dear all

sorry about my recent long posting, I will be brief now.

What motivated my questions is, as always, my concern, my interest in performance (the live), mediation/recording, and the role of new media art in regard to performance and curatorial practices; and the "museum" or the gallery
was one existing platform, connected to the art historical organization of knowledge and the discourses surrounding it (including reviews, .e.g today I read a review in the New York Times on “Nam June Paik: Global Visionary,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (by Karen Rosenberg)[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/arts/design/nam-june-paik-at-smithsonian-american-art-museum.html]

New platforms (online /also combinatory publishing) are emerging, and this is why I mentioned the "choreographic documentation" or dance publising project, and was wondering how you all feel about that.

Here is what my colleague Scott deLahunta writes about this venture:

"Each publication project – from solo to collaboratively authored – has
kept a close connection to the motivating questions and concerns of
the individual artists, drawing on and amplifying elements of their
‘signature practices’. Collectively these publications show evidence of a novel domain of context
and reference, one that explores non-linguistic forms of description
and collateral knowledge relations drawn together by dance.
This does not mean that dance artists have not written and published
before about their practice, and in inventive ways; but there are features
of the current cultural context that are unique. It is this and the surge
of related projects, which makes it possible to imagine that these are the
beginnings of a new literature for a new knowledge space, the emergence
of an intrinsic discourse coming from dance practice...."

Thus it is of interest that time based media arts and performance now "exhibits" scores and drawings and code and recoordings and conversations and so on,
making it of course even more complex: this envisioning of embodied practices to be documented and, further down the line, re-exhibited or re-performed, re-imagined.


Re: Nam June Paik, he made notes and drawings and sketches, and surprisingly, the reviewer (see above) comments:

<<With the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe, he invented one of the first video synthesizers (now known as the Paik/Abe video synthesizer). The machine, he once wrote:
'will enable us to shape the TV screen canvas
as precisely as Leonardo
as freely as Picasso
as colorfully as Renoir
as profoundly as Mondrian
as violently as Pollock
and as lyrically as Jasper Johns.'
... in his masterpiece “Global Groove,” which can be seen in a screening room as well as in the installation “TV Garden,” he did all of these things.

The show could have done with fewer of Paik’s off-screen paintings and drawings, particularly the scribblings on newspaper..... >>

then she continues:

>>And it might have worked in even more selections from the archive: the objects here, arranged on shelves and cataloged on a touch-screen, are engrossing. Among them are antique bird cages (collected for tributes to his friend and mentor John Cage); old-fashioned console televisions; homemade robots; and a marvelous painted-plaster elephant, culture of origin unknown, that appeared in his installation at the 1993 Venice Biennale....>>


Not sure I understand the gist of what is critiqued here, but the score or drawing for “TV Bra for Living Sculpture” [played and worn by Paik’s charismatic collaborator Charlotte Moorman] surely would seem to be interesting to preserve,
would it not?

I am all in favor of the this new "literature for a new knowledge space".....


regards
Johannes Birringer