David
Your modular structuring of older works reminds me of Emmanual Guez et
al.'s recent article 'The afterlives of network-based artworks' and the
praxis of 'second original' as applied to the conservation of Eduardo
Kac's videotext works... its available free-to-view here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19455224.2017.1320299
(I should declare I am the Editor of the Journal...)
best
Jonathan
On Sat, December 16, 2017 1:49 am, David Rokeby wrote:
> I remember Kasper Koenig talking about how public art works need a
> commissioning process and a decommissioning process. (And this was of
> course not even in the context of new media public art). I think this is
> a good point, at least for many works, but most public art commissioning
> scenarios are not structured in a way that works with this idea of
> limited lifetime.
>
> My strongest personal impressions as an artist in both public art
> commissioning situations and institutional acquisition is that very few
> of the stakeholders have any way of grasping the nature of the problem.
> This either results in optimistic blindness to the real challenges, or
> under-informed knee-jerk fear of the challenges. This includes the
> artists in many cases.
>
> Like Simon, I have burned up untold thousands of hours bringing old
> pieces back to life or keeping them current. And I now find myself
> mourning the loss of a number of lost works. And practically, it seems
> like institutions and collectors are starting to pay attention and take
> the plunge, and as they become informed, they are starting to ask about
> those older, technically challenging works that lie moribund.
>
> But I also realize that part of the problem of maintaining these older
> works was amplified by the fact that they were not created with an eye to
> maintainability. The effort went into getting them to work somehow by the
> opening. The thought that these things would live on past their year or
> two of active exhibition could not have been farther from my mind. For
> much of this time I was also inexperienced enough to not have a grasp of
> the real meaning of the rate of technological change that would play out
> over my active professional lifetime.
>
> The result is that, in many ways, these works were cobbled together in
> ways that make then unnecessarily susceptible to rapid obsolescence. In
> the preparation of some of these works for acquisition I have gone
> through the process of refactoring my code to create a clear boundary
> between the code that gives the work its affective character, and the
> code that merely implements an easily specifiable function (i.e.
> functions that can be described to my full satisfaction to an engineer.).
> I deliver the core code in an operating system agnostic form with
> functional description and a documented API, and a functional, operating
> system / computer era specific generic ‘wrapper’ which provides
> things like display on a screen, input from a camera, etc. (along with
> source code).
>
> The intention is partly to learn the discipline of creating new works
> with this modular structure in mind. It does not solve all the problems
> that might come up, but it is slowly making the task less daunting. I can
> put complex works in collections with some peace of mind that I have done
> all I can to deliver a work in a form that could be resurrected at some
> relatively distant point in time with a reasonable amount of committed
> effort.
>
> Part of this process also helps to clarify the aspects of a work that
> will be most likely to require the attention of conservators. i.e. It
> provides the beginnings of a job description for future new media
> conservators… these are the kinds of tasks and technologies that are
> most vulnerable to change.
>
> In my experience, few if any commissioners, curators, collectors and
> conservators are in any position to really assess the future viability of
> a new media art work at this point. I suspect many new media artists are
> also in that position. At the moment, it almost seems like the less they
> know the better as some public art commissioners, and collectors, and
> conservators, will take the leap of faith because they love the work, or
> they understand its import. This situation is however, completely
> unsustainable.
>
> I have unconsciously and for pragmatic reasons created a separation in my
> own work between those pieces that relatively effortlessly move into the
> future as functional pieces, and those that are left behind, but I am
> finding that this is creating a shift in the kind of work that I do…
> avoiding the works that involve more idiosyncratic and complex systems,
> which are, indeed, what my career and reputation are largely built upon.
> So I am in a period of reassessment… For an artist like me without a
> professorship, and as a mid-career artist with a family to support, in a
> country that is particularly good at supporting emerging artists, and not
> so sure what to do with older ones, figuring out this quandary is
> fundamental to keeping my practise sustainable for the next couple of
> decades.
>
> David
>
>
>
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> David Rokeby
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