 I'm Hannah Benbow, down the end is my colleague Jai Gatuzo. We both work at Pynumatorangau Aotearoa, the National Library. We're both involved in different aspects of digital collecting and really interested in born digital practice and what that means for collecting institutions. Do we understand contemporary born digital practice well enough? Are we collecting it in a way that reflects what artists need from us as collecting institutions? So to that end, we've gathered together three creators working in different areas. So I've got Jim Yoshioke, who's an illustrator and comics artist, Miki Haga, journalist, author and investigative journalist, and Luke Raul, who's a musician and also works in the cartoon space. Is that accurate? I'm going to let these three introduce themselves properly in a sec, but I've just got a little bit of housekeeping to do first. So three things. One is that we want this to be a really free, frank and open conversation. So to that end, our employers have asked us to read out a little disclaimer. Make of that what you will. So the views and opinions expressed in this panel do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Tupuna Mataranga o Aotearoa at the National Library. That's one. Two, we've got three questions that we want to focus on. So what of your work do you want the future to have access to? If you could have access to work from creators who influence you, what would that be? How do you want people in the future to be able to consume your work? And we're going to focus on those questions in sec one. And I'm telling you that because the third thing I want to tell you is that we're going to ask the questions while the conversation is going on. So just raise your hand, Mike's got the mic. So don't hold it up till the end. So let's get started. I might start with Luke a chance to introduce himself. Hello, hi. I've been doing digital software music since like 1996. I kind of started on the wave of the early computer music, free software kind of bandwagon. And I sort of write past 80s synth pop, 90s smooth jazz type music. But it's definitely like born digital stays digital on the internet. I self distribute and self release more or less all my music online. That's basically me. I played a lot in Europe and done nearly 500 shows across 22 countries as well. But yeah, my thing is very digital. That's me. Kia ora tatou. Nicky Haga, said Haga. Sorry. I work as mainly as a researcher. I also write books. I wrote my first book in 1999. I published my first book then. So I live very much in the world of trying to find out about information, often which is no one's trying to hide, which is scattered or difficult to find, but not being hidden sometimes, which is being hidden. And so I'm very aware of the blocks and the problems. And I'm also what I'm going to talk about. I'm slightly living terror of what to do with my own archives, which I think are valuable. But I don't know how to handle them. We'll be talking about that. And also most probably most relevant in this room, I'm the family archivist in my family. I love the role of people who look after things, the archives of the world. So for example, under one of the big beds in our house, we have the archives of my one half of my family escaping from Europe, from the Nazis. And it's the most astonishing body of material. And under another of the beds in the house, we've got my family living in Africa, other side of my family living in Africa being doctors. So it's going to be really easy to find out what to do with that compared to the other. Much larger body of information in my house, which is my work, which was what we're going to talk about. Kia ora koutou. My name's Jim Yoshioca. I am a comic artist and illustrator. So most of my work has created more or less 100% digitally these days and has been for quite a while. I have written comics about my mixed Japanese heritage. And I've also written a sort of science fiction webcomic that I'm updating regularly at the moment. So my work has found success online. And so not only am I creating work digitally, but that's where my whole audience is. There's a really interesting dynamic between sort of the local Wellington engaging with my work via a digital channel. So there is still very physical nature to interacting with my work a lot. But yeah, that's sort of where a lot of my stuff has come from. I'm interested in sort of talking about, I guess, like how we will be looking after stuff that is just sort of in our every day that we don't necessarily think would need to be collected. You know, the bits around creating work in a digital space or for a digital audience that people might in the future find quite valuable for what you're not necessarily thinking about now. So we're going to work our way through the three questions that Hannah proposed. But I think before we do that, I just wanted to invite Hannah to just maybe comment on why we wanted to put this panel together and what we wanted to learn because I think that's also useful for framing. So or I can just go first and... I think why don't you go into it, Joe? So in my job I do digital preservation. So I work in the library and we, you know, my job is intrinsically looking at technical objects and trying to work and understand how do we make sure they can still be consumed sensibly, usefully into the future. In library land we talk a lot about use and reuse and, you know, if we can't access things, then we kind of have a proposition that's what's the point. So we spend a lot of time thinking about that. What I am particularly interested in this is why we've assembled this amazing panel today is hearing what people who make this stuff think we should be doing rather than or as well as what we think we should be doing in library land. So this for us is an exposition in what these colleagues who write, paint, draw, make sonically phenomenal pieces of work