Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

one of the most important magazines for experimental poetry, published
in the U.S. in the 1970s, are now available online in the form
of scanned images and PDF files (neither of which are searchable as
text). 278
A different approach was chosen for Photostatic Retrograde, a magazine
published from 1983 to 1998 which focused on photocopying
(xerography) as the source of a particular visual language. Every single
issue, starting with the ones most recently published, was converted
to a (searchable) PDF file and made available online for free. 279 When
the original lay-out (whether in the form of digital files or analogue
materials) was no longer available, it was reconstructed from scratch.
In this case, the act of archiving and preservation required a complete
re-creation of the original printing plates (this time in a virtual, digital
form) – resulting in a copy which was, paradoxically, ‘better’ than (or
at least technically superior to) the original.
Traditional archiving can be defined as the preservation for historical
memory of original materials, in a condition that is as historically
accurate as possible. And so Jeff Rothenberg, digital data preservation
expert for Rand Corporation, may well be right when he predicts that
books in the future will no longer be considered as we know them today,
but rather as ‘art objects’. 280 Small publishers tend to regard the
Web as a sort of global bookshop where they (often desperately) hope
to attract customers. But these publishers’ greatest asset is often their
own history: their best and most successful books. Arguably their time
and efforts would be better spent, not on producing unfocused blogs
or unused internet forums, but on making their past treasures available
and searchable online (or, at very least, a comprehensive reference
to these old and out-of-print treasures: bibliographic references,
127
Left
Cover of
Radical Software,
Volume I,
Number 5,
Spring 1972
Right
Cover of
Photostatic
Retrograde,
issue #1,
August 1983