About This Project
Welcome to the Bloom App Preservation Project.
This project is a documentation effort to capture as many of the "significant properties" of Brian Eno's and Peter Chilvers's groundbreaking generative music app--Bloom. The project was conceived as part of the 2017 Digital Humanities Summer Institute course on Documenting Born Digital Creative and Scholarly Works for Access and Preservation.
Bloom was chosen for a number of its unique qualities. First of all, Bloom is interesting as a preservation study because it represents a first generation iPhone app--perhaps the first generative music app of its kind--one that continues to be used and supported to this day. Secondly, though it is a relatively self-contained and simple app, it is completely proprietary, which means the challenge is to understand how much can be unveiled and documented at a remove such that another developer might be able to recreate its qualities in a future successor platform. Finally, to consider the "significant properties" for the sake of preserving an app like Bloom in some ways runs counter to the forward-looking creativity of its authors--the ambient composer Brian Eno and his developer/designer friend Peter Chilvers.
But artists will be artists and fans will be fans.
This project brought to you by two passionate fans--Matt Schultz (Grand Valley State University) and Macy Miller (USAF Academy). Our hope is that these artists' ideas, through our efforts, can survive the whims of technological obsolescence.
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