Ensemble in Memoria. 2021. [film] Directed by A. Weerasethakul.

^[3] Kaplangi, M. (2016). Dig Deep. On Nicky Broekhuysen’s Solo Exhibition “The Digital Archaeologist.”

^[4] McKenzie Wark, Digital Labor and the Anthropocene, dis magazine transcript from Digital Labor Conference, New School, 2014, http://dismagazine.com/disillusioned/discussion-disillusioned/70983/mckenzie-wark-digital-labor-and-the-anthropocene/

^[5] Taste of the hand [elinin lezzeti] is a Turkish saying that the dish will taste differently even if you follow the same recipe due to each unique flavour and taste of our hands and fingers.

^[6] This means ‘collaboration, partnership’ in Turkish.

^[7] Staff, Patrick, dir., The Foundation. 2015, www.vdrome.org/patrick-staff-the-foundation/.

^[8] See Video 1.

^[9] Kaplangi, M. (2018). INTERVIEW: NICKY BROEKHUYSEN. http://www.Artfridge.de/. http://www.artfridge.de/2018/10/interview-nicky-broekhuysen-mk.html

^[10] Collective Cukurcuma [CC STATION]. (2020, May 12). Conversation with Nicky Broekhuysen [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wbXkwdZrTI&ab_channel=CCSTATIONICOLLECTIVECUKURCUMA

^[11] Proust, M. (2022). Remembrance of Things Past (Complete in Two volumes) (Reprint ed.). Random House.

By: Katherine Mitchell

Computational Constructions of Time and Deep Futures in John F. Simon’s Every Icon (1997)

A media philosophy of (deep) time

Keywords: temporality; computation; obsolescence; internet; aesthetics

In an age of rapid technological obsolescence and pervasive discourse on communication technologies’ phenomenological annihilation of time and space stands a body of media theory preoccupied with slow and deep time. Occupying a Venn Diagram with media archaeology, this material or “geological turn” has turned over the dirt of the digital to surface the earthly entanglements of computational materiality, opening design thinking to planetary-scale interventions. Through their different preoccupations, media scholars including Jussi Parikka,^[1] Nicole Starosielski,^[2] Sy Taffel,^[3] and Benjamin Bratton^[4]collectively situate the perpetual present of computational media and the contemporary digital condition within planetary scales of experience. Through attention to media materiality, this body of scholarship re-orientates our temporal perception toward mineral durations of deep pasts, and media residues of deep futures, and in doing so, it also dismantles any material/immaterial distinctions that emerged with early ideologies of communication technologies. Through advancing a sense of computing as deep earth archives, and looking toward global systems and the immensity of cosmological time, these theories continually decentre and recentre the human subject both spatially and temporally.^[5] When contemplating the construction of time through the digital condition, then, it is principally this commitment to deep time perspectives as an epistemological tool that invites a framing of such media ecological and media archaeological thinking principally as a media philosophy of time. 

Time is a central subject of philosophy and contemporary media theory and its significance cannot be overstated: it goes to the core of human consciousness, our desire to understand the human condition, and our (time-limited) mode of earthly inhabitation. Media and communications theory itself is inescapably linked with the phenomenology of time: both the ordering of discrete time through standardisation and the attempts to reclaim durée – duration, or lived time – as a central tenet of human experience.^[6] The question asked here is whether we might re-orientate these academic preoccupations with non-human scalar entanglements to look toward a phenomenological construction of deep futures through the act of computation. Where theory might only go so far, can we comprehend profound duration not in spite of a digital condition, but specifically through it?