and what they think the long tail of that work should be going into the future and that's kind of what I'm really interested in getting to the bottom of. So in the end, you know, I think this first question for me is where I started my conversation with Hannah when we put that together which is what of your work do you want the future to have access to? And, you know, when we talk about the body of work that we have, I think, you know, 100 years ago it was relatively easy to ring fence and he says that without having the first clue what he's talking about, what a body of work is, it's much less tangible. So I'm going to invite each of our panellists to spend a few moments reflecting on that question and you seem to be the scapegoat for going first Luke. So if you don't mind, if you want to jump in and just have a muse on that for us. Because we did have a little discussion about this beforehand that was very good. But for me, I went to music school at Victoria. I could never pass any papers. I couldn't read notation but I've always done this kind of computer music and for me the question always comes back to like practice. What I would want to see from someone else and I guess what I would want to pass on would be the ability to see the actual, what I consider the actual object of the studio music, computer music realm and that's the session file. That's to be able to see where someone's cut corners or to see where the shortcuts or the repetitions or the subtleties and what things that would inform my practice because there's really not too much around. I mean a lot of, there's this YouTube tutorial type thing but it's not a very sort of, it's very technical, technically based. What I would like for people to be able to do with my work is to look right in there and see possibly where my ideas came from and get a kind of mainline of all these epiphanies that I've had over the last 20 years about writing music that someone else could pick up and take away without having to put all that time into rendering it. So yeah, that's my thing is that the computer music practice revolves around this one object that seems to be somewhat irreproducible without something like a virtual machine or something because you've got file formats, you've got DRM, you've got stolen software, you've got all kinds of operating systems and dependencies and viruses and everything. Because with standard sort of art music you've got the score and that's very much the thing or the performance but it's a shame that we seem to be making, we seem to be making all this useful data that we can't then sort of aggregate down into like at an artistic level and say, well, most of your songs are NF major and most of the things you've worked on are this tempo and have this kind of ability to build a language around computer music because it's been around for long enough there should be someone like that. So that's what what of my work, all of it, that's my answer, all of it. I don't mind that people can go through all my awful sessions. Awesome. Thank you. I would like people to have access to most of my work but by coming along here I've been reflecting on how many problems there are for that and in my case I'm probably the main person in New Zealand writer who meets very large numbers of whistleblowers, whistle, some of them very important whistleblowers who have changed history, helped illuminate things, done big things by speaking up but they've done that on the basis that no one will ever know who they are and I'm going to talk about that and that to a later question which is the hardest one for me but I thought I'd talk about something really, really practical on this which is that when I imagine I'm somebody who has I've already had the National Library ask me if I will give them all my files if they're obviously judged to have some worth so I'm going to tell you what I've been thinking about so originally I had a large number of obviously for a long time I had a large number of paper files as well and I've looked at them and thought these one day and my family once one day these are going to happily live in an institution but I know from my own research that there can be catastrophes of when people put stuff which hasn't been properly sourced into an institution and so I'm just going to say talk about paper files first for a deliberate reason which is that when you've got paper files someone like me has thought which year shall I put aside which would probably what it would take just to sort my paper files so I wasn't giving away notes of people who didn't want me or people have written to me about the tragedies in their lives or not to mention my own life and family and all that stuff which I would not be choosing as my voluntary act to put out there for other people's eyes sympathetic or malicious so that's fine with the paper files but what I realise is that when you go from a paper file situation where you have roughly chosen what you put in there to a digital world where you have an accumulation of stuff where there's been no thought there just hasn't been the thought of deleting and that's the only reason why it's there I'm not sure I've got enough lifetimes left to sort my material properly and I put this to you because if the National Library or whoever it was would like my files and I would like them to have it I've got this massive resource barrier of how I source out back through hundreds of thousands of items of stuff to try to make enough reasonably rational decisions about what goes in there and what doesn't because the easier option which is actually what's going on far and wide is just that computers become hard to access again and people lose them and it all just disappears that's the easiest way to deal with this or the children come around and empty out the old person's files when they've died and put them in the dump we all know that option that's a really