JESSE COHEN (OF TANLINES) IS A PHOTO ARCHIVIST
From an interview in the Village Voice:
How long have you been online?
I don’t know how to answer that. I was never a LiveJournal person or anything. In 2003 and 2004 I was doing some online art projects. In those days, you made your website or had to know someone who made one, because there wasn’t Tumblr or Wordpress. So we did a few music art projects, my friends and I. I used to do these email exhibitions—I have a career as a photo archivist; I’m part-time now—in like 2003, 2004, 2005, and it was just things I would find either in our archives or online and I would put them in an email and send it out to a list. I think it was maybe 500 people by the end. Some of them were whimsical and some of them were sad, and some funny and some whatever. People were like, “Well, you should really do a blog.” But the point of it was not a blog; the point of it was to create a temporary space on the Internet.
Twitter is super-temporal; the search is notoriously terrible. It barely goes back a week. What do you think of that, as an archivist?
I’m more of a content person than a systems person, but I have to assume somebody is just working on that. I know that they are in terms of the White House, and maybe some of that will trickle down. We still don’t know the lifespan of a digital file. We like to think that our photos will last longer as digital items then as paper items, but we don’t really know.
I think I naturally have pretty good etiquette when it comes to these kinds of things, but sometimes I see people and I’m like, “That person’s using the Internet wrong.” I never talk about artists on Twitter. I don’t know why that is. I made a joke about Justice the other day and I was like, “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.” But I figured it wasn’t mean-spirited, so that’s OK.
The Ernest Greene thing, now this: people are going to start thinking it’s cool to go to information school. Ack!