The trouble with futurity

Attempting to construct a digital aesthetic against the annihilation of time is John F. Simon’s net artwork Every Icon (1997). Through the material medium of computation, Simon takes both speed and deep duration as the principle means by which to posit the possibility of a media event for post-human scholarship, but in doing so, the work simultaneously reveals its own impossibility. The work asks:

Launched on 14 January 1997, Every Icon asks what it means to algorithmically produce every conceivable image within a 32×32 black and white pixel grid, and takes seriously the temporal burden of such a task. Moving from corner to corner and from white to black, the Java programme enumerates through all possibilities of the binary grid totalling 1024 squares. The first row alone has 2³² combinations, or 4.3 billion, which at an original rate of 100 permutations per second took approximately 16 months to complete. The second line was scheduled to complete after approximately 6 billion years,^[8] and the entire grid has 2^32×32 or 10³⁰⁸ possible combinations, requiring a total of 10²⁹⁸ years to complete at its original processing speed. Simon ascribes this timescale for the work of the enumeration algorithm to be the ‘human perceptual limit’,^[9] being unable or perhaps unwilling to engage with the scale and complexity of thought needed to truly comprehend the immensity implied here.^[10]

Whilst Every Icon was launched in the shadow of the millennium, and so could be read alongside a contemporaneous body of creative practice that sought to comprehend such durations and our individual place within past and future timelines of human history, Simon’s work was imagined earlier on, as a reaction to postmodernist claims of the death of art and the end of images.^[11] Promising to manifest all potential images in the grid like Borges’ Library of Babel, the project tests the capacity of the computer to produce visual icons in its own image: namely, the aesthetics of early computing and the visual language of Susan Kare’s bitmap icons, designed in the 1980s for Macintosh.^[12]

The strong rectilinear organisation of the system also recalls the grid-based aesthetic of early computer art, and the algorithmic imagination of conceptual artists, such as Sol LeWitt, but the work’s distinctively digital aesthetic is born from its strict adherence to binary modalities. The visual iconography it promises to deliver is both temporally-situated and (Western) culturally-specific (Western), however any precise icon will not emerge from the visual “noise” for trillions of years. In employing these timescales, the work both centres and displaces the importance of a particular kind of human subject through the ambiguous relationship to visual communication with imagined future audiences. And despite being the instigator of the artwork-event, the artist himself is also then displaced by the non-participatory and non-hierarchical algorithmic process of image production. The questions to ask of Simon’s intention are therefore: for who does the work hold meaning? And what time does the work inhabit?

The notion of posterity is crucial to the apparatus of progressive modernity, and this belief that the present is capable of producing something for future generations both fuels and deliberately fails in this project. By offering up vestiges of a cultural moment to be resolved by far-future audiences indifferent to such iconography – most likely no audience at all, and with no analogous computing system at all – the project inevitably complicates its own imagined futures in the age of the Anthropocene. It is worth noting that Every Icon was not the first or only work to employ durational aesthetics as a structuralist investigation of the medium, nor the first to engage with the exhaustive processes of algorithmic image production,^[13] but its specifically digital and web-based condition intensifies the futility of such a scratch at the itch for eternity.^[14] Because whilst Every Icon as an algorithmic exercise may be indifferent to its own resolution, it has nevertheless shapeshifted across different web formats over the past quarter century in order to keep time.

Any ambitions for a cross-generational and panhuman visual language are continually curtailed by the ongoing threat of obsolescence, triggered by recurrent changes to the web infrastructure. Fortunately for the artwork, its minimal aesthetic and operational logic favours cross-platform adaptability, and in the 25 years since its launch, the work has remained accessible on the artist’s website with a professed continuity made possible through rewriting the underlying programme. Originally produced as a Java Applet and migrated to HTML5 to outpace format obsolescence, alternate versions of the work were also developed for PDAs – remember those? – briefly available as a mobile app, and released as an NFT series in 2022.^[15]

The NFT series was a celebration of the project rather than a live version of the time-keeping event itself, however in the context of Simon’s philosophical project, the use of the NFT nevertheless invites important questions as to the legitimacy of the blockchain to counter such existential risk: can the promises of “forever” made by the NFT model and the immutability of the blockchain still hold up in the time after the death of the sun? In the work’s early stages, other Java Applet versions were also produced for sale, but today these editions only haunt their original sites. Existing not as dead URLs but as blank spaces on their original websites, these voids now trace the past presence of an obsolete plugin long since refused a visual translation.^[16]

