Requiem for a Lost Art

Has all of human history already been digitized? AI and Google have created a real-life Borgesian Library of Babel, scarfing up millennia of literature like some mythological Kraken. Thanks to technology that can clone, photograph, or scan film and video, still photography, sound recordings, print media, paintings, sculptures, and architecture, many traditional functions of physical libraries are becoming obsolescent. Hundreds of thousands of phonograph records, originating from the late 19th century onward, have been digitally cleaned up and made publicly accessible, often on YouTube. The same is true of kinescopes of early TV and 70-year-old videotapes, as well as older newsreel films. The Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York has been preserving archival videotapes of Broadway, off-Broadway, and regional theater productions since 1970. More recently, advances in holography have even resurrected famous entertainers of the past as creepy but credibly lifelike digital avatars.