Bomb-proofing the Digital Image: An Archaeology of Media Preservation Infrastructure

Journal of the New Media Caucus | ISSN: 1942-017X

Bomb-proofing the Digital Image: An Archaeology of MediaPreservation InfrastructureBrian Michael MurphyPh.D. Candidate and Presidential Fellow, Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University

The Corbis Film Preservation Facility (CFPF) houses tens of millions of paper photographs,film negatives, glass plate negatives, historical newspapers, and other media in arefrigerated vault, located 220 feet underground in a former limestone mine. Corbis is one ofthe two largest image resource companies in the world (rivaled only by Getty Images), andglobally distributes digital content for advertising, book illustrations, documentaries, andother audiovisual products. The CFPF is one of many vaults within the larger Iron Mountainsecure records and data storage facility in Boyers, PA. Both the CFPF and Iron Mountainreflect a broader network of securitized facilities built in the United States since thebeginning of the Cold War, which collectively comprise the nation’s media preservationinfrastructure. In this essay, I use a media archaeological approach to examine theemergence of this infrastructure in the early 1950s and to contextualize the CFPF’spreservation and distribution of digital images. I argue that the material constituents of themedia preservation infrastructure – the Cold War bomb shelters converted into secure datastorage vaults, the former iron ore mines that house fine art as well as microfilm records ofbanks and insurance companies – are important sites for contextualizing the digital imagesthat now circulate seemingly fluidly, effortlessly, ‘immaterially,’ and perpetually in the globalimage environment.

The reliable transmission of digitized imagery relies not only upon fiber-optic cables, servers,and wireless transmitters, but also the stone caverns and reinforced steel-and-concretevaults in which those networks of hardware are embedded and secured. Thus, the CFPF, andsimilar facilities, reveal the way in which digital images are emphatically material. Thismateriality is comprised of hard drives and other recently developed informationtechnologies, and the ruins, remnants, and residual architectures of previous modes ofresource extraction, production, and national security regimes that continue to shape mediapreservation practice today.

Bomb-proofing the Digital Image: An Archaeology of Media Pr... http://median.newmediacaucus.org/art-infrastructures-hardware...

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Fig. 1. Corbis Film Preservation Facility Office, 2013, Brian Michael Murphy, digital photograph, © BrianMichael Murphy

I visited the CFPF in October 2013, and spent a week in the underground office. I lookedthrough thousands of archival photographs, shattered and taped glass negatives, pristineclippings from Civil War editions of Harper’s Weekly, and also took a tour of the larger IronMountain facility. In order to visit the CFPF, I had to pre-arrange a day and time with aCorbis employee, who then added my name to Iron Mountain’s list of approved guests. Asinstructed by my host at Corbis, I arrived at Iron Mountain, pulled off of the main road andparked my car on the left, entered the front office, and traded my ID for a badge, which Iwas to turn in at the end of the day. Behind the glass of the security office sat an attendant,and behind her was a row of very large, semi-automatic rifles – Iron Mountain has a securityrating of 4 (the White House and the Pentagon are rated at 5). [1] Once I had acquired mybadge, I returned to my car to wait for my host to drive out of the facility. I then followedher through security, where an armed guard searched her car, then mine, and directed meto proceed to the next gate, where the tire-flattening spikes were laid flat and, one car at atime, the arm of the security gate raised to let us through. The entrance into the belly of themountain is only wide enough for one vehicle, so a traffic light system prevents cars fromexiting and entering at the same time. After about six minutes of winding slowly through thecaverns of the former limestone mine, passing vaults containing Warner Brothers classics,the backup archive of everything HBO has produced, all of Stephen Spielberg’s interviews


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with Holocaust survivors, the records of the U.S. Patent Office, and plenty of unmarkedvaults, we reached the parking spaces outside the CFPF. No pictures are allowed until youare inside the CFPF office, thus I do not have photographs of the outside or the inside of theIron Mountain facility, only the CFPF office, with its stone walls, temperature-controlledcaverns, its heavily securitized underground space where thousands of images are digitized.

