Dear CRUMB list,
Thank you all for joining us in the discussion about methods for studying Internet art. We continued a bit longer to give the opportunity for some last remarks. For me these were fascinating weeks in which we explored a range of different types of methods, some more for art historical analysis, others more practical. In particular, I would like to thank all respondents for their valuable insights.
Although this CRUMB discussion has come to an end, I hope that our conversations will continue, among others at Transmediale (Berlin), during the symposium “FUTURE PROOF!? Transformation Digital Art 2017” (Schiedam, The Netherlands) and the CAA conference (New York). For those who are attending this last conference, I would like to invite you to the panel ‘Accelerated Art History: Tools and Techniques for a Fast-Changing Art World’ (chaired by Charlotte Frost and Sarah Cook), where I will present my studies about the (social) lives of online art.
If you would like to know more about this discussion or my research, feel free to contact me at [log in to unmask]
While reflecting on this CRUMB discussion I felt that some concluding remarks or a summary did not cover the variety of voices that enriched this discussion. As such I would like to conclude with highlighting a collection of quotes from the discussion that encapsulates the multiple disciplinary and practical viewpoints. Thank you all again for these interesting and significant posts:
“ (…) close reading could certainly be applied in interesting ways to single works of Internet art. But Internet artworks may reveal new facets when seen in relation to other works or collectively.”
Richard Rinehart
“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.”
John Hanhardt
“Brandon lives (not after).”
Shu Lea Cheang
“It [Brandon] also tells a story about the pyramid art world with museums at the top and artist trying to make them understand new artistic practices.”
Marleen Stikker
[In art history:] “There lies much work to gain attention for developments and impulse coming from the digital arts. “
Matthias Kampmann
“it is important to have an institution where the different layers of meaning could be explored and to be exposed to public. (…) technically dead works of art should be revived under the different but responsibility driven circumstances at a museum, where else?”
Matthias Kampmann
“The outcome is the museum conserving a shadow of the work, not the work itself. This is what museums have always done - conserve cultural ghosts, the life sucked out of them by the process of canonisation.”
Simon Biggs
“Perhaps time based art per se (a shared view by its proponents) held this view of not documenting itself. Its only in hindsight (and when some of us become institutional) that we then felt the need to capture the ephemeral or get included in (art) history.”
Mike Stubbs
“ (…) it's never to late to share the story in whatever way or form possible. It's already in the minds of those reading these emails now that these works even though they don't exist anymore continue to 'live', or at the very least its legacy circulates and might cycle (or, using the analogy of composting, sprout) into something else.”
Annet Dekker
“I do think it is important to focus on finding ways of keeping these works functioning - I believe it is important that we try to be as open as possible when thinking about solutions; there's just not one solution, but a multitude. “
Annet Dekker
“ (…) shared preservation instruments should always give artists the opportunity to opt out of the "standard" approach to preservation. For even if an original work dies, curators can encourage downstream creators to reinterpret it in new media for new audiences, nurturing art in its natural habitat--the wild.“
Jon Ippolito
“With regard to the question about how participation can continue: I wanted to draw the list's attention to the very fine work done by my colleague Dragan Espenschied on Muntadas' The File Room (…) Muntadas felt that the project had to continue accepting submissions, so it was not a good idea to create a static snapshot in a stable format such as WARC. Thus, the project was captured in a way that left its architecture largely unchanged while allowing it to function in a dynamic way.”
Michael Connor
“I wonder how one would preserve the social and artistic processes of translation and adaptation (over many weeks) that went into the actual networked performance then witnessed, and if i had taken some photos or recorded some scenes on video, how distorting would such preservation be?”
Johannes Birringer
“Perhaps what ‘Mouchette’ is suggesting is 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.”
Jon Ippolito
“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
“It's not a silver bullet and no single institution can take this on, but if contemporary cultural organizations with a collections remit take their mission seriously, they shouldn't be allowed to just ignore their bits because it's sort of hard.“
Steve Dietz
“Cultural objects are part of social networks, from which they are detached and dislocated once they become museum objects. (…) But instead of emphasizing their fragmented state, maybe it would be more productive to understand them as scores: objects that carry knowledge and ideas that can be activated and reinterpreted in new social and cultural contexts.”
Liza Swaving
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