simple one but if you want it to be saved there is a huge obstacle there which I'm not sure people can do by themselves and that's my point that's the challenge or question I'm putting out there is who's going to help? Yeah I think for me I'm currently in this situation with my past self for my future my current self is that all of my work is on old hard drives that I haven't moved off since you know from about sort of 10 years ago and so that's work that's in a sense kind of locked off to me in a lot of ways unless I do yeah spend a lot of time going through that in order to de-archive a lot of that stuff to then better archive it to future proof protecting archiving it for the next round so I guess yeah the things the way that I work I have quite a meticulous filing system with how I sort of sort of sort everything that I make mainly because I have to because I'm producing like when you're making comics you've just got file after file page after page and then there's layer after layer of that you can actually dig through any of the pages that I make in a comic and that starts off with like a rough thumbnail at the bottom layer and then you can see my sketch layers and then you can see my colours and my inks and with the type on the final layer so there's all of these sort of yeah there's sort of like a living history in each page that I put together and so keep the high resolution file of that on my hard drive so even though the the bit that gets sent around everywhere is a you know an easy to send jpeg that most people will see I've got this in print format if I do ever want to print it off and have an exhibition of or make a book or a printed book or or anything of that nature or cut it up and use it in other ways or share it with other people to remix you know so there's there's all of that that present in the document and it's mostly relatively well named so but then outside of that I also I don't have a physical sketchbook anymore I only draw pretty much entirely on my iPad and so that but that's become my sketchbook and so that's that's sort of like little bits and pieces it's notes it's it's you know sketches it's the the starts of characters it's the starts of plots and ideas and when I had a physical notebooks which I did use pretty religiously up until last year it was quite nice to be able to flick through and have that physical book and be like oh yeah that's this is the first time I ever drew that character well this is where I came up with that story plot idea or this sort of element and then when I'm I don't really ever go through my digital files in the same way like I don't have like a nostalgia session where I sit down and go through everything because I don't have to do that when I move yeah so when you're talking about the work that you're doing on your iPad and all the I don't know if FEMA is the right word but all those bits and pieces of your practice does that mean that that's primarily stored in the cloud for you these days or would you keep copies? I keep copies it's actually mostly stored directly on the hard drive of the iPad and then I will pull them off and archive them onto my onto my computer yeah and then regular archiving stuff from there so so yeah that's it's yeah mostly just like living on the iPad anybody else have any question so we want to spend a couple of minutes perhaps exploring this so there's a question over here thank you you're able to make a living from what you're doing now and do you think your future income might depend on capitalising on your existing work what you've already made is that directed at an individual or a general question any anyone want to have a like at that? I think it's it's actually always quite a difficult and complicated question to ask are you making a living off of your art? Let's maybe focus on the long tail the long tail like I'm yeah there's lots of ways to make a living I don't think this near necessarily relevant to discuss but yeah I think there's the thing that I'm more focused on with creating my work is to create work that can reach people and be shared and if you know if that ends up being something that is monetarily compensated then that's great but I'm more interested in making it work that people can see and experience I'm always trying to feed into this I'm I started with that with a kind of streaming model in mind when I was sort of 1819 on mp3.com and IUMA and all these early mp3 sites but the the thing I'm always trying to build on this the streaming thing is you put one album out and then you'll put another album out and then it always feeds back through your back catalogue but in terms of this question it's like especially for audio we can't get any higher fidelity you know new youngs trying to sell us on 192 kilohertz audio and it's like not even that useful but in terms of this stuff like I've had to I've had stuff put out by record labels and then had to get the files back when they don't pay me and I've got to then put the stuff up on on Spotify to try to recoup from that and it's like this this file management archiving thing it comes up every time with music maybe not in terms of the the musical object itself but everything around it needs to be you know the the the streaming stores always want more higher fidelity art or you know you always trying to keep up with it so you do have to keep everything archived in that sense thank you I think there's one more question over here to what extent do you think about or pay attention to the terms of use and other sorts of legal frameworks that govern your relationships with these platforms whether they're streaming or whether it's a hardware platform if you're storing on your iPad how much does that enter into your thought process it does like I think it's it's a part of being a digital artist is to think about where your work is being shared unfortunately there's not a lot of choice in terms of