In the twenty- five years since Every Icon began, we have already observed the continual evolution of operating systems, formats and programming languages, the birth and death of web browsers and computing devices themselves, and the emergence of ever-new systems and formats. So in witnessing the constructive and destructive effects of time on Simon’s project, we must also acknowledge the deficiency of assigning such descriptors as continuity and permanence to a digital artefact that must continually regenerate. We might ask instead whether continuity of an idea can be sufficient here. Only time will tell what future modes of survival might look like, why, and for whom because the perceived and actual continuity of the system, as an idea, depends not only on human survival, but also the survival of relevant knowledge and shared cultural practices to motivate acts of continued care. The future of Every Icon is thus interlaced with broader questions of posthuman ethics: will there be a future in which to sustain this work, and what will that look like? Who, or what, will Simon’s prospective audience be? Any speculative answers to these questions will also be deeply contingent on the expected completion of the media event itself, because in the landscape of rapid technological progress and obsolescence as a cultural project, the work’s anticipated duration also holds the possibility to be continually negotiated via processor speeds.

Telling time and constructing futures

The computational task underpinning Every Icon is a deliberate calculation of chronological time, yet through this, temporality is experienced as both multi-layered and always reconfiguring. Multiple timescales are experienced here: psychological time, fixed “clock-time”, and processor speed, which is itself variable and structured according to the material conditions of the CPU. Translating these temporalities into a visual language, Every Icon becomes a time-keeping device– or rather a time-making device– with the blank white tiles anticipating an outstretched future waiting to be produced by the techno-logic of the programme itself, which tests the user’s computer processor speed and structures time within the work accordingly.

Processor speed is partly determined by the CPU clock speed, which refers to a pulse synchronised by an internal oscillator and measured in cycles per second. In the CPU clock, which is essentially a microchip, a crystal vibrates at a specific frequency when electricity is applied. And whilst the focus of algorithmic thought often stays with the metamathematical and symbolic regime of computing, it is important to recognise how its impact occurs in the intertwining of this symbolic order (the code) with the actual matter of computing (the electro-technical implementation).^[17] Time here is a material condition, and continually subject to change.

Where the work was originally operating with an average processor speed of 230-300 MHz of the then-contemporary Pentium II processor and producing a change rate of 100 permutations per second, the visual execution hovered at the threshold of human perception, with each change being detectable by the human eye as a flicker. Early on, however, Simon also anticipated future progress in computing power to resolve the work faster than its original 10²⁹⁸ years, and of course the rapid increase of typical processor speeds in the intervening years does hold the potential for ever-faster completion if so desired. However where a hypothetical image change rate of 1 billion times per second (ten million times faster than the original experience) could produce a comparably manageable duration of 539 years until complete resolution, this would also render any images impossible to detect with the human eye, thereby eclipsing the work’s original purpose. At any chosen speed, the project problematises notions of perception and phenomenality, because whilst the work operates at the thresholds of human perception, it inevitably performs its own failure by never revealing any, let alone every, icon it promises us.

Concluding Thoughts

As a speculative project of computational and durational aesthetics, Every Icon composes an indeterminate deep future in the layering of multiple temporal logics that are both constructed and destabilised by the rapidly changing material conditions of computing. Ultimately understood as an intellectual exercise in image production without referent, computation is used reflexively to explore how cultural knowledge is reconfigured within a digital epistemological framework, but in its undertaking, it also tests and exhausts the limits of both computational and human finitude. In being always unresolvable, the work also presents an open-ended challenge to the idea of artistic completeness and technological mastery.But whilst the centrality of the artist may be displaced by the non-participatory algorithmic processes at play, the artwork’s fragility and its short history of continual shapeshifting reveals the very human work of care, repair and intention that will ultimately be needed to keep time. Will anyone take up this task into the future, or will the clock eventually stop due to neglect? The future of and in the work remains open and unknowable. Of course, it could never be intended to fully resolve itself in practice, and in any case, the algorithm is indifferent to the cultural specificity of visual configurations. Yet as a speculative exercise, Every Icon serves as an important lens through which to think through both our phenomenological perception of the time-discrete aesthetics of digital computation against the backdrop of deep(er) time thinking, and the “race against time” that is cultural and technological obsolescence.

