The Floppy Disk Museum: XFR STN Is a Fantastic Project to Preserve Proto-Digital Art

Right now through September 8, the New Museum is home to an experiment in digital preservation. XFR STN is marketed as part art exhibition, part public service project seeking to conserve, distribute, and thereby reinvigorate content trapped within the confines of long-dead media.

Artists with work on floppy disks, old hard drives, or other accepted forms of archaic storage can make an appointment on the New Museum website and, in the case of moving images, have their work transferred to the wonderful repository of digital archaeology that is the Internet Archive.

Purely from a monetary standpoint, the venture could be described as “ludicrous.” But that’s part of the allure: it is a democratization of the otherwise pricey process of digital preservation.

As new storage technology rapidly develops, older forms, and the material they contain, usually die a slow and ignoble death under people’s beds or hidden in the backs of closets. XFR STN acts as a catalyst for people not just to remember their old files and projects, but to save them before it’s too late.

Doing so can sometimes amount to some unexpected emotions. Mary Beth Coudal brought in several tapes of her 1990s community access television show. Of her transferring experience, she wrote, “I cannot tell you how affirmed I felt in those three hours in the media and edit suites. … Art’s not about dead white male artists, but it’s about living artists, even middle-aged women like me, with a backpack full of old SVHS tapes from the ‘90s.”

Some of the videos from the project have already been posted on the XFR STN collection of archive.org. So far, the slowly growing archive is living up its creators’ expectations of being “chance-driven and yet, … revelatory.” Below is a small sampling of some of the disorienting and evocative videos for your perusal:

Human Vectors (1982) by Dov Jacobson. (Rhizome, which is also deeply involved with XFR STN, spoke with Jacobson about the creation of this piece.)

lsm_one (1996) by Philip Sanders.

Juan in the City (1980) by Mitch Corber.