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Hi CRUMBers, Thanks to Charlie Gere et. al for starting this discussion and to Curt Cloninger for reminding us that an archive, like any form of memory, doesn't really safeguard artifacts from the effects of time, but imposes its own changes instead. Some archives, like The Black Factory, are conscious of this inevitable transformation; in an upcoming book on new media and social memory, Rick Rinehart and I call these guerilla warriors of cultural preservation "the Unreliable Archivists." But most institutions are oblivious to the changes their curatorial policies wreak on a creative work. Like others on this list, I think the term "time-based art" is dumb, but less because all art involves time than because time is a less relevant parameter than control. The paradigmatic case of "time- based" media art seems to be single-channel video. Yet how a viewer experiences time in video changes drastically depending on the amount of control exerted by the curator. A theater curator determines when viewers start and finish watching the movie, whereas a gallery curator has little control over when viewers enter or leave the viewing space. Performance, another archetype of time-based art, offers more opportunities to exert or relinquish control. Wielding the script as an authoritative gospel, the Samuel Beckett Estate polices how plays like Waiting for Godot can be re-staged, whereas John Cage famously handed over control of when to begin and end notes to the performers in indeterminate works such as his numbered pieces. Networks are notoriously difficult to control. Letting a work of net art loose in the wild means you can't tell whether your viewer will see it in Snow Leopard on an 23-inch Cinema Display at Apple headquarters or in Windows 98 on a 15-inch screen at the Wasilla Public Library. Of course, this doesn't stop institutions from trying to control network-based pieces, which is why artists from Auriea Harvey to jodi have refused invitations to high-profile exhibitions because the museum wanted to project a Web site, cache it locally, or run it in kiosk mode so visitors couldn't check their email in the gallery. To call Entropy8.com or jodi.org "time-based" works may help registrars pigeonhole them in badly structured collection databases or curators justify consigning them to black-box "media galleries," but the label has little or no relevance to the critical issues surrounding their exhibition. Recognizing the importance of control to institutions like galleries and museums, many artists have tried to subvert the expectations that attend particular devices, contexts, or genres. Some of the most important new media artworks wrest control from a manufacturer or curator to a viewer or participant. Nam June Paik hoisted a magnet onto a TV set, so that the timing of "station breaks" could be determined not by soap opera schedules but by gallerygoers shifting the magnet's position. His extraordinary installation Random Access, meanwhile, puts the timing of audio tracks literally in the palm of the gallerygoer, who can trace a playback head wired to a handheld wand back-and-forth at whatever speed across magnetic audiotape tacked to the wall. (A Wiimote forty years before its time.) The fact that these works involve time is less relevant than that they allow the viewer to control it. Others subvert by taking away control where it is most expected. Cory Arcangel famously hacked Super Mario Bros. to remove all elements of gameplay except the clouds drifting by, turning an interactive game into a single-channel video (albeit a low-resolution one). But what sense does it make to label Super Mario Clouds a time-based work? Classifying it as a video subtracts everything interesting about it (ironic cultural misappropriation via hardware hack) and adds a presumption that it is somehow "durational," despite the fact that it takes five seconds to "get" Super Mario Clouds and hours (or volumes, judging from the number of dissertations on the subject) to decipher Velazquez's painting Las Meninas. In the age of asynchronous media and remote presence, even live performances can strain the boundaries of a "time-based" designator. Perhaps in response to suffering through one too many performances where viewers couldn't get up and leave, MTAA posted online their One- Year Performance Video--a re-enactment of performance artist Sam Hsieh's year of isolation in a small room, but with a difference. 1YPV enables viewers to time-shift their experience of the year-long project, tracking the amount of time they watch M.River brush his teeth or T.Whid stare at the wall but allowing them to pause and return to the performance at their leisure. From a curatorial perspective, I think it's less important how long the thing lasts than whether you give people access to the pause and fast-forward buttons. Cheers, jon ______________________________ "ThoughtMesh invites you to push beyond the surface of your screen" --Tara McPherson, USC Tag your writing and join the conversation at http://thoughtmesh.net/