engaging with these platforms and these these technologies you know you might find some of the conditions a little bit squiffy but there's there's that's the only way you can really get your work out at the moment and so like the main place that I am sharing my webcomic at the moment is a is a private company that lets you use it for free and then they advertise underneath it and and so pretty much they just ask that you're not going to put porn up and that's that's about it and it's it's been it's been a relatively good relationship for me as an artist and I think I've got about 40,000 subscribers through using that platform which I wouldn't have otherwise if I'd set up you know on my own server or or you know yeah there's just I wouldn't have the I wouldn't have the access so but that is definitely a trade-off me knowing that by doing that I'm giving them a certain amount of access and rights to using my work in specific ways it's mostly did like the most of them are just so that they can actually share and distribute your files but yeah it does yeah I'm thinking about what I do in terms of having like a more of a more cloud storage archiving and yeah and so I'm thinking about which which of the services that are all run by private companies are going to be the most yeah the sort of most tolerable for what I want to be doing with my work basically in the same position so I think we'll move on to the next question if there's no one with a burning question so Hannah do you want to do you want to do you want to do you want to before we move on I just Nikki we can totally help you sort through your files okay our next question if you could have access to work from creators who influence you what would that work be so that's kind of the question of are you interested in that finished product is it the shavings is it somewhere in between and how does that kind of play out in the digital space you're thinking about a sculptor right you've got like the the shavings of the stuff that's being sculpted you've got the final sculpture you've got something somewhere in between yeah what interests you and the work of others or who you find a pointual shall we start with start with you Jim I mean I always love sketches and process I mean that's that's something that I find really interesting as an artist is seeing the the little bits and the thought process behind stuff so that's definitely the work that that I'm drawn towards when when I of artists who I really like and and appreciate the work of because it's through that that you can see can see the initial structures of of how those finished pieces came to be I'd you know studying art history it's always quite neat to see sort of like the initial sketches before the the final paintings and the relationship between the studies and what the final work ended up being and I think that's that's a really interesting space and and there's always a lot of very interesting historical context around around artwork and around around yeah what what's what ends up being the finished product and I think that's that's the bit that I think is the most interesting to me and the most important to being captured because it's also the easiest to lose I think is that sort of wider cultural context that the work's been created in and so yeah Is that when you put some pressure on yourself to make your own workings work in progress more accessible yeah sometimes I mean I guess because I'm a fan of other people's sketches I tend to share a lot of mine on on Twitter and stuff as I'm as I'm going because it seems like that's yeah it's just it's what I like so I assume that other people like it too and yeah so it's quite nice to be able to put something out there and be like here's the sort of you know the pre thing yeah so yeah completely different genre for the people who's the work I really respect I get the pleasure out of seeing the way that they put their work together but if I'm we'll talk about what I would like I would like to see of course what their original sources and we never do unless they're a buddy unless you make friends with them and there's collegiality all around the world as you know you don't actually get to see it and so I'll talk about a slightly different thing because that's that's my whole answer there living in the realm of information and trying to find solid information in the world of incredibly shifting digital sands I'm very aware of how much stuff is solidly around and then it disappears again and one of them to illustrate this one the main websites that I go to over and over again is the internet archive archive.org and the reason I'm doing this is that the thing that the people do the official reports or this the list or the the press release which was up there yesterday might not be up there today or it might be slightly different because there's nothing stuff on the internet doesn't hasn't gone to an institution which guarantees it doesn't change it's constantly changing in fact hunting in the fields where I hunt which is for information all the time and searching and looking and so on I get a very good idea of how impermanent the internet is on all sorts of informational ways and so for the people who had set up the internet archive I would be at a great loss a lot of the time and that there aren't there aren't many internet archives and there aren't varieties of internet archives there's only a you know I always have to go back to the same one generally so it's a really big deal and it makes me think about as I say when I work in original sources and source materials constantly in different ways not just where individual things are going but whole great swaths of stuff which I know I'm just certain I'm not going to be around in the future the publications which were only you know I'm looking at a publication for some industry organisation or company or something and I've got the last five but