Death and the J2ME applet (NTLSys 1-3)
I recently posted on Flickr some images of NTLSys 1-3, a J2ME app piece I did for Nokia Trend Labs in 2007. They had been lying around on my hard drive, and even though this is hardly a major work (I do still think it’s somewhat charming) I still thought they were worth archiving permanently.
Then it struck me: This piece will be gone forever in just a year or two. I can still run it on a couple of old Nokia phones I have lying around, but most likely even those will be dead soon. And what is the likelyhood of a J2ME app being supported by smartphones in, say, 2015?
Not that media obsolescence is a surprise, in preparing software artworks for gallery sales I have certainly considered how they may be preserved. But this might be my first full-on collision with the issue. After all, I still have Java applets written in 1996 hanging around with perfectly valid bytecode that will run in any Java-enabled browser. But for this piece and others like it death will most likely come rather soon with the death of J2ME, with the exception of running them in emulators (which might also become extinct soon enough.)
Perhaps I should go out and buy a mint J2ME-capable phone just for the sake of preserving this piece? Or should I be content to just let it die, the same way most of my compiled executables likely will given enough time? Of course, I always archive the source code and so can recreate it at will, that will always be the fallback option for any software art work. Hardware is not long for this world, but code is forever.
NTLSys 1-3 is still available for download, just point your J2ME phone at www.unlekker.net/ntlsys.jad.
- applet
- dead media
- generat
- generative
- j2me
- nokia
- phone
- smartphone
- software art