[end]

BIO

Katherine Mitchell is an AHRC CDP PhD student at Birkbeck College and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Her PhD research explores collecting and conserving born-digital images in the museum through the lens of digital decay, modes of failure, change and loss. She has an academic and professional background in architecture, and an MPhil degree in interdisciplinary film and screen studies.

REFERENCES

^[1] Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

^[2] Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

^[3] Sy Taffel, Digital Media Ecologies: Entanglements of Content, Code and Hardware (New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

^[4] Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

^[5] Computing systems are physical systems that operate through silica, copper, lithium and other geochemical energy resources momentarily materialised as hardware, network infrastructures, before returning to the earth once again as forms of waste. For foundational perspectives on the mineral lifecycles of digital and electronic media and e-waste, see: Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

^[6] Durée being a philosophical concept put forward by Henri Bergson partly in response to the standardisation and mathematisation of lived time as a late 19^th century project. For media theoretical engagement with the industrial and technological standardisation of time, see: Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency and the Archive (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2002); Wolfgang Ernst, Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014)

^[7]  John F. Simon, “Artist Statement,” Numeral , http://www.numeral.com/paraicon.html

^[8] Taking 2^64 possible combinations, divided by 100 frames per second, then by number of seconds per day, and number of days per year. Or (((2^64)/100)/86400)/365 = 5,849,424,173.55.

^[9] Matthew Mirapaul, “In John Simon’s Art, Everything Is Possible,” Numeral , last modified 17 April, 1997, http://www.numeral.com/articles/041797mirapaul/041797mirapaul.html#1.

^[10] He instead refers to this as ‘several hundred trillion’, a number still effective in communicating such a phenomenological impossibility. However in reality, the figure is just shy of one centillion, so approaching the limits of conventionally-named numbers at 10³⁰³. For comparison, one billion is 10⁹. See John F. Simon, “Artist Statement”.

^[11] Meredith Hoy, From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press), 172-176.

^[12] Emma Tucker, “Susan Kare’s pioneering Macintosh icons are on display in France,” Creative Review , last modified 11 April, 2022, https://www.creativereview.co.uk/susan-kare-icons-exhibition/.

^[13] John Cage’s composition Organ2/ASLSP has an intended duration of 639 years, and directly inspired Juha Van Ingen’s 1000-year GIF AS Long As Possible (ASLAP), both in name and intention. Like Every Icon, Jem Finer’s 1000-year generative composition Longplayer is continually confronting technological obsolescence and immense cultural shifts in both musical practice, cultural understanding, and language itself. In the visual space, Lars Eijssen and Boele Klopman’s De Wensput (1991) and Leander Seige’s ImageN (2000) employed similar approaches with print and RGB colour sets respectively, whilst more recently Alex Anikina’s Chronic Film (2019) translates these motivations into digital film.

^[14] I borrow this phrase from Pontus Kyander’s excellent writing on Juha Van Ingen’s AS Long as Possible (ASLAP). See Pontus Kyander, “The Itch for Eternity”, As long as possible (2018). https://www.aslongaspossible.com/images/As_long_as_possible_publication_2018.pdf.

^[15] The NFT project is a parallel reimagining of the work, including images with resolvable patterns that serves to probe the ways in which we can sustain an idea. See “Every Icon by John F Simon Jr (2021),” e.a.t.} works, 2022, https://www.eatworks.xyz/john-f-simon-jr-every-icon/.

^[16] See links for the “Enterzone copy”, the “Stadium copy” and the “IAAA copy” along with Simon’s terms of sale. In the Enterzone copy, the absence of the applet is marked through visual negation: a blank space framed by the surviving text instructions. Each version discloses various states of refusal. See “John F. Simon Jr.: Every Icon.,” Radical Art, 2001/2004, http://radicalart.info/AlgorithmicArt/grid/every/EveryIcon/index.html.

^[17] Wolfgang Ernst, “Existing in Discrete States: On the Techno-Aesthetics of Algorithmic Being-in-Time”, Theory, Culture & Society, 38, no. 7-8 (2021): 13-31.

