Dear Karin, dear list members,

Besides the fact that I feel deeply honoured to be part of this CRUMB
discussion, let me say, that the topic is one of the 'ok, where to
start?' ones. First, the following is a statement based upon many ideas
which are still in the world and repeats maybe some thoughts of Richard
Rinehart'S posting. Sorry for that.

When I try to circle around internet art and its specific art history, I
meanwhile notice a strange feeling. The one, that it is today hunted by
a greedy monster, and included in something we call contemporary art.
Which resembles closely to the history of video art. A turn which lead
in the mid 2000 years to the decline of one of our favourite terms i.e.
'media art'. In thinking so, how is it made possible to analyse and
prepare historical works of internet art for the next and after next
generation?

My Circles
a. Technical questions regarding presentation and preservation,
b. shortcuts to the art world and art history in general,
c. methods to better analyse, understand, and embed internet art in a
broader conception of an art historical narrative – if narratives matter
somehow today.

From the bird's-eye view art history left his traditional track at least
at the time when internet art arose. With the upcoming approaches of
gender, and postcolonial studies, with (post) institutional critique
etc. traditional narratives, regarding only white, European men most of
the times, came into question. Although this is a common place, I
believe that we do have these stories in mind. But I am also convinced
that it is helpful not to refuse narratives in general.

a. One of the core problems is circumscribed in item a. In the past
decade, many conferences and researches where held and done to find out
best practice models to keep these works alive. From emulation to
re-coding or re-engineering. But is there a database out there,
documenting all these approaches? We are far away from an organised
structure. There are as usual some web sites. Here is an example from my
recent work. I was invited by the ZKM to curate a project called
ArtOnYourScreen (aoys.zkm.de). The curatorial idea was to create a
display of the different fields of activity of this respectful
institution by commissioned art works. So, I considered for instance the
digital archaeology approaches of the ZKM plus the fact that it takes
care of the archive of Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven. The latter was
specialized upon sound art and new music and was 'invented' among others
by Paul Panhuysen. My idea then was to open a closed source work,
created by Paul for a long gone British art magazine (Artifice No. 2,
London 1995). The "Pattern Primer one" appeared as a Macromedia Director
work on a CD-ROM which was included in this edition. It consists of an
interactive colourful game play of different levels with sounds.
Nikolaus Völzow, a freelance programmer and artist, created a
HTML5-version which is a nearly perfect copy of the original piece. This
was a lot of work. After two or three months of inquiry I got the
original data, then I tried to analyse the files with old software, to
document, and to interpret the code together with Nikolaus. I grabbed
the original sounds one by one from the sound card of my Linux
workstation directly by emulating MacOS 7 to project the work within the
original software environment. Because the media assets in Macromedia
Director projects are stored in a compiled format and not accessible as
files any more. And together with screen films and shots and many
meetings, more than a year went by, but the art work came back to live
in forms of a sustainable code which is not so difficult to maintain.
That was an adventure saving a 'poor wonderful creature' from industries
proprietary cages and from the fact of being forgotten when the last
CD-ROM drive gives up and the last pre-OS X-machine is dead. The
programming process is documented on the website in a non-standardised
text. But this is a single approach. And there are many others. But
there is no best practice database to display the process and to link
the now living piece of art. Is there? Ok, that was not internet art.
But it gave a taste of what has to be done. In my book "Netzkunst. Ihre
Systematisierung und Auslegung anhand von Einzelbeispielen" (2008)
focused upon shortcuts between the art world in general and the internet
art worlds. I analysed Alexej Shulgin's "Form Art" which is preserved on
Rhizome (http://archive.rhizome.org/artbase/48528/), and which is and
was before hosted on the web site of C3, Budapest
(http://www.c3.hu/collection/form/). This is a typical example of some
of the core problems mentioned above. Also, regarding the connection of
internet art with the general art world.

b. There is another aspect combined with all these ambitions to keep art
works alive: the mediation. If digital art isn't part of the official
art history, consciousness is the lacking factor. For instance, I teach
always some works in the framework of my courses dealing with art
history from early Christian art until the latest contemporary art. I
start with a comparison of Alex McLean's "Forkbomb" (2001) which was
honoured at transmediale.02 and the "Forkbomb" (2002) by Jaromil to
awake attention to artefacts which are at first not connotated to art.
This fosters discussions about art in general, the question of
institutions such as festivals and museums, and not to forget about
aesthetics. The next plug ins are based upon artistic styles. Reaching
the 20th century, we focus upon geometric positions from De Stijl to
Rafaël Rozendaal, from conceptual pieces by Sol Lewitt and minimal
artists to this wonderful work of Caleb Larsen ("A Tool to Deceive and
Slaughter") which is directly referenced to Robert Morris' "Box With the
Sound of Its Own Making", and in my opinion on the same intellectual
level as e.g. Piero Manzoni's "Socle du Monde". But in fact, this isn't
mainstream in art history, and I'm not teaching art historians but
future art/culture critics. There lies much work to gain attention for
developments and impulse coming from the digital arts.

c. Finally, questioning and adjusting methodology again may help to
understand the works and to open them to a broader public. In the
beginning, there was a hype in writing mostly from a sociological point
of view about internet art. I'll never forget the misunderstanding of
"life sharing" by zerodotone.org. In Germany, so many articles dealt
with this metaphor of "being inside of the machine of the artists"
although it was a simple representation of the file structure done by
the apache webserver. Nobody could move something or delete a file or
upload one or change system's parameters as on a machine accessed by a
remote shell. It was just a website. But the speculations about the
"body of data" etc. had grown… These technical differences are often
overlooked, because dealing with technical arts afford a minimal quantum
of understanding of what happens. Sometimes one should explore source
code, for instance.

So, coming to a tiny but long grown conclusion about the situation
digital arts and art history, I'm convinced that preservation means
still at first to understand what happens in and with the work itself.
It must relate to other art forms in the traditional art world to link
similar phenomenon with each other. Then it will be easier to mediate. A
means of this type of mediation, and of great help could be a
centralised world wide data base, working in a way of standardised
criteria including case studies of preservation and of possibilities of
display via links to virtual machines. It could be a meta database like
Prometheus (http://prometheus-bildarchiv.de/en/index) which connects 88
image databases on one common interface and which is of course the most
important tool for me to get my lessons prepared.

-- 
weisskunst.de
kunstgeschichte - forschung+lehre - kunstkritik
dr. matthias kampmann | margaretenstraße 1e | d-93092 barbing
DJV and AICA member | [log in to unmask] | www.weisskunst.de
FOLLOW ME: www.facebook.com/weisskunst
+49(0)9401.9538124 | skype: matthias-kampmann