Brown Bag: John Durno speaks on “The Lost World of Telidon: Challenges in the Conservation of Glenn Howarth’s Digital Art”

The Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory at the University of Victoria (http://etcl.uvic.ca/) invites you to attend the second meeting of the 2015-16 Brown Bag Speaker Series. This is a series of informal lunchtime seminars for faculty and graduate students in the Department of Humanities and across the university to discuss issues in digital literacy, digital humanities, and the changing face of research, scholarship, and teaching in our increasingly digital world. For an hour once per month, we meet to hear from an invited speaker, share ideas, and build knowledge.

On Thursday November 19th, from 12 until 1pm, John Durno (Head of Library Systems at the University of Victoria) will be presenting a talk entitled,

The Lost World of Telidon: Challenges in the Conservation of Glenn Howarth’s Digital Art.

Details are below and in the attached poster. Please share this announcement and poster with anyone who might be interested in attending.

Thursday November 19th, 12 – 1 p.m.
Clearihue D132, University of Victoria

Abstract: In 2012 the University of Victoria Archives received a donation of materials from the estate of the late artist Glenn Howarth, RCA. Included in the donation were several 5.25″ floppy disks containing the only known copies of the artist’s early digital artworks. Created in the early 1980s using locally developed software implementing the PDI/NAPLPS standard developed by the CRC, these artworks were deeply enmeshed in the technology of their era. When our Archives was approached by a local curator wishing to review the works for inclusion in a planned retrospective, we undertook a project to make the artworks accessible in a modern computing environment. This talk will discuss the particular challenges we encountered as well as larger questions relating to maintaining the authenticity of digital artworks across multiple generations of computing hardware and software.

Bio: For the past ten years John Durno has been Head of Library Systems at the University of Victoria, where he manage the exceptional team responsible for building and maintaining the Libraries’ IT environment. His current research interests include digital forensics, digital archaeology, and other excuses to muck about with old hardware and software.

Bring your lunch and join us to discuss digital technologies and research in our community!