By: Leah Packard Grams

Killing Time: Reading Ancient Text-Artifacts in the Digital Realm

Keywords: papyrology; digital humanities; digitisation; accessibility, time

Introduction

The field of papyrology appeals to many scholars because these ancient papyri (most of which have been excavated from Egypt) preserve texts in the very handwriting of the people who wrote them. The handwritten notes of everyday people as well as the autographs of Cleopatra and Emperor Theodosius II survive within these miraculous documents. Reading ancient papyri allows for a kind of time travel- an immediate connection to someone who lived thousands of years ago. The great “papyrological project” of scholars is to excavate, read, and publish every papyrus that survives from antiquity. It is a lofty goal whose fulfilment lies many generations in the future, since there are hundreds of thousands of papyri in collections spanning the globe. As we tackle one papyrus at a time, digitisation tools allow us to manipulate text-artefacts such as papyri in ways that are not possible offline, enabling their legibility.

The digitisation of papyri does not stop with a simple photo or scan of the artefact, however. Papyrologists use a diverse range of digital technologies to enhance the legibility of these artefacts, and among these are the two main papyrological databases. These databases (Trismegistos.org and Papyri.info) serve to combine metadata into searchable formats, which help papyrologists find parallel texts.^[1] Numerous papyrologists use Photoshop in their work, adjusting levels, light, and contrast to make the ink on papyrus “pop” (see fig. 1). Scholars also frequently use a digital microscope to magnify and clarify certain letters (see fig. 2). Recent efforts have also succeeded in “virtually unrolling” carbonised scrolls using noninvasive CT scanning, leaving the artefact safely untouched.^[2] This allows for a mode of digital “sight”, sensing the layers of ink below the surface of what may otherwise be seen visually as a congealed lump of carbon. The primary work on the topic of digital papyrology is Nicola Reggiani’s two-volume work, Digital Papyrology, where even more examples and case studies of digital methods can be found. These various tools and their digital manipulation and organisation continue to be improved each year: papyrological databases are constantly being updated and collated, CT and other types of scanning are becoming more accurate, and applications are being developed to machine-learn ancient handwriting (the Ancient Lives project). There have even been projects dedicated to trying to simulate the process of papyrological interpretation (the eSAD project). This phenomenon is a papyrological paradox: namely, that we know more about the ancient documents of the past with every advance of the future.

In this paper, the double-edged sword of digital papyrology will be explored, examining the paradox of time that can be felt in the work as well as raising some ethical questions that digital papyrology poses, regardless of how elegant it may be conceptually. 

Time and Digital Papyrology

Reading ancient text-artefacts in the digital realm offers a sort of time travel, enhancing the legibility of papyri so that the voices of ancient peoples can be heard once again. In our work, faded ink is emboldened, fragments are reunited, and the meanings of sentences are pieced together. Technology mediates the space between scholars of antiquity and the people we study, rerouting time into a circuit, ever folding back onto itself with every iteration and version of the digital artefact. The Digital turns time into a spiral, its rotations occasionally bringing us parallel with the past while carrying us further towards the centre as we proceed into the limitless future. One great papyrologist has rightly mentioned the cumulative advantage of papyrology: “every edition broadens the base of our knowledge of the ancient world.”^[3] This rings even truer now than when it was written in 1992, and the advances made since then in accessibility and digitisation have launched a whole new generation of papyrologists who have grown up viewing papyri on a computer screen, producing online editions of texts to add to our corpus of data. And yet, this moment is indeed a paradox: after a certain amount of time, the further we proceed away from antiquity, the more we can understand it as our methods become more efficient. The consequence of our practice is that we are pulled in two different directions, reaching deep into the past while using tools that lie at the edge of the future. We lie suspended, stretched between the two chronologies of the archaic and the digital until we snap; the cord of ignorance breaks and the words of a text are realised. The empty space between the papyrologist and the handwriting we aim to decipher is brought into contrast by digital devices; when this negative space turns positive, the enigma dissolves and we can read the words of the ancients as they wrote them—largely thanks to these digital modalities. The interplay of time between the search for the past and the inevitable pull of the future is the perfect example of how the Digital not only distorts and bends time, but also annihilates it. We look at an inscribed papyrus on a screen and are mindfully existent, experiencing the phenomenon of being past and present, as echoed in the experiential ontology of Zhuang Zhu and Hannah Arendt. If I can say “I am”, and point to a micro-CT scan of a papyrus and say “this is evidence that this scribe was”, what is the digital object in the here and now? What does that make our relationship to one another? The answer to that question is perhaps ineffable, but that is precisely the miracle of conducting digital studies in the field of history, caught between antiquity and a machine.

