Hi
Pip's invocation of loss that Josephine mentions below is fascinating.
For a conservator or curator working in a traditional gallery dedicated
to the collection, preservation and display of objects its an obvious
issue. Yet to think in terms of loss is possibly to cleave to a model of
the work of art that is simply inappropriate for the kinds of ephemeral,
fluid and temporal (as well as temporary) practices that characterise a
lot of new media art. The corollary of this is that the gallery/museum
is no longer an appropriate institutional model for thinking about and
dealing with this kind of work.
Charlie
Josephine Bosma wrote:
>hello all,
>
>
>The question Charlie brings up have been adressed at a congress
>organised by Hartware in Dortmund last year called '404 object not
>found'. Some info on this congress can be found at:
>http://www.404project.net/kongress/thema/index_e.html
>Archive:
>http://www.404project.net/datenbank/index_e.html
>There you will also find some texts, one of which is mine. This
>particular text has in the meantime been re-written, re-published and
>now also re-editted (as these things go). The latest short version of
>this text I will paste below. Unfortunetaly all notes have disappeared
>in this most recent edit, as have most of the subtleties. It was edited
>by Andrea Wiarda, to be published in the October issue of the Belgian art magazine A Prior.
>www.aprior.org
>
>I just want to remark that what is quite striking about both the
>definition *and* the preservation of media art is that there are two
>or three strategies that seem to be working alongside eachother and
>which feel quite different. There is the textual or theoretical
>approach in which there is an attempt to contextualize a work in
>history and/or in contemporary culture. Then there are those that seek
>the best possible material preservation by collecting hardware,
>software and/or emulating hardware and software. I guess it is this
>tactic that mostly leads to the kind of problems that Charlie mentions
>(with the lightbulb situation), because it is more obvious a change in
>a work if something material is 're-interpreted' then when a part of a
>work is re-interpreted immaterially.
>At the congress in Dortmund one of the speakers (I think it was Pip
>Laurenson, Sculpture Conservator at the Tate Brittain) had the courage
>to mention that when preserving art one also has to learn to deal with
>loss. This was not at all picked up at the congress, which should not
>be a suprise of course, since we all like to keep our favorite art
>works alive, and preservation of media art works also means
>recognition of this art. It seems to me however that whether or not
>loss is acceptable is one of the key issues in art today. It is
>connected to issues of power, to deep cultural and economical issues.
>It seems as if loss is not acceptable because it means loss of
>presence on almost all levels of cultural influence. We seem trapped
>in having to adjust to standards that do not really apply to many of
>the art works we are dealing with today, trapped by economical issues
>most of all. I do have some ideas as to how to deal with this, but I
>will leave it with this slightly sombre observation.
>
>
>warmest greetings from rainy Amsterdam,
>
>
>J
>*
>
>
>No Ego: preserving the exchange between artist and audience
>Josephine Bosma
>
>translation, art as conceptual space and art as experience
>
>Thinking about the preservation of new media art in relation to
>translating implies thinking about media art, and I would like
>to think art in general, as a language of sorts, thus tempting
>us to take into consideration all aspects of language as well
>as the cultural impact of language issues also in the arts.
>Preservation of art is not just about preserving matter, like
>translation is not just about finding words with the same meaning
>in a different language. It is most of all about preserving and
>conveying that which is intangible in the text itself or in the
>matter of the art work itself, which makes us enter the (mostly
>textual) realms of education and (oral) tradition, of culture as
>an intangible entity. Preserving art always presents us with
>problems, whether it concerns what type of paint to use for
>eventual restorations of paintings (which is in the end also a
>cultural decision too) or whether it concerns the preservation
>of an artistic 'intervention' in public space.
>The Nederlands Media Instituut Montevideo/Time Based Arts in
>Amsterdam has recently started to interview artists about the
>past, present and especially future of their work, a project
>that seems vital for new media art. Yet, what we should keep in
>mind is that talking about any kind of technical solution for
>preserving art does make one tend to get stuck, however slightly,
>in quite rigid ideas about art as a material object of culture,
>even if the artist never intended it to be so - and maybe the
>audience never experienced it in this way either. I have
>therefore decided to talk about how I see art in the age of
>information networks and how art today has, and will, become
>increasingly difficult to preserve in the traditional way of
>storage and restoration, because it is not just leaving the
>traditional art object behind, but also because art is changing
>into an art experience, maybe even a lifestyle.
>
>Art as Cult, Art as Space of Engagement
>
>We are still witnessing the continuation of a change in art
>that started with the development of reproduction technologies
>and which accelerated in the era of industrialization. However,
>this change goes back, not to the invention of photography or
>the jacquard loom weaving machines (just to name two popular
>starting points of new media art history), but to the invention
>of printing. Print, the end of written text as an almost intimate
>connection between writer and reader, and the end of written text
>as being almost purely a conveyer of meaning. This breech in
>inter-human connectivity - the reproduction of texts and
>especially the uncontrollable dissemination and spreading of text
>this in the end produced - created a bigger distance between
>writer and reader. It created an audience, rather then a group
>of individual readers, itself interconnected through printed
>periodicals.