I draw my understanding of infrastructure from the recent work of Lisa Parks, and otherinsights from the diverse field of media archaeology. In her essay, “Stuff You Can Kick:Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures,” she defines physical infrastructure as “thematerial sites and objects that are organized to produce a larger, dispersed yet integratedsystem for distributing material of value, whether water, electrical currents, or audiovisualsignals.” [2] She develops a “critical methodology for analyzing the significance of specificinfrastructural sites and objects in relation to surrounding environmental, socio-economic,and geopolitical conditions.” [3] The term infrastructure, as opposed to network,“emphasizes materiality and physicality and as such challenges us to consider the specificlocations, installations, hardware, and processes through which audiovisual signals aretrafficked.” Parks’s infrastructural approach applies readily to my consideration of Cold Warpreservation infrastructure, where paper and microfilm vital records traveled in armoredtrucks along the infrastructural paths of highways to infrastructural locations like CFPF. Inthe body of her essay, Parks analyzes not only contemporary cases, such the undergroundeconomy of DIY digital satellite dishes in Tehran, but historical ones, such as a mail-bagsorting room operated by the U.S. Postal Service, to address the complexity of mediainfrastructures. Just as the mail-bag sorting room is an “infrastructural object” that is part ofa “media infrastructure” (the postal system), the CFPF is an infrastructural object that is partof the media preservation infrastructure. [4]

To contextualize digital images it is important to consider the infrastructural spaces ofpreservation that preserve not only digital images stored on servers, but the fiber-opticcables, electrical wiring and wireless transmitters used to distribute them throughout theglobal image environment. The CFPF preserves, digitizes, and distributes several importantarchives of 20th century photography and art, including the Bettmann Archive, the archivesof United Press International (including predecessors Acme and International News Photos),Outline celebrity photography, the John Springer collection and the work of many otherphotographers, such as William Rau, the Pach Brothers, and Lynn Goldsmith. In her book,The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources, Cynthia Bozak challenges the“notion that digital images are immaterial; like analog forms, digital is industrial and eachimage consumed bears a material life.” [5] Bozak pushes beyond debates about thetruth-value of digital images, their difference from analog photographs in terms of ontologyor (im)materiality, to assert the “ecological difference between analog and digital forms ofimages,” differences that “exist primarily in the physical infrastructure and residual lives ofeach.” [6] She also locates a key difference between analog and digital in “the machinery orsupport systems” which include not only the camera, but also “the computer, its softwareand hardware.” [7]

Where Bozak’s work is centrally focused on the environmental stakes of film production andthe natural resources consumed to produce filmic images, whether analog or digital, I amconcerned with the historical development of the media preservation infrastructure thatenables the distribution of digital imagery, and the media archaeological layers materially


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embedded in the spaces of preservation that comprise this infrastructure. Parks, who alsodraws upon Bozak’s work, writes that media infrastructures are difficult to analyze becausethey are “difficult to visualize in [their] entirety within a single frame” and because they aredensely layered. Parks writes that “[m]edia infrastructures are not just a product of the mostcontemporary technological formations of the digital age; they should be thought about in anhistorical and intermedial sense. That is, media infrastructures demand a consideration ofthe ways that distribution processes have emerged, changed, and been layered upon oneanother over time, how they are part of a media archaeology.” [8] The iconic digital imagesgenerated by and distributed from CFPF rely upon the bombproof, underground, securitized,refrigerated spaces of preservation that constitute critical nodes in the media preservationinfrastructure. Thus, the stone caverns, fireproof vaults, reinforced steel and concreteconstruction of these spaces are understudied material constituents of digital images. Muchof the media preservation infrastructure is underground – the refrigerated spaces and theirtentacular cables buried, fireproof vaults often inaccessible to researchers – but exampleslike the CFPF are exceptions that provide opportunities to visualize this otherwise vastlyinvisible media preservation infrastructure.

Fig. 2. #3 (Corbis Film Preservation Facility), 2009, Christian Andersson, MDF board, glass, plastic, paper,paint, electric lights, 90 x 42 x 25 cm. Installation: Christian Andersson, Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm,Sweden, 2009. Photo ©Terje Östling (Used with permission, Courtesy of Christian Andersson and GalerieNordenhake Berlin / Stockholm.)