Accessibility and Ethics of Digital Papyrology 

While the temporal magic of digital papyrology is both useful and profound, a number of issues related to accessibility nevertheless arise when using these tools. On the one hand, digitisation facilitates the reading of papyri, the “core business” of what we do,^[4] while on the other hand, these digital versions may not be accessible to all scholars. Despite the fact that digital humanities has been championed as a more accessible approach to scholarship, we are nonetheless faced with some difficult questions that may suggest we are accomplishing the opposite of the intended effects of digitisation. Who has access to technology and databases? Trismegistos notably requires an often cost-prohibitive subscription. How can we ensure digital papyrology is a welcoming cyberspace for all? 

Dr Usama Gad has written on this topic in a blog post for Talking Humanities entitled “The digital divide and how to challenge the Eurocentric ‘exclusion zone’.”^[5] In this piece, Dr Gad lays bare the unfortunate fact that digital papyrology is, at its heart, Eurocentric. It is no coincidence that Digital Papyrology (de Gruyter, 2018) contains contributions by a majority of white European men. The inaccessibility of digital papyrology is obvious once one considers the potential roadblocks such as data hidden behind paywalls (notably the essential database of Trismegistos, see above), the omission of translations of relevant ancient and modern texts, and colonial attitudes that remain pervasive in academia. When fashioning future digital spaces, Dr Gad offers a possible solution of including a “student from an ethnic/religious minority and a scholar from the global south, whose culture you are digitally appropriating,” and exhorts academics “to serve the underrepresented communities in your own society.” He suggests that this work may take the form of including Arabic translations and interfaces, conducting outreach work, or focusing more research on the local antiquities dealers who uncovered these papyri to add to their provenance. 

Another possible solution related to the issue Gad raises is the promotion of community-based collaborative work, notably during archaeological digs (and their subsequent cataloguing and research efforts) led by European and North American teams. Much attention has been given to the topic of indigenous archaeology and community inclusion, but the application of these strategies to the digitization of textual artefacts has been left mostly unexplored. In practice, this would take the form of sponsoring a partnership with Egyptian scholars and students to collaborate in the creation of catalogues and summaries of excavation results in order to make textual artefacts accessible to local people. It remains possible that the products of such community collaboration may not be digital, or may use digital technologies that European and North American scholars are not familiar with or used to.

I would like to point to another issue of Eurocentrism in digital papyrology, namely, the glaring absence of Egyptian-language papyri in papyrological databases. While Greek and Latin texts are systematically entered into these websites, the published Hieratic, Demotic, and Coptic papyri are rarely listed in the databases, and in the few instances where they do appear, their entries never have their text embedded within the page as their Greek and Latin counterparts so frequently do. Certain Egyptian papyri are available on other databases, such as the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (TLA), but this has a mainly German interface and is quite outdated. Egyptian-language papyri are thus even more inaccessible to interested scholars, and this is symptomatic of a larger issue with papyrology as a field, as these languages are still considered the purview of Egyptologists.^[6] This is an antiquated and colonialist holdover from earlier days of papyrology, and is slowly being remedied by a new generation of interdisciplinary scholars who know Greek and Egyptian. Not only do our databases risk being inaccessible (costly subscriptions, English-only interfaces, and the specific technology required to run them), but their content is also exclusionary, containing Indo-European languages and excluding Afro-Asiatic languages. A future effort to integrate Egyptian-language texts into these databases would help remedy this issue.      

