04/12/2001

By DOUG BEDELL / The Dallas Morning News

Technological history is littered with the carcasses of fantastic inventions.

Where are the Talking ViewMasters? What happened to the mimeograph machine on which your third-grade teacher cranked out those daunting tests?

Even more important: How will coming generations evaluate inventions when the machines themselves are extinct?

These are the questions that began vexing Austin sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling and a band of merry techno-freaks in 1995, when they started the Dead Media Project (www.deadmedia.org; a second site exists at griffin.multimedia.edu/~deadmedia/frame.html).

Born in a cerebral discussion list at The Well (www.well.com), Dead Media grew from a sense of pending panic.

"How long will it be before the much-touted World Wide Web interface is itself a dead medium?" Mr. Sterling wrote in his seminal "Dead Media Manifesto."

"And what will become of all those billions of thoughts, words, images and expressions poured onto the Internet? Won't they vanish just like the vile, lacquered smoke from a burning pile of junked Victrolas?"

After watching modern search engines trample text-based predecessors such as Gopher and WAIS, this august group churned out a series of documents that is now a definitive electronic source of technological history.

The project itself shows no sign of decay. Just last week, archivists at the Guggenheim Museum in New York summoned Mr. Sterling as a keynote speaker on dead media. Their object is to develop systems to preserve art created on computers and other systems decomposing before our eyes.

Beyond their work as curators of yesterday's creations, Mr. Sterling and his partners monitor current technologies for signs of failing pulses.

Says Richard Kadrey, fellow sci-fi author and dead media chronicler: "We're probably generating more dead media than at any other moment in history. This is the golden age of cool junk.

"To understand this is to think differently about where we are and where we're going."

A stroll through the Dead Media archive sends the mind reeling with questions such as, "What where these people thinking?" Why, for instance, did the U.S. Postal Service – in cahoots with the Navy – experiment with a missile delivery system?

"Before man reaches the moon," an official was quoted saying in 1959, "mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles."

The project also causes visitors to ponder the techno-furor over new creations. Will we someday regard Windows 95 as we do Ramelli's Book Wheel?

Ramelli developed the first workstation for scholars in the 16th century. This machine was designed for "anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those indisposed by gout." Eight lecterns holding books were affixed to a wheel that could be rotated using gears and pulleys. Researchers stood in front, spinning the mechanism to bring their tome of choice to eye level.

The Dead Media List is also a repository of the absurd. Take the Cat Piano. Developed in Brussels, this 1549 contraption was designed to be played by a bear. Inside the instrument were 20 cats, each with a cord tied to its tail. As the bear pounded the keys, the cords were pulled, yanking the cats' tails and making them meow.

The list is also a window into the way we attempt to fuse disparate technologies. These "convergent" mechanisms, says Mr. Sterling, might be better viewed in light of failures such as the Telharmonium, a gargantuan electrical generating plant and distribution system invented by Thaddeus Cahill in the 19th century. It was supposed to provide music over telephone lines. But the Telharmonium's signals overwhelmed telephone switching systems, causing them to whack out.

Current efforts to make the Internet more TV-like may be similarly misguided, Mr. Sterling says.

"It's like thinking motorcycles and cars are going to merge because they both use wheel technology," he says.

On the death watch

Mr. Sterling is watching some technologies closely for Dead Media List induction.

They include the Iridium satellite phone system, a $5 billion venture that promised communication "with anyone, anytime, virtually anywhere in the world." Iridium never attracted enough subscribers to support the massive outlay for its 88 satellites.

At one point, it appeared the satellites would be intentionally pushed into a flaming atmospheric cremation, much like the Russian space station Mir. But the U.S. Department of Defense and a private venture have purchased the satellite network for $25 million.

"It was dead for a year and they, like, they turned it back on and now they're selling phone service again," says Mr. Sterling. "It's like a mummy back from the dead."

Equally alarming, says Mr. Sterling, are the prospects for the fiber optic networks backed by billions of dollars in venture capital. Those networks, he suggests, could go the way of the underground pneumatic transfer tubes once used to send documents across Chicago's vast downtown.

Already on the dead list is the IBM Selectric typewriter. The Selectric was used by more people and sold more units than any other IBM machine. Known as the "golf ball" typewriter, the Selectric was a standard in offices and homes for more than a decade.

Today, high-speed printers still use the Selectric as the minimum standard for correspondence, or letter quality, output. The Selectric is out of production, and IBM no longer supplies service or parts.

Still, some people have found reason to preserve the dead.

"Surviving examples are many, and they are often highly prized by their owners," writes dead list contributor David Morton of the IEEE Center for the History of Electrical Engineering.

"How do you deal with the task of filling out forms in the computer age? You dust off your old typewriter."

Future archives

At the Guggenheim last week, Mr. Sterling lectured on his longtime project. His idea for publishing a Dead Media text has taken a backseat to other writing ventures.

"I'm really saving that for my retirement, frankly," he says with a laugh.

But art curators assembled for the Variable Media Initiative were all ears. Led by assistant curator Jon Ippolito, this gathering of prominent art archivists is trying to create a way to preserve works created in the digital age. They're concerned that software, operating systems and PC screens may soon become obsolete. How, then, would they display art developed with dead tools?

Says Mr. Ippolito: "The Dead Media Project points to the ephemerality of media. And when it's media we don't care to recover – like an eight-track cassette of Dolly Parton we have replaced with CDs – it's not a problem.

"But if the original work created in a dead medium is an artwork, then museums or other institutions charged with preserving that heritage for the future are up the creek without a paddle."

Mr. Sterling, Mr. Ippolito and others are committed to giving history an accurate account of these fast-moving digital times. At the heart of that effort is concern that software written in great haste and other "digits in decay" lack safe havens such as museums where data might be safely restored.

Mr. Sterling says he fears the future could wind up as described by Stewart Brand in his book Clock of the Long Now.

"The system doesn't really work, it can't be fixed, no one understands it, no one is in charge of it, it can't be lived without, and it gets worse every year."

The Dead Media List, says Mr. Sterling, is merely a first step to fending off that horrifying vision.