they don't have any of the ones before that and how many companies are even existent a generation later it's really big if I might just to have a quick question what do you do about that in your in your practice what's your coping mechanism for this transient nature of information on the web what's my coping mechanism as I say every time I look at something on the internet which where I've got a question in my mind I then go and look at the earlier versions on the internet archive and so often it's changed where it's been for a certain top while and it's disappeared what it means that and for example after September 11 before September 11 the United States military and government organisations were amazingly rich in information they had a strong tradition of public public information and it was like lights went out all over the place and they've it's they've never come on again and so you can feel like you've made progress and you've got this flag in the sand and you're going to get in the rock I mean and you're going to have the information for everybody you don't have it forever which means that people are tempted to try to save it all themselves but you can't do that it's actually not practical so when I find of course I save safety copies of things which I find all the time as a precaution but what we actually need is other people making safety copies the way that the National Library I think it is has a system for people's New Zealand websites which I think is really crucial and then multiplied by a thousand or a million yeah thank you I think my answer is going to be pretty in line with Jim like I like I like it when you can hear just the vocal take of a song you know you can look at that in YouTube and you can just hear one part of it and it's like being able to have that sort of vision of someone else's music just to get down to the parts I'm kind of like hyper obsessed with getting ideas and getting the idea out and getting it out as quickly as possible and you know trying to I don't know I'm always looking for the way that in the last two or three years trying to find some sort of practice involved with sort of computer music and and home recording yeah what would I say I want to see someone's someone's rubbish bin and you know all their outtakes and stuff I've started actually on my sessions if something doesn't work out I just throw it to the right and then I've got because I work in my lounge I'll play through a song and then it'll go and I'll go make a coffee and then a minute later they'll just build this garbage and then I so I can listen back to all the garbage I've generated and sometimes there's another idea in there but it's about yeah if I could see someone else's garbage that'll be amazing that would be like it's been weeks with that Do you have any questions? Anyone? Well I as always have a billion questions Oh there was a hand sorry I didn't see it Sorry I'm sure the question was really good as well Nikki I just you touched on this slightly about and I just really wanted to know with resources like the internet archive out there what role do you see New Zealand institutions taking to support that digital collecting like what is that does it need to be more than collecting New Zealand websites or what is what does that look like and what how would that support your work Thank you The internet archive is great but half the time the stuff's not there or the layers down out there and so if it were possible to for a country to care about its own material more than others and have an equivalent of that that would be it would be heaven that's what I'm saying so yes websites but but a wide unlikely variety of websites so I don't know how wide you go I imagine I just kind of imagine you cover the full range of stuff the internet archive does at the moment So I had a question for the to music the music and illustrative side How do you think you then encourage people to share their practice in a way that will help inform yours you know is there a modality here that we can all kind of work towards that encourages that to happen I guess we kind of have that a little bit with the internet and just the way that there is you know if we're talking from other contemporary people working in this space people do share like their their Photoshop files so that you can see how they put a picture together you can watch videos of people putting putting you know their illustrations together so you can learn you know watch their painting techniques and and all of that kind of stuff a lot of people are pretty pretty awesome about sharing you know when they find something cool and new a lot of people make cool brushes that they share so you can go and you can download a different brush set and some people monetize those and some people don't so yeah there's there's definitely a you know an artist community where we are all supporting each other and sharing these sorts of resources amongst each other and there's also you know like like live streaming and people just you know put their put their screen up with their with their you know and be like I'm working on a comic just come along and hang out while I draw this and so yeah so it's it's yeah I guess it's it's community really that and it seems to pretty much already be happening so yeah I thought about live streaming music but then I realized no one wants to watch me work on like one loop for two hours because that's what I do I've I think there is a bit of especially especially with electronic music a bit of this expectation that you've got to cultivate a mystique and you've got to use you know vintage 70 synthesizers and you can't use software and you know plugins are kind of inferior and they're not macho and it's it's kind of weird so what I tend to do is share a lot of be quite upfront about the software that I'm using and and you know giving away more secrets and sharing pictures of session