I sometimes think of documentation as conservative in both senses of
the word--a strategy that satisfies itself with preserving the
footprint rather than the animal that made it. But as Alain Depocas
and Rick Rinehart continually remind me, documentation is essential to
some of the most radical techniques for resurrecting the beast itself.
This was certainly the case for the Lituus, a long-necked trumpet that
was ubiquitous in Roman times and cropped up in musical scores by Bach
yet disappeared after the Baroque period. Now researchers have re-
created a real working Lituus after designing software to emulate its
sound, based solely on existing descriptions of the instrument:
http://tinyurl.com/mv8bgs
What's interesting to me about this example is how little fuss people
seem to be making about the authenticity of rebuilding an instrument
that no one living in the past half-millennium has ever seen or heard.
As one of the commenters on Slashdot put it, "What they have here can
almost certainly be called a Lituus."
In the visual arts, meanwhile, Dan Flavin's former technician is
devising a special wiring technique that the Flavin estate can fuse
into certain fluorescent light fixtures that it decides are
"authentic" sculptures by the artist. This, despite the fact that
Flavin maintained that the medium of his work was light, and that the
bulbs were interchangeable. (I suppose if you tried to reverse-
engineer one of these wiring schemes, you could be prosecuted under
the anti-circumvention clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.)
Yet this visual art world that is so fixated on authenticity is also
happy to collect "net art" as JPEGs on CD-ROM and "performances" as
silver-gelatin prints. Instead of seeing documentation as a means to
an end, galleries and museums too often see documentation as *the* end.
Is this contrast between music and the visual arts simply a function
of their different economic models (selling objects versus selling
rights)? Or is it a consequence of the fact that, at least until the
age of recordings, music was always re-performed based on scores
rather than locked away in vaults?
jon
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