Hello,
Once more into the breach of time, or events.
My thanks for this really engrossing dialogue. I would like to take us back a little to Armin who also tied the discussion back to the broader context of the work's production, and then over to Charlie for returning to real-time and the museum context, or death drive of the archive etc etc
Again I would like to quote from a particular period of my own interest/research, that of Artist Placement Group, and later O+I, that extended work beyond the gallery, studio and museum, and into the fabric and events of society, in the UK specifically (1966-89). The development of an approach and the establishments of methods that were both embedded in various institutions, government bodies and corporations, yet whose methods were operating outside of any institutionally recognised norms, believed the artist could become incidental to their context, to put it in their own words, they believed that the 'context is half the work'. This essential understanding of the way in which the artwork is tied to its context through a specific contextual meaning is now clearly understood in relation to post-intentional models of understanding a work and its specific references (thanks Roger M, and Bruno). (APG legacy has also suffered from the demise of the artist placement to the much weaker role of the aritst in residence).
Yet fundamental to an understanding of this position of these APG artists, or incidental person as they renamed themselves, is that the work itself was set continuously in the real -time of now, and it is tied through event structure to time-based works as fleeting as performance to the enduring land-art piece made by Latham for the Scottish Office (this also perhaps raises the issue of spiral jetty - a case in point as it could soon to be lost to the short time-base, immediate interests of local oil exploration in Utah). In this sense, the work, its process, any output of any kind is always real-time, as life and work are both media in this sense. If we then consider the museum or archive as a space which sets out to preserve objects, artefacts , codes etc, (death drive or cryogenics...) we can also say that the archivist understands the need to reduce the time-base of each object/item to their own time-base - that is institutional time. This arrest is not specifically problematic, but indicates issues relating to archives and events, part of the the real problem at hand. You may ask yourself why certain kinds of event based work have encountered resistance not only in the galleries, but within the archive of the museum itself to the extent it should be present, and then to examine the time-base of technologies, situations, contexts upon which it relies, to realise these are awkward at best, if not completely incompatible at worst. If nothing else these works made in one context would be at the mercy of another entirely, that is the event structure of the institutional practices of a collection, its overheads and relevance. For me, the loss of work to the real-time of its context should be balanced against its incidental potential (otherwise known as a 'unit of attention') both immediately and within the broader time-base of society.
Have a good weekend,
Neal White
Associate Professor
Art and Media Practice
The Media School
Tel: 0044 (0)1202 961452
[log in to unmask]
________________________________________
From: Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gere, Charlie [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 4:27 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Another stab at thinking about the question of time
In the late sixties the critic Jack Burnham strongly advocated and
discussed the idea of art in 'real time'. In some sense he was
discussing work that would prefigure the world of apparently near
instantaneous networked communication that we now sometimes appear to be
in, and was then just beginning to be widely available. I am intrigued
by the term 'real time', which of course has a fairly widely accepted
technical definition, but also an almost poetic sense of invoking
something more immediate and real than we are used to with mediated
experiences, and thus also perhaps impossible in the light of questions
of pretension and retension or of difference and deferral immanent in
all experience of temporality. Perhaps TBA is always about making time
(more) real somehow
Charlie Gere
Head of Department
Institute for Cultural Research
Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YL UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 594446
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/cultres/staff/gere.php
-----Original Message-----
From: Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Simon Biggs
Sent: 11 September 2009 16:06
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Another stab at thinking about the
question of time
Or a click?
Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
[log in to unmask]
www.eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
[log in to unmask]
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
From: Caroline Langill <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:35:42 -0400
To: <[log in to unmask]>, <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: RE: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Another stab at thinking about the
question of time
Simon, your comment brings to mind T.S. Eliot...what would it sound like
to
clear out digital works? Wouldn't we just press the delete button? "Not
with
a bang, but a whimper."
Caroline
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Another stab at thinking about the
question
of time
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Books have been burned as a form of cultural clear-out. We could have
a
> bonfire of new media artworks. I can donate some ephemeral code to get
the
> pyre started. We could have a symbolic burn this November 5.
>
> Best
>
> Simon
>
>
> Simon Biggs
> Research Professor
> edinburgh college of art
> [log in to unmask]
> www.eca.ac.uk
> www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
>
> [log in to unmask]
> www.littlepig.org.uk
> AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
>
>
>
> From: "Gere, Charlie" <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: "Gere, Charlie" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:57:23 +0100
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Conversation: Another stab at thinking about the question of time
> Subject: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Another stab at thinking about the
question of
> time
>
> Getting away from the phenomenology of the art experience to the
> ontology of the art object, I am interested in the disconnect between
> the ephemerality of much contemporary art and the continued mania for
> preservation that lies at the heart of the museological project and
> indeed in other parts of our culture.
>
> I think this is interesting in relation to the increasingly
unmanageable
> amounts of stuff we are confronted with, and the surely futile efforts
> to find ways of preserving it. It is interesting to go to conferences
> where digital conservation/preservation are earnestly debated without
> any discussion about whether it is either possible or even desirable
to
> preserve even a tiny percentage of the flood of digital material now
> being produced
>
> I would like to think of time-based art as referring to works that
> acknowledge finitude, entropy etc...
>
>
> Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland,
number
SC009201
Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland,
number SC009201
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