>
>Even if it took a few hundred years before the way in which
>'ordinary' people would experience written text changed, when
>reading in silence to oneself alone became popular amongst the
>working classes as well, printing as a technology is very
>interesting when considering the cultures of estrangement the
>modern and postmodern era have been and continue to be today.
>It offered an empowerment of the individual that was almost
>unprecedented in the history of the arts by enlarging the
>distance between author and reader, between the author's
>intention and the reader's interests, through a manifold of
>layers of production and possible interpretation. This
>interpretation happened inside the reader's head and translated
>itself into visible culture through the development of fashions
>and 'cults' such as for example gothic romanticism or decadence,
>or the cults around the work and personality of Goethe or Oscar
>Wilde.
>
>One could, of course easily jump from the history of text
>printing to the history of translation (the connection seems
>obvious), but what I would like to look at first is the quite
>recent history of popular cultures. I am interested in those
>not as a defamation of the high arts, but I am interested in
>them as a potential zone of transgression between artist and
>audience. It is quite remarkable that there has been such an
>outspoken tension between popular cultures and the high arts
>for most of the 20th century, when both of them originated from
>the same background: the estrangement from the original
>intention of the author through the before mentioned reproduction
>techniques, which allowed large groups of individuals from all
>social classes an unprecedented freedom of and space for interpretation.
>
>This estrangement produced a mainly social phenomenon in which art,
>fashion and popular cultures would meet: the first large
>'interactive' space of the arts. It created an environment in
>which the audience could expand upon a work of art, no matter
>how slightly or subtly, by entering the new world created by the
>artist. It was the beginning of an at times shallow rapprochement,
>a coming together, of audience, including curators and critics,
>and artists; a time of mutual manipulation in which artists
>influenced the audience and vice versa. The audience's association,
>on various levels, with the arts in popular culture was always an
>active, lively environment, and in the 20th century this environment
>developed from being mostly an interpretation space into being a
>production space as well. This communication or exchange between
>artist and audience created a moving away from the singular,
>original art object to a conceptual space. So when we then neglect
>the conceptual meaning of a work of art in favor of its materiality,
>this can eventually create problems when we deal with works of art
>which are location or time specific and process or communication oriented.
>
>Constantly moving between original intent of an art work and the
>freedom of interpretation one could legitimately state that we
>are in a sort of 'perpetuum mobile' situation. These circular
>movements in the arts can roughly be summarized as follows:
>reproduction creates distance from the original which in turn
>creates increasing freedom of interpretation, this freedom of
>interpretation creates a reaction on the part of the arts to
>pre-create interpretation and thus regain an intimacy with the
>audience; the audience is challenged by the individual artist's
>pre-creation of interpretation (and the eventual reproductions
>and documentation of it) to enter into a further expansion of
>interpretation, and all of this is happening in an expanding
>market complemented by personal and mass media.
>After experiments in 20th century art and discourse which tackled
>specific questions concerning originality, authorship and the
>boundaries of the work of art and of art itself, we have now
>entered a stage in which artists are moving away from creating
>objects to focus almost solely on creating 'zones of interpretation',
>on creating art processes rather then objects or installations.
>
>Popular culture, once seen as the domain of mainly "fans and bimbo's"
>of all kinds of quality and class, has developed in such a way that
>it is producing its own, autodidact artists (plus art context: artist
>initiatives, journalists, publications). Art has irreversibly become
>part of daily life: the avant-garde can rest in peace. The
>development of a non-institutional art practice has gained momentum
>by the development and availability of personal media, e.g. consumer
>technology. The last few decades in particular a part of the 'former'
>audience has gained access to the higher levels of cultural
>production, through various presentation platforms and media. The
>internet seems to have been of particular importance there. On it
>'grassroots' artist movements and art initiatives with an often
>more profound understanding of media art and its ever changing
>environment then older, more established art institutions have
>developed. Some of these artists and initiatives already collaborate
>with all kinds of art institutions world wide. The now much broader
>(and also deepened) environment of popular culture is actually
>adding to the creation of high culture: it produces high culture.