Another issue that papyrologists face is that ancient people are not alive to argue with us and advocate for themselves beyond their written words. Papyri that preserve grocery lists, accounts, and personal letters were never meant to be read outside a small circle of people in antiquity, just as our modern texts of the same genres are today. The process of humanising the people of antiquity includes a matter of respect, so would they consent to having their words broadcast to us today? Some of the sentiments found in these papyri are immensely personal, ranging from the profane (explicit sexual sketches and language) to the tender (one woman writes “Know that I am not seeing the sun because you are out of my sight; for I have no other sun if not you.”).^[7] Is there a conflict inherent in telling and interpreting other people’s stories? Is there a conflict in digitising and electronically manipulating them? A question along these lines has been raised by Dr Katherine Blouin, who writes on the blog Everyday Orientalism:^[8] “Our ancient interlocutors are not living bodies anymore. They cannot sign an ethics form allowing us to use their words, texts, and data.” So, what to do about this ethical question regarding subjects unable to consent? Part of a solution is to prioritise uplifting the modern inhabitants of the lands in which ancient people lived. The ancient process of papyrus-making is still in practice in modern times, and a piece published last year by Business Insider has brought this to an international audience.^[9] Professors would do well to mention this modern thread when teaching their students the history of papyrology, and support this contemporary industry. 

Unfortunately, there is a notable lack of engagement with this line of scholarship. Indeed, it requires a substantial amount of cognitive dissonance for a scholar to care so deeply about the ancient inhabitants of a land but not one’s own living neighbours. In her blog post, Dr Blouin recounts an anecdote that fits within that exact line of thinking. Blouin especially emphasises the role of the earth we inhabit:

The Lands [ancient people] lived on and were buried in still exist. Many of these Lands – including Egypt – have shifted, and so have the many generations of living beings on them. But they are still here, and although thousands of papyri have been scattered throughout the world, they remain fundamentally rooted in the Land where the words they carry were penned, buried, then extracted.^[10] 

To take Blouin’s point even further, one could say that the earth forever links us with a variety of communities both past and present. The plant papyrus requires cultivation and harvest before its manufacture into paper, and thus the very material we study comes from the earth. A palimpsest of peoples both ancient and modern overlay one another in the practice of papyrology, and the chronological connections we experience are made deeper when we realise our connection to each other and the earth we share. This notion reminds us of our responsibility to ensure accessibility, perform our due diligence, and include all communities when writing and studying history.   

Latent Futures, Solutions, and Conclusions

When combined with the issues of accessibility and ethics Usama Gad and Katherine Blouin have raised, my original statement about digital papyrology being a method of time travels seems a lot more naïve and idealised. While there is no doubt that digital tools revolutionise the way we practise papyrology and affect our relationship with the ancient world, we cannot be blindly optimistic about these utilities. As Ségolène M. Tarte has written in her article about the digitising of the papyrological method, “digitization is never neutral”.^[11] In the process of digitisation, other questions naturally arise: if something is scanned, what should happen to the original artefact? What sorts of things are better visualised in a virtual setting and what remains inimitable? How should we treat the digital artefact versus the original? One possible solution is to coincide the temporal phenomenon inherent in digital papyrology with contemporary activism, or else we risk committing irreparable harm to marginalised and underrepresented communities. The digital can annihilate time in the field of papyrology, but our tools are only as benign as we are when we employ them. I do not mean to paint a grim picture of the future, but rather recall a pertinent section of DiSCo’s mission statement: “We are not dystopian about humanity’s technological destiny, nor do we envisage a utopic future. Rather, we believe it is of critical importance to develop and deploy innovative research processes to grapple with our new hybrid reality.”  Some of these innovative research practices that can ensure a more optimistic future are the inclusion of scholars of marginalised groups in European and American digital projects (as Gad has called for), the promotion of local collaborative work in archaeology, the advancement of ancient Egyptian language texts in existing papyrological databases, remaining in touch with the current events and culture of countries where textual artefacts come from (as Blouin suggests), and harbouring an abiding respect for the Earth- the same Earth that our ancient predecessors all walked and tilled. We ultimately miss out when the digital humanities are controlled by privileged groups in countries far from the land of origin, and scholars would do well to look to the future with a goal of accessibility. This can be accomplished first and foremost by holding a deep respect for our fellow humans both ancient and modern, and indeed, this is the best way to make digital papyrology accessible to all. We can unite in collaboration by digitising the past in a way that is accessible to all in future generations. The fate of digital papyrology is not yet settled, and the time-tangle that is intrinsic to the process of studying digital text-artefacts offers us an opportunity to reflect on the future we have the power to choose.

