Reflective overflow

Hello.



Testing testing, is this thing on? One, two, *feedback sine-wave screech*.

Here is one of the few remaining movies of Emile Cohl, Don Hertzfeldt of the Fin du siècle, pioneer in animation and member of the proto-dada avant-guarde movement Les incohérents.  Which films are going to be the fabled lost documents of our times in a hundred years?  In two hundred years?

The larger the temporal distance we use to project a future's opinion about the present, the more the period encompassed in the "present" is extended.  For instance, say a time-traveller visits this moment from the year 3692, he might mention to his darling, while calling home through his chronophone, that he is at the beginning of the 21st century.  Another traveller, from the year 369258, would find the unit of "century" too specific, like mentioning the exact second at which a rendez-vous should take place.  He might opt, in a casual discussion, to simply call our time "the second millennium."  Finally, a traveler from the year 2086, might actually specify the month at which he made his landing.  This is important because it makes us realize that our moment in time is part of an infinite amount of ever-increasing ensembles, and that as the years go by, minutes are swallowed into hours, hours into days, days into weeks, and so on.  We settle for general information about, say, the date of composition of Shakespeare's plays, because time has blurred the instant when he dotted the final period at the end of King Lear.  Necessary constraints like lack of archive space, economy of attention and absence of records create the limits of what we call moments.

The obsession with knowledge hoarding that is a necessary symptom of the age of information cannot reverse this movement as would a time-machine.  Instead, we hold dearly to the present's information, store it in databases and on hard-drives.  Yet time marches on.  Emile Cohl's lost work is about a century old, which is relatively less than, say, the works lost to the burning down of Alexandria's library.  His highly flammable reels failed to survive two world wars, and the conversions into many more obsolete mediums.  But are the challenges faced by today's cultural works lessened by the advent of the digital?

This blog will attempt to grasp ephemeria about the way knowledge comports itself in the new media economy.  It is a way to exorcise the pop-envy found in my academic writing. A commentary for the Wikipedia generation. It doesn't hope to survive the passage of time.