Hello,
Speaking as an artist who makes ephemeral work, I am often painfully
aware that what might persist will merely be a trace of what was first
made, and that in most cases it will simply disappear. I would also
agree with Caitlin that these issues must be approached on a case by
case basis, because even as artists we (I work collaboratively with
Alison Craighead) find ourselves shifting our position as we move from
making one piece to another. Sometimes we want things to fade away and
sometimes we don't. Sometimes the whole point of work is that it
cannot be kept or grasped or fixed, but then sometimes we have made
archives, documents and simulations of works for collections and, 'the
future' whatever that might be or bring.
Yet more than that, I believe work can actually be iterated in
installments and for it to be implicit in the intent the artist has for
the work when it is made knowing as we do that the passage of time and
the archival process will alter it. This is what we have tried to do
with an on-line shop we made in 2002 called dot-store.com, where the
products sold and the site itself will hopefully become something quite
different as time passes. When we launched dot-store as a kind of
parody of an early e-commerce venture, we sold museum shop style tatt
that was about the internet and the way it looked circa 2002 -tea
towels displaying search engine results, lenticular badges animating
cursors, and web gif temporary tattoos etc... As time passes however,
our hope is that the whole dot-store assemblage will transform into
something quite different -a set of relics and an off-lined website
that operates more like a fluxus box and where the aesthetic of the web
as it was then can be seen from some distance...
bw
Jon
-->u/s/
Thomson & Craighead
http://www.thomson-craighead.net /
--> w/e/b
BEACON is now live: http://www.automatedbeacon.net
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Currently - Nov 2005: Algorithmic Revolution, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany
Currently: Pass the Time of Day, Angel Row, Nottingham
> There are some interesting artistic works to consider that are not
> digital but the work of Francis Alys, for instance, seems to thrive in
> the oral tradition - relying on the retelling despite the existence of
> documentations of the performances (often multiple documentations which
> make each relative and less authoritative)
>> just that different people can draw different
>> types of value from the same thing. Maybe the original artist would
>> rather a work of net art obsolesce as quickly as its technological
>> context. But maybe, say, my as-of-yet-unborn grandchildren will, in a
>> few decades, learn wonderful things by reading historical accounts of
>> that work.
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