Christian Andersson’s sculpture/installation #3 (Corbis Film Preservation Facility) (2009)


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invokes the invisibility of much of the media preservation infrastructure with a black boxprotruding from the wall, through which the viewer can gaze upon a miniature scene withinthe CFPF – rows of file cabinets flanked by the whitish gray stone walls of the undergroundspace. The CFPF in this work is literally a miniature component of a much larger space ofmedia preservation, much of it secret, not appearing on most maps, including a growingnumber of spaces that are literally dark. On my tour of Iron Mountain, my guide pointed outa number of vaults for energy-saving “lights-out” server rooms, where hard drives storeinformation in dark, unstaffed vaults. In the event of data loss or the crash of, say, MarriottHotels’s local servers, these backup resources would restore the corporation’s files to ensurebusiness continuity.

Fig. 3. #3 (Corbis Film Preservation Facility), 2009, Christian Andersson, MDF board, glass, plastic, paper,paint, electric lights, 90 x 42 x 25 cm. Installation: Christian Andersson, Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm,Sweden, 2009. Photo ©Federico Baronello (Used with permission, Courtesy of Christian Andersson andGalerie Nordenhake Berlin / Stockholm.)

In Andersson’s Corbis, the image of the CFPF is technically a kind of diorama, but thepositioning of a single viewer in front of the black box recalls the voyeuristic experiences ofengaging early film technology, such as the Kinetoscope. Instead of a peep show flashing theexposed flesh of a dancer, the viewer sees a solid block of file cabinets that withhold theirimagery from view. Behind the cabinets looms an impenetrable wall of rock that preservesthe images by making them both inaccessible and bombproof, freezing them in therefrigerated space of the archive in order to freeze them in time. If photographs were trulystable slices of frozen reality, we would not need sites like the CFPF and the broader mediapreservation infrastructure. Such sites, like Andersson’s Corbis, highlights the vulnerability ofimages that require such preservation efforts. Corbis positions the ostensible viewer not as a


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powerful gaze dominating the small scene, but as a powerless spectator standing outside,and unable to enter, the fortified space that contains the visual archive of much recenthistory. Corbis is emblematic of the cold, formidable spaces of the media preservationinfrastructure that now house many photographic archives, both analog and digital, andprovide the material conditions of possibility for the massive digitization of historical images.Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and the sole owner of Corbis, built the CFPF when he realizedthat digitizing the Bettmann Archive alone would take decades, and that many of the imageswould deteriorate by then, unless refrigerated and protected. [9] The images in theBettmann Archive are, thus, both private and corporate property – members of the publicmust be granted permission to view them.


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Fig. 4. #3 (Corbis Film Preservation Facility), 2009, Christian Andersson, MDF board, glass, plastic, paper,


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paint, electric lights, 90 x 42 x 25 cm. Installation: Christian Andersson, Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm,Sweden, 2009. Photo ©Terje Östling (Used with permission, Courtesy of Christian Andersson and GalerieNordenhake Berlin / Stockholm.)

The digital images generated by the CFPF issue from a space that is highly surveilled,securitized, and difficult to access, one that is both a product of Cold War infrastructure anddigital age technology. The media preservation infrastructure emerged in the early Cold Warthrough repurposing remnants and ruins of previous modes of production. For instance, thefirst facility of Iron Mountain, Inc. was located in upstate New York, in a former iron oremine, once used to produce horseshoes, cannons, cannonballs and bullets for the UnionArmy during the Civil War. Herman Knaust founded the company, originally called IronMountain Atomic Storage Corporation (IMASC), when he built a secure records storagefacility in the mine in the Catskills, 125 miles from New York City. The facility housed vitalrecords and microfilm duplicates for banks, insurance companies, and other corporations,and also included underground living facilities for executives of large companies likeStandard Oil. One atomic bomb expert called the facility “the safest place in the world.” [11]Its high level of safety derived from three factors: 1) its distance from a target city thatwould likely be bombed in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack 2) its underground location,reinforced steel and concrete construction, and fireproof vaults 3) its heavily securitizedoperation, which included 24-hour surveillance and a team of guards armed with .45 caliberpistols and tommy guns. IMASC met a major need of corporations during the Cold War, theneed to preserve their vital records in impervious spaces of preservation to ensure theirbusiness continuity – the reconstruction of their business history, the re-building of theirfacilities and equipment, and the resumption of production as soon as possible after anuclear attack.

