No Time To Wait is a three-day conference dedicated to exploring open media, open standards, and digital audiovisual preservation. The eighth edition (NTTW8) took place at Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 11 to 13 September 2024. I was already planning to travel to Belgium the following week for iPRES and wanted to make the most of the long journey from Australia to Europe and attend NTTW8 as well.
After more than 33 hours in transit from Sydney, with stops in Singapore, Frankfurt, and Mannheim, I finally arrived in Karlsruhe with just enough time to (attempt to) get some sleep before conference proceedings began. The following three days included workshops, tours, presentations, and discussions that covered a wide range of topics related to digital preservation, archiving, and the challenges faced by institutions in managing and preserving media arts and digital collections.
Tours and workshops
For me, day one included a workshop and tours of exhibitions and behind-the-scenes at the conference venue. ZKM was founded in 1989 with the mission of continuing the classical arts into the digital age. It is housed in a former munitions factory, which is an impressive and expansive space shared with Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung | University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe (HfG).
A tour of the Antennae: Frequencies from the Archive exhibition was led by Felix Mittelberger and examined themes around the differences between cultural and state archives, and the significance of exploring connections between archives – particularly as artists often live and work in various locations throughout their careers. Felix explained how students at HfG started by exploring the ZKM archive before expanding their research and exploring connections with others, detecting gaps and limitations.
The workshop on RAWCooked and Audiovisual Preservation Tools was an open discussion with participants and Jérôme Martinez from MediaArea. It covered the application of RAWCooked for efficient storage and conversion of uncompressed files, emphasising the importance of conformance checks beyond basic checksums to ensure digital file integrity. The discussion also considered the need for thorough documentation and preservation metadata to help future archivists identify MKV files processed in this way.
When digital preservation isn’t visible, it can easily be overlooked, misunderstood, or undervalued. The tours of the ZKM Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems and Lab for Digital Art Conservation highlighted the need for visible spaces to demonstrate the work and effort involved in digitisation, digital preservation, and media art conservation. It was great to see examples of the challenges being faced with technology, media carriers and their condition, and the complexities of time-based art conservation.
Highlights
This was my first time attending No Time To Wait, and despite the jetlag it was a great experience that provided me with lasting insights into open standards and audiovisual preservation. It was also a unique opportunity to meet new people, reconnect with those I met during my research trip to Europe in 2019, and finally meet others in-person for the first time following years of online meetings. A great deal more was discussed and presented at NTTW8 than I can cover here. Fortunately, recordings are freely available online for you to examine further on the MediaArea YouTube channel. See the NTTW8 program for an overview of the conference.
The first day of presentations focused primarily on media arts, emphasising the intersections between physical and digital elements in both born-digital and digitised formats. It also included talks on making use of MediaWiki for collective documentation at ZKM, efforts to increase the online visibility of media art through Wikipedia edit-a-thons using the Functional Requirements Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model, advocating a move away from ‘files-in-folders’ to object storage and extended file attributes, challenges in preserving artworks relying on obsolete technology, and concluded with an introduction to Digital Preservation Is People.
The final day of proceedings aligned closely with the work I do in my role as Lead Digital Archivist at the State Library of NSW. Covering both innovative approaches and practical tools, these discussions offered valuable takeaways. The following sessions were among the key highlights for me.
In Sharing the wealth: Training vendors to adopt RAWcooked, Sarah Gentile from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) highlighted the amount of time and effort it takes to ingest digital materials into a digital preservation system. Tasking vendors with some of the preparation work streamlines this process but requires providing guidance on using open-source tools and meeting technical requirements. Vendors will charge additional fees for processing time, but it can speed up the ingest process with limited internal resources.
