Dear list, dear John,

Thank you very much for your enlightening view on the differences
between the traditional art world and the ephemeral. But I stumble upon
a tiny but core contradiction. You wrote:

"Being in a museum should not normalize the artwork. Preservation should
not tame what the artist has created. It should understand that the work
can continue or disappear. As we all know: how we see and understand art
changes over time and experience. Brandon is a work that exists in all
time and in all ways challenges how the museum sees itself and its
self-preservation."

There are at least two matters intermixed:

a. the assumption that the character of a museum is to normalize an
artwork. Which means: If a piece of internet art enters the museum's
sphere, it is in endanger of being kept quiet or at worst to die. The
conclusion is not to preserve but set up a clever documentation. This is
what the marvelous Jan Robert Leegte told me this August, when I wrote
an inquiry for the German magazine KUNSTZEITUNG [1] about APIs (Google
closed the EarthAPI and many pieces died) being closed down or getting
deprecated. His comment:

"Again the beauty of the pieces, and relevance is their interventional
performative character. Having them conserved by corporations would be
in opposition to the continuous shifting of online technological
reality. Naturally some of the works, have historical importance, but
other ways of documentation will work fine.The agile development of the
software behind API’s related to evolution and erosion within nature.
Works made in this context will erode in time. Static documentation
capture the works in the context of the time they were made in better
than endlessly emulating them."

Although this notion of an ephemeral character is completely right, I
disagree at a point. My appeal: Make difference between the works. Some
fit in the museum's display, some not. And there is a unfortunately a
shackled logic behind our thinking about internet art or ephemeral art
which sounds like the following: Internet art deals with the structure
of the users' expectations. It criss-crosses the expectations and calls
them into question. Which is the only impact. The always used metaphor?
Internet art as a virus. But to be honest: I started searching for art
on the net from the very beginning of my access and found for instance
this wonderful hybrid participative project "TechnoSphere" [2] (with
Jane Prophet). But it was _me_ who found that. Not the Sphere itself.
Last year, !Mediengruppe Bitnik from Switzerland changed all images of
the Cabaret Voltaire website by making use of the Google image search
tool. There are not only worlds between the works with regard to the
timeline but also with the structure and the direction of impact of both
works. [3] Again: If we reduce the meaning of an artwork on that simple
logic, the work is just poor with regard to non ephemeral works. So it
is important to have an institution where the different layers of
meaning could be explored and to be exposed to public.

And with a side effect: Our view on Giotto's "Cappella degli Scrovegni"
is different to that of his contemporary's...

b. The counter-reflective aspect of art, or as one may say: the
institutional critique which is inherent in some contemporary art forms
(performance, internet art, activism...): This cannot be taken as an
absolute guide _not_ to collect. The first issue of "South as a state of
mind", the documenta 14 magazine [4], quotes the natural fact, that
without media and archives democracy will not happen. Books/Libraries
were the focus. Where's the difference between a library and a museum
from that point of view (neglecting the differences between visual art
and books for a moment)? The 2nd edition [5] offered an interesting
conversation between Clementine Deliss and Frederic Keck on hijacking
ethnographic collections. Keck said: "Access to database is a (?)
necessary for research, but it doesn't obviate contact with the object
itself." [p. 51] From my point of view this is true. But digital art is
different to ethnological artifacts. What is similar between them? If we
accept, that reading, writing and collecting and mediating books is a
necessity for the existence of democracy, I like to conclude, that the
same applies on museum's work. Therefore one may also say, that
technically dead works of art should be revived under the different but
responsibility driven circumstances at a museum, where else?

With regard to these aspects, I'm convinced, that we are facing three
issues at minimum:

a. The still challenging nature of some internet artworks (but not all).

b. The ongoing development of the internet and the computational
background which changes daily.

c. The contradiction between collecting and setting up a dispositive at
the same time which is driven by selection. And calls itself never into
question (with regard to this I have my doubts): The deadly
post-colonial act of canonising one might say...

My best regards, Matthias

---
[1] KUNSTZEITUNG, September 2016, p. 20, "Schnittstellenmonster. Ueber
Softwarekunst und deren Abhaenigkeit von der Industrie" (print only)

[2] cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechnoSphere.

[3] cf. http://www.cabaretvoltaire.ch/en/243.html.

[4] Latimer, Szymczyk: South as a state of mind. Issue 6, Fall/Winter
2015, Documenta #1.

[5] Latimer, Szymczyk: South as a state of mind. Issue 7, Spring/Summer
2016, Documenta #2, pp. 47-61.
-- 
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