Magazine Memory Stick

Preparing to stop and regard the procession into the past that is Artlink's 33 year history, another thirteen years have passed since I did a wrap of the second decade (1990- 2000), as organisations are expected to do when they have a milestone - the JamFactory turning 40, NAVA turning 30. Too much already. It’s the year of the horse and of the handover and I need to wrap those thirteen now, before I gallop off. All those themes, all those launches, lugging all those boxes in and out of all those venues, all those trays of sushi. The emails that bring such treasure and the ones that deliver the treasure so late in the day. All those attachments, the conversations to and fro, and almost all lost thanks to the digital world and uncertainty about digital archiving (who actually does this?) The early part of the archive from Artlink’s birth in 1981 has paper letters and faxes which are preserved, but within a few years we went virtual. How can someone now get a feel for how it was, how things were done and talked about even as recently as 2001? To know the history there are Annual Reports, where facts are listed, but only in the faulty memory banks of the brain can you keep those conversations and surprises, and the building up of relationships and understandings. It won’t be too long before we will be able to preserve our thoughts and conversations on a biological memory stick perhaps housed conveniently on the forearm like Stelarc’s third ear. The Cloud sounded cool but is a hot factory belching CO2 somewhere in another country; it has to be more elegant than that.