In AIDA Capture Lab: Converting Legacy Media into Digital Archives, Nastasia Vanderperren and Lode Scheers spoke about a shared service to transfer data from obsolete media operated by meemoo. Automatisering Ingest Digitale Archieven / Automation Ingest Digital Archives (AIDA) is a collaboration between multiple organisations, combining their resources to work together. It is challenging to set up and maintain a similar service individually – competing to acquire rare devices and cables, and developing the specific skills and knowledge to operate and maintain them. This is something I have thought about in the Australian context, but our larger geographic area makes it even more of a challenge. The Australian Emulation Network project has established a community of practice led by Dr Cynde Moya, with the Digital Heritage Lab at Swinburne University a treasure trove of technology used to develop workflows for imaging and emulation. This is not a service, but project partners have been able to visit the Lab for training and testing out its equipment. I can tell you, traveling with 8-inch floppy disks between Sydney and Melbourne is no easy task – particularly trying to avoid them from passing through x-ray machines at airport security.
In Conserving a mobile app using emulation: Considerations on the method and its institutional challenges, Anna Mladentseva provided examples of apps acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum and discussed challenges with preservation and access. Limitations of emulation methods were highlighted, including whether apps can function as intended. It was noted that for some collections, stakeholders can only access apps through dedicated, stockpiled mobile hardware. Mladentseva emphasised that a single method cannot be used to preserve and provide access to all apps, where methods will shift and change over time through further developments in emulation research and community-led initiatives. APK Analyzer was mentioned as a tool that can be useful to determine requirements for emulation of Android apps.
In Scraping and crawling: Lessons learned about archiving social media, Nastasia Vanderperren and Lode Scheers shared insights into the project Best practices for archiving social media in Flanders and Brussels. They highlighted the important role of social media as a source for research and noted the legal and technical challenges to archiving it. A key point was that social media platforms frequently change their code, making it difficult for developers to keep up with for tools to archive them. They found commercial tools were no more effective than open-source alternatives, and many of the useful tools they tested have since stopped functioning due to changes on social media platforms. It was highlighted that self-archiving (downloading a copy of user data) does not contain other user’s content or reactions such as comments and likes, which raises challenges in using a combination of tools and methods for a holistic capture. Documentation on their workflows for capturing individual social media accounts is available online.
Lastly, in Protecting the Real and Identifying the Fake: A Human Rights Centered Approach to Generative AI we heard from Jacobo Castellanos and Yvonne Ng from WITNESS on the challenges posed by synthetic media, which includes AI-generated images, audio and video. They emphasised the difficulties in distinguishing real from fake media, and its erosion of trust and complications for human rights investigations. They pointed out that our inability to explain artificial intelligence increases the complexity. Detection is not something that people can do based on looking at the media alone, requiring a toolbox approach through investigating alternative sources and other technical methods including content credentials, watermarking, and finger printing. They highlighted the pros and cons of content credentials and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which addresses the prevalence of misleading information online through the development of technical standards for certifying the provenance of media content. The session ended with an open discussion on concerns around AI. I noted that libraries actively acquire born-digital photographs, where staff have been trained to determine if they meet technical requirements – this made me consider whether we need to start including quality control checks for AI-generated media. This session and the follow-up discussion prompted me to consider AI in the context of libraries. It’s not only about what we collect and how we use AI to engage with our collections, but also about the media literacy of our readers and visitors in understanding and trusting our organisations and digital collections.
A family connection and brief glimpse of Germany
This visit was my first time in Germany. Unfortunately, there was limited opportunities for me to explore as I continued my journey to Ghent straight after NTTW8. I have recently been researching my family history and was excited to discover that I travelled through an area of Germany that my ancestors are from, having migrated to Australia in 1855 from Feudenheim and Ilvesheim in Baden-Württemberg.
Thanks to ZKM for providing complimentary exhibition tickets to attendees – I made the time to walk through the exhibition spaces while at the conference, with Black Flags a highlight for me. Schlosslichtspiele / Light Festival coincided with my visit, and I stopped by Karlsruhe Palace on my last night to see the show. During my stay, I had the chance to take a quick walk around the city centre and between my hotel and the conference venue, which provided a brief glimpse of Karlsruhe.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my employer, the State Library of NSW, and the Digital Preservation Coalition for supporting my travel to Germany and Belgium to attend NTTW8 and iPRES.
The views and opinions expressed here are my own.
Photographs by me, CC BY-NC 4.0.