files and stuff or you know try to work a little joke in there if there's some sort of electronic music joke or whatever but um yeah I've I've always tried to be quite upfront about my tools and about trying to especially with a lot of the free software stuff I've worked with is is trying to be very upfront that this stuff's free and it's you know it's easy to do and yeah so just trying to be more upfront I guess and honest and not like oh this is my you know genius master work that I made on a vintage synthesizer from 1970 to just be like it's a plug-in you buy it here and it looks like that you know thank you um we'll probably move on to the last question because the clock's ticking oh if it's a super quick one thank you oh thank you um all right so the last question oh that was the wrong way which is about use and reuse and it's something which we think about heaps in library land so the question is as framed how do you want people in the future to be able to consume your work so I'd like to start with Nicky if that's all right thank you first part answer is very easy I would I would look forward to the day where um all my books all my articles all my writing is permanently preserved as part of New Zealand materials in a digital way I'm very happy with that I don't need to get revenue off with all my family that would be fine I said I but I've I've got this problem about my my research materials which I mentioned and I want to talk a little bit about that because I don't know the answer apart from a huge bonfire and smashing up of hard drives one day and that is that I've had many many people trust me to give me very classified or very and sensitive information I've had to make all kinds of judgments about which bits are reasonable to use and which stuff should never be used or what's what's public business and what's private business and I shouldn't touch the private business I've had got to go through all those processes and it seems like a crime to me that I will take all those materials one day and smash them into little pieces but on the other hand I've got these really you know serious responsibilities to the people and I imagine it's a bit like other kinds of archives like you know one of these days people will be able to open up the archives as a security intelligence service or you know John Key the next prime minister and see the embarrassing bits and the good bits but who cares cos it'll be so long dead everyone concerned it won't matter but is that going to work for my kind of material and I don't I don't actually don't actually know anyone who has my job whoever takes that risk and so my question back to all of you a lot would be would I be safe enough with an with an access agreement Trump somebody coming around and wanting it and otherwise I'm going to have to smash it all and burn it all and I don't like that but that will obviously be the right thing thank you well I guess that the finished product is obviously the thing that I want people to be able to consume in the future but I think yeah I I do want people to feel free to reuse and remix what it is that I create and to and to stuff of their own like I've come from a sort of creative commons background and I found quite a lot of success by releasing my art and illustrations under you know like a relatively open creative commons license so I I do like the idea of putting my work out there in a way that people can reinterpret and reuse and retail stories so if I'm if I if my work gets used in that kind of a way that into the future that's that'd be really awesome for me yeah isn't it good do you think for your workings as well as for your finished product absolutely yeah for 100% yeah did not I've been I use creative commons non-commercial just as a way of securing peer-to-peer distribution for forever hopefully and that hopefully within my understanding of creative commons if there is a sort of commercial part of the process I can sort of negotiate that separately but um yeah I've got no problem with anyone doing anything with my work as long as there's attribution I can't think of a single sort of thing that would sort of by term on turn my nose up at yeah trusting it will just live on the internet forever yeah yep basically whatever corporation runs the dominant streaming platform will will retain my work so Nicky's question that if you didn't hear it was are you trusting that the it will live on the internet forever which I think is a very silent point I really haven't thought about that Jim I wanted to just pick up on on on something you said so you you described your workflow as being 100% digital and I know in our previous conversation you talk about that your iPad which is essentially your notebook do you see that as being a physical object that would be interactable with into the future or is it your final products which are more what you think about I mean the that iPad itself is not very important like you know can just plug in another one and then the brain just moves from there to the to the other one you know you could very easily clone it and have you know have bunch of copies I don't think there's yeah and the file formats that I working on there don't necessarily yeah there's nothing about them about the iPad itself that I think you'd need to keep it for although it is fun to sort of be able to zoom in and out on stuff but um yeah no I don't think it's sort of format specific for any reason other than you know people might be interested in knowing that that was the sort of surface I like to work on but I'm sure I can and you know less than a year I'll have like a completely different kind of tablet set up because technology just moves so fast so yeah unlike a sketchbook which which has like that this sort of very you know I feel like I was looking through a couple of my physical sketchbooks the other day for something and that does have quite a specific