[end]

BIO

Leah Packard-Grams [she/her] is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. Email: leahpackgrams [@] berkeley.edu

FIGURES

REFERENCES

^[1]  papyri.info is the older of the two main databases and provides an essential textual search function. Trismegistos is linked to papyri.info and has additional organisational features such as a database of individual people attested in the papyri and summaries of ancient archives. 

^[2] For a summary of the virtually unrolled scrolls and the problems they pose, see Brusuelas, James H. “Scholarly Editing and AI: Machine Predicted Text and Herculaneum Papyri”, magazén vol. 2 no. 1, ( 30 June 2021). See also the work of Brent Seales, mentioned therein. Brusuelas exhorts scholars to be completely transparent with metadata and documentation of their machines and artificial intelligence so there can be no doubt about the exact methods and technology employed. https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/edizioni/riviste/magazen/2021/1/scholarly-editing-and-ai-machine-predicted-text-an/ 

^[3]  Minnen, Peter van. “The Century of Papyrology (1892-1992).” The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 30, no. 1/2, (1993): 14. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43785997.

^[4]  Minnen, Peter van. “The Future of Papyrology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology. (Oxford, 2009): 644.

^[5] Gad, Usama. “The digital divide and how to challenge the Eurocentric ‘exclusion zone’.” Talking Humanities (blog). (4 Apr, 2022), https://talkinghumanities.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2022/04/04/the-digital-divide-and-how-to-challenge-the-eurocentric-exclusion-zone/. 

^[6] On the artificial divide in modern academia between “Greek papyrology” and “Egyptology”, see Hobson, Deborah. “Towards a Broader Context of the Study of Greco-Roman Egypt,”  Echos du monde classique: Classical Views XXXII, n.s. 7, no. 3, (1988): 353-363; Ritner, Robert K. “Implicit Models of Cross-Cultural Interaction: A Question of Noses, Soap, and Prejudice,” in Life in a Multicultural Society: Egypt from Cambyses to Constantine and Beyond, Janet Johnson, ed., SAOC 51, Chicago, (1992): 283-290.

^[7] P.Oxy.3059, see Bagnall, Roger, and Rafaella Cribiore. Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt. University of Michigan, (2006): 275.

^[8]  Blouin, Katherine. “Ancient texts and conference cocktail party: Some uncomfortable truths and personal thoughts.” Everyday Orientalism (blog)., (7 Mar, 2022). https://everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/2022/03/07/ancient-texts-and-conference-cocktail-party-some-uncomfortable-truths-and-personal-thoughts/

^[9] Seleim, Hossam, and Dylan Barth. “Meet Some Of The Last Papyrus Makers In Egypt Keeping A 5,000-Year-Old Craft Alive.” Business Insider, 8:00, (7 April 2021). https://www.businessinsider.com/papyrus-paper-making-egypt-al-qaramous-2021-4 

^[10]  Blouin, Katherine. “Ancient texts and conference cocktail party: Some uncomfortable truths and personal thoughts.” Everyday Orientalism (blog)., (7 Mar, 2022). https://everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/2022/03/07/ancient-texts-and-conference-cocktail-party-some-uncomfortable-truths-and-personal-thoughts/

^[11] Tarte, Ségolène M. “Digitizing the Act of Papyrological Interpretation: Negotiating Spurious Exactitude and Genuine Uncertainty.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 26, issue 3, (September 2011): 349.

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