Since its founding, IMASC expanded to other facilities, eventually changed hands, wasre-named Iron Mountain, Inc., and has now acquired many of its largest competitors. TheIron Mountain facility in Boyers, PA, where the CFPF is located, was originally a limestonemine for U.S. Steel, and was converted into a secure, bombproof records storage center byNational Underground Storage in the late 1950s. Iron Mountain purchased it in 1998. Thedense historical layers of the Iron Mountain facility pose a challenge to contextualization, asthe Cold War architecture of the past is as present in its underground spaces of preservationas the digital age technology of servers and fiber optic cables that now fill these spaces.These mutually embedded layers from seemingly distinct historical eras now constitute,equally and coevally, the materiality of digital images. Media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst,discusses how a specific media object – a radio manufactured under the Nazi regime – canbe so densely layered that historical divisions between the object’s past and presentdissolve:

“From the media-archaeological viewpoint…the cultural life span of a medium is not thesame as its operational life span: a radio built in Germany during the National Socialistregime…receives radio programs when operated today, since the stable technologicalinfrastructure of broadcasting media is still in operation. There is no ‘historical’ difference inthe functioning of the apparatus now and then (and there will not be, until analogue radio is,finally, completely replaced by the digitized transmission of signals); rather, there is amedia-archaeological short circuit between otherwise historically clearly separated times.”[10]

In a parallel fashion, infrastructural sites like Iron Mountain in Boyers, which was used


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during the Cold War to house microfilm and paper records and is now used to preserve anddistribute digital data, “short-circuit” the separation between their Cold War past and theirdigital present.

The media preservation infrastructure that emerged during the Cold War expanded not onlythrough re-purposing abandoned mines and railway tunnels, but through the construction ofnew spaces meant to ensure the continuity of business and the continuity of government inthe event of an atomic attack. The Bunker at The Greenbrier Resort in White SulphurSprings, WV (which I will refer to hereafter as The Bunker) was an underground falloutshelter for all members of Congress, built with reinforced concrete and steel, stocked withpreserved food and water, and equipped with air conditioning and purification systems.Similar to the original Iron Mountain facility, as well as the one in Boyers, The Bunker haddiesel generators to backup its electrical supply, as well as a communications center sostatesmen could deliver messages to the American public, and a large open room that wouldbe filled with desks and chairs and become a workspace for Congressional aides in the eventof a nuclear attack. [12] The federal government was a major force in the emergence ofpreservation infrastructure, both through its construction of a number of facilities like TheBunker for sheltering the President and military leaders – a network known as the FederalArc – as well as through its ideological commitment to, and financial incentivization of, theconstruction of similar facilities for state, county, and local authorities. The federalgovernment offered these authorities matching funds for the construction of EmergencyOperating Centers – securitized locations from which officials would continue to rule theirconstituencies, allocate scarce resources, and enforce the social order in the wake of anuclear attack. [13]

The Bunker is emblematic not only of the emergence of preservation infrastructure duringthe Cold War, but also of transformations in preservation infrastructure in the digital age.The federal government decommissioned the Bunker in 1996, four years after investigativejournalist Ted Gup exposed it through an article in The Washington Post, [14] and completecontrol of the Bunker reverted to CSX, the railroad corporation that owned The GreenbrierResort and The Bunker (the government had always leased it from CSX). The Bunker wasnever activated and used during the Cold War, and it is only in the digital age that itsreinforced rooms have found a purpose integral to the daily operations of American life.Beyond now being a tourist attraction, the Bunker is also a secure data center owned byrailroad giant CSX, where a number of Fortune 500 companies store digital records onservers in underground spaces originally meant to protect the bodies of Congressmen fromradioactive contamination and the social disorder that Americans imagined would reign onthe ground after an atomic attack. Cold War bunkers, in their digital afterlives as datacenters, have proven to be far more crucial to ensuring the continuity of government andbusiness than in their rather eventless operations during the hottest moments of the ColdWar. As a 2008 article in The Economist made clear, “Data centers are essential to nearlyevery industry and have become as vital to the functions of society as power stations are.”[15]


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Fig. 5. Bunker Receipt for Electronic Devices, 2012, Brian Michael Murphy, digital photograph ©BrianMichael Murphy.