form of nostalgia and kind of importance to it that scrolling through my archive of files is never going to feel like anything other than a chore so yeah I'm not sure if there is a way to replicate the feeling of having a notebook now that I don't really keep them anymore or if it's just something that I've lost in my work which you know I've traded I guess more than lost for the for the ease of use in the and the flexibility of having a digital a digital surface to to sketch on yeah so thank you and Nikki I wanted if you had any thoughts around how your your contact with your informants or sources might have changed over the years as you've thought about what it means to have an archive and and that that might live yourself have you changed how you approach that question of permanence of their information within your own archive or is that something you you address with them at all? That's a that everyone here that's a very hard question so this is meeting people who meeting someone from a government department or meeting a minister or a meeting a soldier or something who's telling me something my need to be faithful and protecting of them means that I become less digital yeah as the years go on yeah and my interactions with them which is strange and not what I would have expected but it's an it's an absolute necessity which means that I don't you know if somebody wants to seize my computers or something they will never find that because that's the last thing I would possibly put there yeah that's just the answer yeah great thank you any question we've got about 10 minutes left of the session we've got quite a bit of time so if anyone have any questions on this specifically Hi thank you all your panelists these are great answers to get to hear from real creators I have a question how do you feel if your material never goes to an archive are you working under the assumption that it will go somewhere and be collected or would you be okay if it wasn't ever collected by anyone yeah I'd be fine with that to be honest yeah I don't make work you know I make work for myself and I guess for contemporary people and so the yeah who are who are sort of participating in my work as I make it almost or watching me make it yeah that's one of the cool things about a webcomic is that I have readers who are sort of coming along with me in real time as I'm working on a story which can be interesting and frustrating but it's you know it's kind of like as much for for those people in the moment as it is for a as a sort of final finished product at the end and then I guess the thing the thing is that that I might be a digital practising artist but but print is still a huge part of being a digital artist so even though all of the creation of my work is happening within the digital space then I sort of think like it's not really finished finished until it's actually printed out and then a book somewhere so yeah there's still this relationship between you know being a sort of published artist or published author you know I still will be hopefully being able to make print books in the future that I don't think prints gonna die so you know those will by necessity be archived and so I think that there's you know it's okay if like every little sketch that I do doesn't end up somewhere special because that's um you know it was just a warm-up or just you know half an eye that I did although my mum still has like all my paper from when I was a kid which includes like yeah this all my my childhood drawing yes so she's my she's my archivist I think I've been working under that assumption and I maybe that's a bit narcissistic but um I'm still archiving my own stuff and I'm I sought everything kind of meticulously so it'll be somewhere and I always think it'll be somewhere but that's fingers crossed that's my short answer no I'm different from that actually um to me I would have thought one of the sort of the the obvious ideas and sort of tragedy of archives is that they get their value later and people don't really see them as valuable at the time that's so I was like by definition and so do I care about my family papers deeply you know I'd feel like I'd let down everyone if I didn't look after them but my own stuff I don't care yet actually to be honest I want my books to persist I want my work to persist which are already in the world but my working stuff I only think it in theory I don't feel it yet actually isn't that funny cool thank you go ahead um there's another question it isn't yep this question is probably primarily for Niki but for anyone on the panel there's been a little bit of talk around sort of creatives as part of a community and kind of participating in that community as you create but I think anytime Niki you release output from a major piece of work then New Zealand becomes the community and it tends to you know a big conversation will arise out of that and I wonder if you have any comment to make on how we record and archive how New Zealand responds to your major pieces of work and possibly similar question about sort of archiving fan communities and that sort of thing for the other panelists man that's hard so I don't know the answer actually but what I'll say is what I find with most thing I make some things happen sometimes but things happen all the time right and when things happen what I find is that the bit that's usually missing is the person who at the time who collects and analyses and understands what's going on as opposed to just another thing happened and and that in terms of the of what you're asking about my work where it's sometimes that prompts a debate or a reaction of some sort I'm not sure that the archiving bit is the bit that which some of the archiving happens anyway because news news sources are retained you know you know news archives save their own stories and things but I think there's an interesting role for the people who bother