A World Heritage site always attracts a lot of attention. Such archaeological sites are viewed to materially represent irreplaceable ‘heritage’ on a global scale and are defined and protected through the United Nations’s UNESCO declarations (eg. UNESCO 1988). Teotihuacan, Mexico is no exception (Video 1). Replete with two monumental pyramids (the Pyramid of the Sun being the 3rd largest Pyramidal structure in the world) set amidst the ruins of a once densely populated, urbanized city (the first of its kind in Mesoamerica), “Teotihuacan”, or the “place where the gods were born” as the Aztec later identified it, has attracted, both historically and contemporaneously, a broad range of interests.
Video 1
As most of us may personally attest to in visiting these world monuments, such interests run the gamut from the archaeological
Figure 5.2
to new age spiritualism. Figure 5.3/Video 2)
video 2
Indeed, because of its material complexity Teotihuacan has historically been the venue for both groundbreaking archaeological projects (Millon 1964) and celestial celebrations. Similar to other prominent archaeological sites around the world (eg. Bender 1998, Carmichael 1994, Castañeda 1996, Hodder 2004), Teotihuacan looms large in 'new age' or spiritual practices and references (Webmoor forthcoming). Unfortunately, aside from a few anthropologists or social archaeologists, inadequate attention has been paid to these sites as material networks for popular culture. This is especially surprising at Teotihuacan, given that it has been a cornerstone of 'myth building' from prehispanic pilgrimages and oracles to 20th-century identity politics and continuing today (Boone 2000, Ruiz 1997, Vasconcelos 1925). Working at Teotihuacan, I often heard the phrase ‘yahoos’ being used to refer to the unsanctioned, occult practitioners who regularly gather at the site for rituals.
Enter , the billion dollar, international internet company based in the Silicon Valley of California. To celebrate the media giant’s 15th anniversary, Yahoo! announced that it would create a ‘time capsule’ to gather together a snap shot of contemporary human life. Beginning last October 10th, the search firm began collecting text, audio-visual and video contributions from any and all interested parties worldwide – estimated in analogue terms to represent about 5 million books worth of data (OCRegister 2006). Contributions were amassed on Yahoo!'s servers through remote uploading via the internet. Like the YouTube phenomenon, where "broadcasting yourself" has become a generational movement, the ease of uploading digital media from any networked location effected a pastiche of global sampling of local, often intimate, content. E-text poems, sound bytes of nature or birthday parties, mp3 songs, video clips of happy events, images of loved ones and so on. Contributors catalogued their submissions under various general themes appropriate to the capsule's digital record of human heritage - love, family, beauty, happiness, sorrow, faith, etc. Once sorted and archived, Yahoo! hired an internet artist to 'mashup', or mix all of the content using a dynamic, Flash program interface.
Figure 5.4
Through the end of October 2006, interested visitors or contributors could read/watch/listen to the collected content stored on Yahoo!s servers through this internet interface, as well as easily add their own with a mouse-click. But the server life of digital information is as yet uncertain. Indeed, a recent study warns there is not enough storage space for the estimated 161 billion gigabytes of digital information produced in 2006 (Wired 2006). Within archaeology, a discipline keen on preservation of and for the longterm, the server-life of digitized primary data, excavation reports, artifact collections and publications recently figured in a National Science Foundation funded symposium (Kintigh 2006). Theoretically, digital information, as mathmatized code, is impervious to media degradation (Manovich 2001:27-30). Initial enthusiasm for the 'digital turn' from old media to new media celebrated the possibility of endless replication without corruption (Chun and Keenan 2006). Binary code as a discreet and parsable 'language' can be endlessly 'uttered' without alteration (Manovich 2001: 51). This in contrast to analogue media, say ethnographic text, photographs, stratigraphic profiles, maps, or artifact drawings, which inexorably degrade as their celluloid or (even) acid-free paper media-carriers wear and age. And indeed the widespread emergence of digital media - whether digitization of analogue media into code via scanning or digital-original media as with digital cameras and video - does present a greater degree of media longevity. The line of a map may wear away, be torn off, bleed into shades of grey when wet; and with reproduction and publication, the tonal and continuous quality of analogue information (the edges of the printed line or chemical emulsions of photographic celluloid for example) makes especially vulnerable information conveyed in analogue to corruption. But digital information is discreet and quantified so that reproduction of a work becomes replication of numbers (viz. Benjamin 1970). In practical terms, however, this coding of digital information makes digital media beholden to computers; all new media, encompassing digital forms of older media, are nothing if not for computerization. That is, they require, at some point in their creation, rendering or display, computer assisted manipulation (Monovich 2001). Most often, this information permanently resides in digital databases on computer servers. We might say that computers are the ineliminable collaborators, or creative prostheses, for scholars, technicians and artists of the digital age. As a practical consequence, the fate of digital media is the fate of computers and their programs; and the fate of digital media stored on servers, for instance the fate of the digital heritage collected by Yahoo!, is the fate of server longevity. The bytes making up images, sound clips, video, or statistics must be 'back-uped' in case of crashes, migrated to new servers as technology upgrades, and protected from corruption-inducing spam robots. Moreover, digital media must still be 'lossy compressed' in order to accelerate their upload and retrieval across bandwidth connections linking remote servers. All of these factors pose issues of degradation and information loss.
