thanks Jon,
for this very productive response, you give us even more to think about,
and I'm also aware how you push us to think across many, diverse cultural forms, and thus
the potentials and also limits perhaps of reinterpretations as preservations strategies.
When I commented on Liza Swaving's posting on the lamak and spoke about re-performances,
– also asking about the particularity of ritual and ceremonial cultural objects and ephemeral choreographies,
– I was of course hoping that Liza would respond, or others here, as well; I think that last week
of December also had a brief post by Mark Hellar, very diiferent from Liza's, which didn't get picked up. The conversations
just stopped?
Jon you may very well be right about narrow conceptions of creators (for museums? for historians
and curators of dance/performance/new media art), though in my argument I was less worried
about 'proliferative re-creations' (say, by students or other interpreters or through what I think some have called "delegated performances"),
I suppose yes, in music and dance we get reversions; in media arts installations most likely also; and your examples beyond a narrow understanding of sculpture/painting were brilliant.
I thought I had worried about affect, and thus also about 'authority' or "Nahbarkeit" of technopolitical complexity (when I recounted my experiences of Makrolab).
Nahbarkeit (in german) is not a very easily translated notion, but it has to do withy how close one can get into the well, 'aura' of the ethnographic framents,
the loss of an original work and its motivating context and contingency problems/resistances, and what Jon's celebrates as the "persistence that is reinterpretation" (without mentioning the range of preservationist criteria
that may or may not be applicable/available for the persisters, though they may be in your book I need to get a hold of [Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory]..
Can we then for one moment turn to Mark? he did not write here, but gave us a link to a Montréal lecture; what I think his lecture was about seemed to
be some specific criteria that he and his team grappled with, vulnerabilities he called them (Flash, Macromedia etc software problems, platform problems, code migrations, obsolete media,
obsolete file systems , obsolete file formats, etc); the first example given was the internet artwork "Agent Ruby," by Lynn
Hershman Leeson.
>
• Original Url:
http://www.agentruby.com
• Permalink:
http://www.agentruby.com
>
and when I went to look, my browser brings up a message saying "AgentRuby.com is for sale" -
which puzzled me greatly, but I enjoyed listening Hellar's lecture and his work (in San Francisco) on "saving" the languages "behind the interface"
and pondering what to do with the interactional / participatory "record" of the Agent, apparently, over some years, having accrued some 20 000 conversations that
users/visitors had had with this artificial-intelligent web agent. Hellar began to remind me of a music ethnologist I once heard at the Science Museum in London
(Giant Exponential Horn exhibit, 2014) who told us about his field work in West Africa recording local languages that were threatened to be lost and vanish.
Hellar quite succinctly evoked his fieldwork, say, with Susan Kare's boxes full of old floppy disks ("a conservationist's dream," he noted).
Who then, amongst the persisters, decides which box or which floppy to rescue, and migrate to a Linux emulator and make sure the emulator survives?
and would a museum really want to make available/exhibit the 20,000 logged conversations with Ruby?
respectfully
Johannes Birringer
________________________________________
Jon Ippolito schreibt
A late response to Johannes on the generalizability of reinterpretation:
No preservation strategy works for every form of cultural expression. The exhibition Seeing Double (2004), for example, made the case that emulation kept the spirit alive for Weinbren and Friedman's Erl King but would have extinguished the spirit of Paik's TV Crown. Even when reinterpretation is apt, we can still make judgments about which performances are better than others, in fidelity to the original or in inherent value. Music and dance critics do this all the time, and artists' reinterpretations of their own work are not immune from critique (cough George Lucas cough).
But let's recognize that some of this critical impulse stems from our society’s narrow conception of a creator, which biases us against considering reinterpretation a form of preservation. We worry that the intent breathed by the artist into the original atoms or bits will be lost--lost in a muddle of successive re-creations by reinterpreters with only a tenuous connection to the historical context.
This apprehension seems perfectly natural until we look outside of the narrow genres of painting and sculpture, or indeed outside the Euro-ethnic artistic tradition. As Liza noted eloquently, the Balinese presume their lamak will be recreated as necessary, to be "activated in new social contexts." Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, meanwhile, has shown how natives of Papua New Guinea sell a Malangaan sculpture after a public display, only to destroy it so the new caretaker must have it re-created from memory. [a] A Malangaan figure carved from wood and shells is not nearly as ephemeral as a lamak made of palm leaves--or indeed a website made of HTML and Perl. But each generation re-creates Malangaan because they value such "proliferative preservation" [b] as a mechanism for forging bonds among people across clans and generations.
Don't get me wrong: reinterpretation can be effective as a preservation strategy regardless of other social benefits. Last month the New York Times ran an article on indigenous tribes of Namibia wiped out by Nazis in what some are calling a prelude to the European Holocaust. Over 80% of Herero perished in the colonial campaign, yet the survivors' families have passed down memories of those times through songs and re-enactments of wartime stories. [c] If aliens descended tomorrow to eradicate our civilization--and in the US it feels increasingly like this just happened--the Guggenheim and the Vatican Archive would go the way of the Library of Alexandria. What survived would look more like underground media: African spirituals, Okinawan katas, fanzines.
That's not to say that museums, libraries, and archives shouldn't harness the powerful engine of persistence that is reinterpretation. But they will have to change ingrained habits and attitudes. Rick Rinehart and I conclude our book Re-collection with a chapter called "Only You Can Prevent the End of History," which calls for 12 different stakeholders in cultural preservation--from curators to historians to lawyers--to change how they do things. You can find an interactive infographic that summarizes these recommendations here:
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