dear all
I just saw the posting (Karin?) on vanishing and the difficulties of preserving the unspecific and promiscuous network/multiple media works of the recent past, and I am also rereading
Jon's excellent replies, commentaries and suggestions on variations & reperformances, and whether one could find alternate notations, matrices........
>>
... neither a score or a recording by itself, but a *matrix*: a structured environment containing the building blocks of future life. Rather than oppose generative and reinterpretive preservation, we could see a matrix as human- and machine-readable instructions augmented by screen recordings and interpretive documents intended to provide context for how the instructions are meant to be performed
>>
I wish there could be more discussion of Jon's idea that performance (thus also the temporal understanding of the performative, and its site contingencies) might offer some guidesm if not salvation, and
i of course agree with the comment made after my brief reportage from the "Technology is not Neutral" exhibit in London.
>>
...really hope we're beyond the point of exhibiting prints on the wall, digital or not, to stand in for performance art. The art market has tried for years to reduce live art to signed photographs and props. It would be tragic if preservationists without a comparable profit motive could think of no more creative way to re-present bodies moving through space, time--and yes, the Internet--than by means of such attenuated relics
>>

I am currently in Houston, and thinking of my vanishing video/predigital archive, stored away,  a friendly letter reaches me from Australia asking about footage from documentary film I made in the mid-90s on the Makrolab, a complex
telecommunications/network/activist/science project engineered by Slovene artist Marko Peljhan,  I am sure some of you have come across this project (the physical lab stood in some farmer's field outside Kassel in 97, traveled to other locations and of course conducted its various strategies of 'counter-intelligence'  communications-interceptions through radio and satellite network. 

I admit I'm now feeling a bit upset, I have forgotten much, my interactions with the Slovene artists date back 20 years, my own tapes and notes are gone or deteriorated, so I am wondering who preserved the "performance scores" or matrix for Peljhan's and his collaborators' fascinating work?  are there several online archives?  (http://v2.nl/archive/works/makrolab    - this seems to be one)? http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/makrolab/    ?    Arts Catalyst?  http://www.artscatalyst.org/artist/marko-peljhan

There are published re/sources, images, videos, talks, etc, and the young researcher in Sidney could probably piece something together. Including finding some oral histories and narratives. I may remember my nights out in the lab on the farmer's field, the old MIR flying in outer space talking to us.   How do museum and curatorial professionals consider the piecework, the piecemeal one may end up with relying on a search in wildly uneven or distributed scattered resources. 
Unreliable story tellers?  Could the lab itself be re-performed today, under today's geopolitical climate?

regards
Johannes Birringer
Houston, TX


________________________________________
From: Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Karin De Wild (PG Research) [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2016 10:46 AM


It seems a little odd to talk about the preservation of "Internet Art", while Post-Internet Art is the art worlds (and art markets) buzzword. For "digital natives" the idea of preservation seems not to be relevant: online content is in "the Cloud"... outsourced to mayor companies such as Google (including Youtube), Facebook, Apple etc.


Way back in the prehistory of Net Art, in the 1990s when artists where running their diy online hard- and software, preservation also seemed not to be a topic: it was about art-as-process and self-contextualisation. The digital-as-social was still a grassroot movement. Most art that happened online was "against preservation" (giving a new twist to the infamous "against interpretation" dictum): how to avoid the commodification of the finished artwork, how to remain always un-finished.


These two poles describe the gap in which most of Telecommunication Art, BBS Art (yes, art with bulletin bord systems, before the internet), NetArt, BrowserArt, OnlineArt ... you name it... has vanished.


Problems with all kinds of digital preservation are manifold. Here only two of the most urgent are mentioned: The single art work loses its contextualization, sometimes even his sense, and the look-and-feel of its time. The preservation work itself has to be preserved, this needs an institutional backing with a sustainability perspective.

Dieter Daniels, december 26. 2016