So for Yahoo!, the server version of the time-capsule was to be only one component of the project. A ‘hard copy’ of the time capsule was buried on the Sunnyvale, California grounds of the corporate offices. But, in keeping with the ethos of ‘digital democracy’ inherent in the conception and content of the time capsule project, the company wanted to laser the digitized information in real-time as a public, physical event at a prominent locale. Where was this media-bundling to be beamed into space? You saw it coming. This Yahoo! chose the top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.
Figure 5.5
If the convergence of archaeology, high-tech corporations and 'lasering' sounds like a throwback to a 1970's science fiction plot, the inspiration for such an undertaking can't be far off. Following in the original steps of the affable ‘yahoo’ Carl Sagan, this digital time capsule was made in hopes of communicating to digitally attuned extraterrestrials the diversity of life and culture on earth. As a spokesperson for Yahoo! stated: the purpose was to join the "past and present with the universe's potential future by sharing today's culture on Earth with other life that may exist light years away" (Subzeroblue 2006). The reasoning for there choice of Teotihuacan was as follows: “We have this incredible ancient site and from that site we can project contemporary content," Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo!'s editor in chief, told Reuters. For those working in heritage management, the notion of popular culture utilizing the archaeological imaginary for consecration of events and beliefs offers little surprise. Archaeology historically derives from antiquarian popular engagements (Schnapp 1996) and, willingly or not, enervates the contemporary buzz at heritage sites. It is only the acknowledgment of this mutual relationship, fostering non-antagonistic consideration of all those participating in the archaeological imaginary (Bender 1998), that is relatively novel. "What is new", as Srinivasan continues, "is the ability to capture this information in such scale" (CNN 2006, my emphasis).
Yahoo!'s announcement to transmit the time capsule from Teotihuacan added more fodder for commentators in the ‘blogosphere’. Indeed, events transpired so quickly that only the news blogs seemed capable of updating the rapid developments. While the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), the Mexican government’s cultural heritage managers, initially granted permission for the time capsule project, they announced just two weeks before the digital gala that permission to go ahead was rescinded. A representative of INAH told Yahoo! that “we are the guardians of the heritage of Mexico. . .” and the event “posed technical and operational problems that might damage Teotihuacan” (C/Net News.com 2006). It was determined that the laser installation on the pyramid, combined with the real-time web-cast of the event’s participants gathered at the site, would pose adverse effects to the archaeological structure. The message was: not one more ‘yahoo’ at Teotihuacan - even if this one might bring international publicity and an estimated millions in potential pesos as revenue for the Valley of Teotihuacan and its businesses 1.
Yahoo!, undaunted by the denial and determined to dig-in its digital data at a historical location, looked elsewhere. With less than a couple of weeks to go, and with bloggers typekeying their suggestions and coverage, an alternate venue of antiquity was selected. Happening at the end of last year (October 25-27th, 2006), the digitized media of the time capsule was beamed into space from Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico; considered to be one of the oldest, continuously inhabited dwellings in North America.
Figure 5.6
With the same simple technology used to create the capsule, the digital web-casts of the live, two day event may still be accessed online at Yahoo!'s video archives. It was not an insignificant, techy-only event either: an estimated 2.5 million people from over 200 nations watched and participated in this “electronic anthropology archive” (marketwire 2006). Not to mention the several thousand additional tech gamers who's avatars attended the parallel, real-time 'mixed-reality' event in the alter-world gaming environment of Secondlife. To augment participation even further, Yahoo! accepted digital media contributions for the physical capsule for several weeks afterward at their capsule website.