to analyse and collect at that time and that would be that would be the most useful thing to do is out of all the clutter in the context of that time to understand it at that time and and save that does that make sense I have some thoughts there was a like a aesthetic music scene that emerged in 2011 2012 that's become quite big called Vaporwave and that seemed to come out of like a net art tumbler type community and that all the stuff sort of happened online it's like pretty internationalised sort of base of artists making this style of music and imagery but when you go back to look at the the sites where these with these these internet community spread came out that they don't exist anymore there's no there's no record of any of it so yeah in terms of my practice stuff like that's already happened and it's come and gone because it comes and goes on the internet so yeah like a lot of sort of stuff of you know goes down on like 4chan and you know these sort of places of ill repute but um yeah so that's the worst has already happened in my opinion for some some of these kind of internet art movements that have kind of disappeared the worst the worst disappearance right so that they've got oh yeah like the you the you it comes and it's it's born on the internet it dies on the internet but you don't you don't get to see the start of it because no one you know no one picked it up yep thank you well it's a great meme archive that's you know how old memes are yeah i think it's um it's probably quite similar answer to Luke in terms of yeah that how that sort of stuff yeah within within sort of webcomic community you know if especially if it's sort of like a self-hosted comic it's very easy for an artist to say have a you know decide that they actually they don't want to share their work anymore and just pull it all down and so yeah it can you know and then that's just sort of gone from from the internet or you know reshared as lower and lower quality jpegs cross time with names cropped off yeah like loss of attribution to comics is a huge thing with with work being shared by like literally aggregate accounts that that then sort of strip the strip the names off quite often intentionally in order to get you know hundreds of thousands more more attention you know more retweets more more reblogs then the original artist meanwhile the original artist is not even being able to make a living off of their their hard work but you know that this is fine dogs so you should know all know one web comic that someone made about I made this and then the guy the text is like no I made this but I've seen that without the watermark and it's like they just you know yeah exactly yeah it's become its own it's sort of its own reference to itself so yeah so I think that's that's something that I think is is a is a huge challenge for the community now which isn't really what you ask but it's sort of really how do you find out if your works being stolen yeah usually like a a dedicated wee fan will will find it and then they'll they'll sort of shoulder tap you and be like did you know this Chinese website is selling t-shirts with your work on it and it's like oh oh they shouldn't be doing that yeah so or yeah this has been shared thousands of times from this you know this other other sort of yeah problem account and and the people who do it don't think that they're doing anything wrong because it's just the internet and it's just pictures on the internet and there's what's copyright I've never heard of that so yeah we we probably have time for one more question if there is if there's any remaining one more question as I hand up the bag there we'll try and be succinct if we can just we've got five more minutes I have a question for Nicky you talked about how you've got quite a lot of sensitive information and that you might potentially have to destroy that do you not feel that you have a duty to protect that from censorship? Very fair question I've got two competing duties I've got the duty which is that I owe it to history and future people that they can see it and I've some time and I've got the duty to the people who who gave me things you know sometimes sometimes in the little ways and sometimes by the gigabyte that I promised I would protect their their identity forever and I'm saying I don't know the answer and and out of those obligations I suppose I'll tell the truth out of those obligations if I had to choose I'll destroy it I can't get out of that but I wish there was an option E of CME All right so I think we're basically a time so you know for me this has been a phenomenally illuminating session I'm grateful that we are recording this because I know that I've heard more than I can kind of process while sitting here and trying to absorb the things that you guys have said and for me the main things that I was kind of hearing is that deleting isn't a thing as we move into digital work streams so we just end up with more stuff we can't we don't do the same rigors of the paper archive of weeding on the way we just kind of don't delete it and kind of move into another bigger pile and that's going to cause us a problem when we move into the future and I really enjoyed the commentary around practice and recording of one's own practice and recording it to share and particular the conversations around the structure of object even back to original sources in the written material for me there's a theme there and absolutely enamored by the idea of seeing someone else's rubbish bin that's kind of like stuck with me I wrote it in big letters and draw lots of circles around it because I thought it was very cool so anyway I've really enjoyed the session and I hope you all join me in thanking our panel for a really really amazing conversation I could have spent another hour having this unfortunately we don't so thank you very much for giving up your time and joining us today thank you