I visited The Greenbrier Resort in March 2012 and took a tour of The Bunker. Nophotographs of The Bunker are allowed. Before I could join the tour, I had to turn in my cellphone, for which I received a receipt, so that I could retrieve it when the tour was over.According to my guide, the servers in the data center receive much of their information fromsatellite transmissions, and cell phones must be surrendered before entering the facility sothat they do not interfere with these transmissions. The doors to the server rooms are notmarked with signage, only numbers that are meaningless to tourists, though I assume theyare codes for various corporate clients. The Fortune 500 companies create billions of digitalimages per day in the form of pdfs, and federal legislation requires corporations to preservea larger amount of their records and internal correspondence than ever before. The Bunkerstill has its 27-ton “blast door,” but where endless stacks of C-rations once filled a longtunnel, only empty boxes and styrofoam padding for servers and monitors now litter theground. The two decontamination showers still sit unused at the entrance, once stocked withmedicated soap to remove radioactive particles, as does the “pathological waste incinerator,”an oven with the heating power to transform garbage to vapor and ash, and to cremate acorpse, if necessary. [16]

Many other decommissioned, underground, Cold War bunkers have been recentlyre-purposed by state agencies and corporations. During the Cold War, Mount Pony in


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Culpeper, Virginia, was a Federal Reserve facility that housed $3 billion dollars in U.S.currency in shrink-wrapped cubes on wooden pallets, intended to replenish money suppliesin the event that a large-scale nuclear attack destroyed a significant amount of currency.[17] Mount Pony no longer stores currency, but is now the site of the Library of CongressNational Audiovisual Conservation Center (NAVCC), which serves as the nerve center of theLibrary’s digitization and digital distribution activities, as well as the site where it stores thebulk of its audiovisual collections. Journalistic accounts of visits to the facility emphasize thescale of its collections and preservation efforts, as well as the infrastructural componentsthat make such activities possible, the “miles of cable, which will send digital information” toa “separate backup in Manassas, Virginia” and “pipe different varieties of electronic mediaback to D.C. for public access”; an “electronic hub” that required “27,000 cables”; and“something like the worlds largest TiVo”: 100 DVRs recording and archiving television shows.[18] Originally, when Hewlett-Packard heir David Packard approached Librarian of CongressJames Billington about creating the National Audiovisual Conservation Center, they settledon a facility that had previously served as “an outpost for intercepting atomic attack.”However, the discovery of a rare bird nesting in the ruins of the facility led to a group ofenvironmentally-aware third graders to successfully lobby Billington not to use the facility, inorder to preserve the bird. Similar to this atomic “outpost,” Mount Pony, according toBillington, “was deserted when we got it.” [19]

