LinkRot
Radical Networks 2019 Proposal
Replace sample info between [brackets] with your own!
Format: [Performance]
Name: [Sarah Nguyen]
Pronouns: [she/they]
Location: [NYC, NY]
Email: [srah.nguyen@gmail.com]
Twitter: @snewyuen
Repo: [https://github.com/michi-gato]
Url(s): [https://michi-gato.github.io/]
Consent to being photographed?: [No]
Consent to being on the livestream?: [Yes]
Speaker Bio and Profile Picture
[Sarah is a modern-contemporary dancer and a librarian-archivist in training. She is a student at the University of Washington's iSchool for Library and Information Science, project coordinator for Preserve This Podcast, research scientist for Investigating & Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience, and archivist for the Dance Heritage Coalition/Mark Morris Dance Group. An advocate for open, accessible, and secure technologies, she promotes open source tools such as GitHub Pages, Nikola, and vrecord for all involved projects. Offline, she can be found riding a Cannondale mtb or eating plants.
As a first-generation Vietnamese-American, Sarah finds community within the wider Asian-Pacific Americans (APA), alongside movement/dance practitioners, FLOSS, and bicyclists. While exploring the predominantly Anglo-male software development and the Anglo-female library/archive fields, there is the constant push for socioeconomic equality, trust, and acceptance, which is inherent in communities of dance, FLOSS, and alternative transportation. Each of these aspects are daily practices to continue their existence in the current state of complicated and oppressive social norms. The ability to contribute, support, and create in each of these fields (e.g. physical movement awareness and creativity, free/libre open source software, and human-powered transportation) exposes and grows the communities to be accepted as the norm instead of just experimental outliers.]
Description
[LinkRot is a ~9 minute dance inspired by broadcast audio and RSS preservation practices, technology obsolescence, and 3-2-1 backups. Sounds recreating auditory memory of early digital networking are made tangible through isolated limbed branches that build to a feeling of potential completion, but soon breaks down as segments are gradually destroyed due to algorithmically-controlled centralized over-saturation. This is an exploration of the social pressures made from rapid content creation through conveniently available GUIs versus openly accessible text-based mediums.
There is an undervaluation of the internet's open source dependencies. From the invisible labor contributed to open source development to the ephemerality of the content. Podcasters are only just recently becoming aware of this issue. The RSS feed is an open framework to deliver files between computers, and with the rise of commercial RSS publishers, podcasts (e.g. audible cultural content) are being lost. RSS feed link rot can be avoided. Dancers have lived with this issue since the beginning of its time. Performance and practice is stored in muscle memory, while recordings only capture bytes of audiovisual interpretation. Exerted movements and feelings are never reproducibly the same with each performance. Movement link rot is an ongoing study. And last, open source tools--web archiving and software preservation techniques exists, but are not cohesive. Specifically, Git version control systems, like GitLab, hold codebase for a wide variety of games, media, research, protocols, etc. Existing archiving techniques are missing components to recreate the full computational environment. LinkRot is a dance that serves to emulate the physical euphoria that internet content creation permits to the digital decay that comes with loss (or is there even a feeling of loss?).]
Length: [9 minutes for performance and 6 minutes for Q+A]
Please adhere to these guidelines:
Talks: 15 - 30 minutes with 10 minutes for questions.
Panels: 30 minutes with 10 minutes for questions.
Lunchtime Meetups: up to 1h.
Workshops: 1h - 6hrs.
Tour/Field Trips: up to 6hrs.
Performances / Film Screenings: up to 90 minutes.
Workshop technical requirements and materials list (if applicable)
Equipment/technical requirements: [n/a] Maximum number of attendees: [n/a] Full list of materials needed for attendees: [n/a]
Artwork installation requirements (if applicable)
[n/a]
Artworks must be installed on Friday October 18th, 2019.
Note: We are not responsible for damages done to your work! (Although we will take every precaution we can to safely handle your work.)
Performance requirements (if applicable)
[Speakers for audio playback, auxiliary connection for wav/mp3 player, and floor space for wide-range movement. Square footage is negotiable.]
Additional Info / Links / References
Sample of older dances at [https://vimeo.com/snewyen]