Digitization requires infrastructure, and, specifically, it requires spaces of preservation likethe CFPF and NAVCC that securitize and preserve analog collections, much of which willlikely never be digitized due to the infrastructural burden that comprehensive digitizationprojects would create. CFPF has only digitized approximately 250,000 of the over 10 millionimages in the Bettmann Archive, not to mention the other several million analog imagespreserved there. [20] The NAVCC must be selective about what it digitizes, and even so, italready generates 3 to 5 petabytes of data per year. In a recent article, Ken Weissman,Supervisor of the Film Preservation Laboratory at the Library of Congress, contemplated thepossible consequences of moving entirely to digitization as the means of preserving film,rather than continuing to perform film-to-film transfers. [21] In a series of calculations hecalls “really, really scary,” Weissman estimates that a typical archival scan of a color filmresults in about 128 MB per frame; with digital restoration data included, along with initialscans, each film comprises 48 TB. To digitize the 30,000 titles in the nitrate film collectionalone would generate 1.44 exabytes of data. In order to protect the digitized images in a“deep archive,” much of this data would need to be offloaded in a SAN or Storage AreaNetwork. While pulling data out of the deep archive “depends upon the speed of the digitalinfrastructure,” Weissman wrote that in 2011 moving even a single terabyte into the deeparchive for post-processing would take between 3 to 5 hours. He deeply questions thefeasibility of then migrating that data every five years (which would be required in order toprevent data loss through format obsolescence), and is astounded by the unsustainability ofthe general wisdom he’s heard “at several conferences and meetings in the last couple ofyears where people are saying, ‘No, no, no, no you want to have at least TWO backupcopies.’ On separate servers, separate geographic locations, the whole bit, because a singlebackup that you make might not be able to be restored. You want the second backup, just incase.”

As difficult as it may be to fathom, facilities like the CFPF and NAVCC are actually rathermodest sites within the broader media preservation infrastructure that stores and distributes


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digital images, a network that includes the data centers of large corporations like Facebookand Google. In the course of his attempt to estimate how many photos have ever beentaken, Jonathan Good reported in 2011 that Facebook already had 140 billion photos in itscollection, which is “over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress.” [22] Of course,the clandestine digital image collections of the National Security Agency, Federal Bureau ofInvestigation, and Central Intelligence Agency, likely dwarf even Facebook’s massiveholdings, though it is impossible to precisely assess these rather significant sites in themedia preservation infrastructure. [23] What is certain is that the vast majority of digitalimages reside in data centers, which, even though many do not reside in the ruins of ColdWar bunkers, still bear the legacy of the Cold War in that they are often located in remote,‘non-target areas,’ originally demarcated as such by civil defense planners trying to predictwhere Soviet bombs would strike and to pre-emptively disperse key industries and distributeinfrastructure so as to render the nation less vulnerable to incapacitation.

In his book Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt illuminates the ways in which the digital ageinherits and makes use of preservation infrastructure from the Cold War. He characterizesdata centers as “contemporary incarnation[s] of the Cold War architectural ethos”; they arethe “physical housing of websites” and provide “security, redundancy, and anonymity.” [24]In Galison’s view, the internet that relies upon these data centers for its existence “grewdirectly out of fifteen years of longing for a world still standing after thermonuclear war.”[25] It is now commonplace to point out the roots of internet technology in the military-industrial complex, but Galison is saying more than that: the internet, its imaginary andmaterial infrastructures, grow out of longing, out of a desire to preserve what is. Thepreservation infrastructure of the Cold War (which was meant to preserve not only mediaand vital records, but bodies, communications technology, currency, pharmaceuticals, gold,and national art treasures) is now being integrated into the media preservationinfrastructure of the digital age, and thus provides key conditions of possibility for the delugeof digital images that saturate the global visual environment.

The CFPF, like other spaces of preservation, in its reinforced construction, securitization, andsecrecy evokes the existence of a formidable set of threats. This is the magic of preservationinfrastructure: during the Cold War, its reinforced, bombproof spaces seemed to certify theirown necessity; during the digital age, that preservation infrastructure now is necessary tothe corporate, political, and social continuity of American life. The fireproof steel-and-concrete vaults of Iron Mountain and the Bunker were never actually necessary duringthe Cold War that produced them – they prepared America against the threat of Sovietbombs that never arrived. Now, in the digital age, nearly every transaction – whetherpolitical, financial, or social – relies upon media preservation infrastructure, upon the datacenters and related elements embedded in the material and imaginary remnants and ruins ofthe Cold War. The so-called ‘cloud’ does not exist immaterially in the air above our heads butresides very materially in these remote, reinforced, underground, transcendent spaces ofpreservation within a vast media preservation infrastructure that grew out of hauntings ofdestruction, fears of radioactive contamination, and has now been re-purposed to reflect ourcurrent fears, hopes, and persistent, impossible desires for permanent media invulnerable tothe forces of (cyber)terrorism, natural disasters, and the indomitable force of decay thatinheres in all media. [27]

The media preservation infrastructure will continue to expand into the hollow underground


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caverns and abandoned bunkers of previous modes of production and national securityregimes as long as digital information is generated as prolifically and exponentially as iscurrently the case. A recent article that commends the NAVCC on its “green” architecturalprinciples forecasts a haunting direction for this seemingly inevitable expansion: “With therecent announcement that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and various related‘black areas’ will close imminently, perhaps these mistaken monuments can find similarlyhopeful uses as the [NAVCC]’s former bunker – and be adapted with equal skill.” [28] Such aconversion would not be entirely unprecedented, at least in the realm of the Americancultural imaginary in the Cold War and War on Terror, two periods increasingly blending andshort-circuiting their historical separation through their material embeddedness in mediapreservation infrastructure. For instance, in Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s 1962novel, Fail-Safe, a character predicts that the most likely survivors of a nuclear apocalypsewould be insurance file clerks in fireproof vaults and “the most hardened of convicts, those insolitary confinement.” [29]

In the conversion of Guantánamo into a media preservation site, the mediating function ofthe penal architecture would no longer contain the threat of terrorists but instead keep thatthreat on the outside of the fortified space. This flexibility of sites within the mediapreservation infrastructure – their ability to mediate threats from inside and/or outside theirsecuritized spaces – facilitates their continual repurposing according to new mediapreservation requirements, against new threats, within a shifting set of geopolitical tensions.If the cells of Guantánamo Bay ever do become the vaults of a data center, we will bewitnessing not a radically unprecedented development, but a continuation and intensificationof an ongoing process that converts residual spaces – left behind by previous modes ofproduction and abandoned by previous national security regimes – originally meant topreserve bodies into spaces that preserve data. The stone walls, underground roadways,blast doors, and observation towers of the media preservation infrastructure are indifferentto what they protect, and what threats they protect those contents from. The iconic imagesdigitized and distributed by the CFPF – Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue at the camera,Marilyn Monroe struggling to hold down her up-blown skirt, Rosa Parks seated on aBirmingham bus – come into existence in and through materials that include not only harddrives and cables where ones and zeroes flicker and pulse, but also the bombproofarchitectures that house this hardware, the ruined monuments of Cold War bunkers thatshelter the flickering image-worlds of the digital age.

References

1. On a tour of Iron Mountain, my guide informed me about the security rating of the facility.2. Lisa Parks, “‘Stuff You Can Kick’: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures,” Humanitiesand the Digital, eds. David Theo Goldberg and Patrik Svensson (Cambridge: MIT Press,forthcoming), 1.3. Parks, 1-2.4. Parks, 4.5. Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (NewBrunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 12. Also cited in Parks, “Stuff.”6. Bozak, 18-19. Bozak engages most directly with William J. Mitchell’s seminal book, TheReconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).For more on the scholarly debates about various issues surrounding digital images, see The


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Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), especially the essays: SarahKember, “‘The Shadow of the Object’: Photography and Realism”; Geoffrey Batchen,“Photogenics”; and Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography.”7. Bozak, 19.8. Parks, 5.9. Sarah Boxer “A Century’s Photo History Destined for Life in a Mine,” The New York Times,April 15, 2001, accessed April 15, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/15/national/15BETT.html?searchpv=site01&pagewanted=all10. Wolfgang Ernst, “Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History andNarrative of Media,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds.Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley, LA, London: University of California Press,2011), 240. I am not as focused on the microphysical technological and mathematicalprocesses as Ernst; my tendency is to trace continuities and ruptures within thedevelopment of media preservation technology and infrastructure. I think that media historyand media archaeology can be more compatible than he suggests, even if they aresomewhat paradoxical, or even contradictory approaches. For more on Ernst’s approach, seehis essays in his collection Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2012). See especially “Archives in Transition: Dynamic MediaMemories”; “Discontinuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multimedia Space?”;as well as Jussi Parikka’s introduction to the volume, “Archival Media Theory: AnIntroduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology.”11. Don Wharton, “The Safest Place in the World,” The Saturday Evening Post. March 22,1952. pp. 138-140.12. Beyond Robert S. Conte’s history of the Greenbrier, I draw much information on TheBunker from the guided tour as well as souvenirs I received as a part of the tour, including abrochure called Project Greek Island, which summarized a large amount of the informationpresented on the tour.13. David Monteyne, Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 211-212.14. Ted Gup, “The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway.” The Washington Post. May 31, 1992.15. “Down on the server farm.” The Economist. May 22, 2008. http://www.economist.com/node/11413148.16. Gup, “Ultimate.”17. David Sokol, “Coming Out of the Dark: A former Federal Reserve bunker protects adifferent kind of currency,” Greensource, March 2009, accessed April 15, 2014,http://greensource.construction.com/features/solutions/0903/0903_FederalReserveBunker.asp.18. Richard von Busack, Cinema Saver: David Packard of Stanford Theatre gives millions tonational film-preservation effort,” metroactive, September 5, 2007, accessed April 15, 2014,http://www.metroactive.com/metro/09.05.07/film-restoration-0736.html; JacquelineTrescott “A Sound Investment: Packard Heir Gives Library of Congress Va. Facility for Audioand Film Treasures,” The Washington Post, July 27, 2007, accessed April 15, 2014,http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/27/AR2007072700160.html19. von Busack, “Cinema.”20. “Corbis’ Film Preservation Facility at Iron Mountain & the Bettmann Archive: FrequentlyAsked Questions, Updated April 2013.” When I arranged my visit to CFPF, I received thisdocument from an administrator at the CFPF.


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21. Ken Weissman, “Film Preservation at the Library of Congress Packard Campus for AudioVisual Conservation,” AMIA Tech Review 2, (October 2010).22. Jonathan Good, “1000memories blog” http://blog.1000memories.com/94-number-of-photos-ever-taken-digital-and-analog-in-shoebox23. Peter Galison suggested in 2004 that “about five times as many pages are being addedto the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning,including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largestrepositories on the planet.” See his article, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 31, No 1(Autumn 2004): 229-243.24. Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America.(Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 203. Writing of other locations, he says that“If Cold War facilities such as Site R and Mount Weather were meant to protect the enduringsurvival of a network of command and control–providing a redundant ‘back-up’ if anotherelement was destroyed–the data centers are similarly quasi-visible fortresses protecting anetwork that itself has no physical expression.” 198-199.25. Peter Galison, “War against the Center,” Grey Room 4 (Summer 2001): 5-33. 28. 26.For more on industrial dispersion that imagined target areas and non-target areas within thenational space, see Galison, “War,” as well as Kenneth Rose, One Nation Underground: TheFallout Shelter in American Culture (New York and London: NYU Press, 2001), especially“Chapter 2: The Nuclear Apocalyptic,” pp. 38-77. 27. For more on the materiality of thecloud and its physical location in a proliferating network of data centers, see Paul T. Jaeger,Jimmy Lin, Justin M. Grimes, and Shannon N. Simmons. “Where is the cloud? Geography,economics, environment, and jurisdiction in cloud computing,” First Monday 14, No 5, May 42009, accessed April 15, 2014, http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2456/2171. Also cited in Parks, “Stuff.”28. Sokol.29. Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Fail-Safe (Hopewell: ECCO, 1999, reprint edition;originally published 1962), 122.

Bio

Brian Michael Murphy is a Ph.D. Candidate and Presidential Fellow in Comparative Studies atThe Ohio State University. His research focuses on time capsules created during theDepression; bombproof records storage facilities built in the Cold War; digital preservationefforts in the contemporary moment, and how preservation practices develop in relation tobroader national, cultural, and racial anxieties. He is also a poet, and his work has beenpublished in the Birmingham Poetry Review, SLAB, Kenning Journal, and CHEST, amongother publications. He blogs for the Kenyon Review Online, and in the summers, he teachescreative writing in The Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. In 2013, he founded anonline magazine and blog, 20 LENSES, which features writing on film, books, and othermedia, all of it around 20 years [email protected]


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Bomb-proofing the Digital Image: An Archaeology of Media Preservation Infrastructure

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