>
>Media and art experience: "the intelligence sits in front of the computer"
>(Stefen Wernery, founder of the Chaos Computer Club, the German hacker association)
>
>The Canadian art critic Jeanne Randolph, closely involved with the
>new media arts since the early nineties, has developed a criticism
>of what she calls 'the Technological Ethos'. Skillfully avoiding
>the often tedious and rigid Marxist criticisms of capitalism, she
>criticizes our society's obsession with the appearances of our
>alleged progress: virtual reality goggles and gloves, the latest
>mobile phones, personal computers, palmtops, etc. Jeanne Randolph
>reminds us that technology is not that shiny, desirable object, but
>technology is what created it. Technology is an ever developing,
>immaterial process, which we can perceive and be aware of through
>the traces it leaves behind in the form of the products it every
>now and then materializes in. One could even say that these
>products are the temporary physical translations of an immaterial,
>creative process. Randolph's reminder of the basis of our
>technological environment gives us the opportunity to look at
>preserving 'unstable' art works as reconstructing a partly materialized process.
>
>The history of art created with electronic media is often presented
>as a separate entity in the history of art as a whole, just like
>products of technology are often perceived as a breech with the
>environment they sprung from, but the art works we deal with here
>could also be seen as a technologically conceived (art) form, within
>the diversity of all arts, whereby technology is part of a larger
>artistic, cultural context. More deceivingly even, the history of
>media art is often presented as one separate, linear history, based
>on technological developments. Criticism of art in all sorts of
>digital networks is slowly turning into an ever more technology
>centered discourse as well. It should not have to be that way,
>because like earlier media art was closely related to the context
>of 'immaterial' arts such as performance or conceptual art, network
>art discourses have at least as much roots in a conceptual discourse
>as in a materialistic one.
>
>In June 1997 Tilman Baumgaertel wrote an interesting text in which
>he proposed a pre-history of net art that included many 20th century
>approaches to art, from Futurism via Dada to Fluxus and Conceptual
>art and so on. Others have written similar texts in which art on
>the net is compared to earlier developments in art history and/or
>analyzed from a (cyber)feminist or political perspective. The early,
>conceptual approach to network art and maybe even media art as a
>whole offers a great freedom of thought, and therefore also of
>practice. The desire to see network art as either a purely digital
>object or as an entirely separate entity in or even from art is,
>despite these texts, unfortunately still very strong. Yet if one
>looks at the variety within on-line art projects it is hard to
>maintain that network art is really a separate category in art.
>It would be more accurate to say that art, and the art world at
>large, has sort of been extended and also changed by the use of
>computer (related) networks.
>
>The reality of the arts in the age of the internet is that the
>digital networks, like their predecessor the telephone, has become
>a tool that combines (a relative) accessibility and 'sociability'
>with (a relative) effectiveness and productivity. Artists will use
>them as they please and implement them in whatever art practice
>they engage in. Using all kinds of networks has simply become a
>part of an ever growing multidisciplinary art practice. Artists
>do use the digital networks for their specific technological
>possibilities, yet those possibilities are very often subdued to
>the artist's intent. Whether for instance an art work's conceptual
>space is extended through the web, whether the internet is used as
>a musical instrument or simple signal transportation device,
>whether wireless networks make a city a local canvas, whether the
>internet is used for representation only or for multi-user or even
>audience participation projects, the network is in the end most of
>all the vehicle which makes it all possible, its wiring or nodes
>are not all there is to this art. The core is often something
>else: a fascination with or need for communication, the tension
>between closeness and distance, an exploration of new views, a
>media-political statement etc. The apparent material similarities
>of the art works do not automatically imply that they can all be
>fitted under one and the same category.
>
>Preservation of a Process = Going with the Flow or Being the Flow
>
>A few years ago I interviewed conceptual artist Ron Kuivila, who
>had presented a lecture about his idea of notation/realization as
>a tool in media art at the Dutch media art institution V2. He
>says: "I am raising the possibilities to the notation/realization
>almost in self-defense against the boundless energy and invention
>of these technical forms." And: "The acceleration of development
>in digital media has also increased their ephemerality. This
>becomes a fundamental creative problem for artists trying to
>engage in the possibilities of a particular technology as a
>'medium'. (...) What I am interested in is raising the question:
>what if we begin to think of the creation of media work along
>the relationship of notation/realization? What happens if we take
>that observation seriously and imagine all art making with media
>as having the ephemerality of performance?"
>Curators of new media art, in particular of the arts that engage
>digital media, are chasing the impossible. They are trying to
>capture a movement, an event that is time, site and hard or
>software specific. It might be time, as he suggests to "imagine
>the passage between a particular set of technical possibilities
>to a particular piece as a more fluid situation. Or, we can take
>the opposite tack and imagine works as problems of specification..."
>
>Let's now turn back to the development of what I called the
>interactive space of the arts, the circular movement, a dance
>perhaps, of interpretation in which artist and audience each
>take turns. The much hailed interactivity of the new media
>networks is not about clicking buttons, but about engaging in
>a work socially, personally. The internet is an intimate space.
>In it we find the same strange tension between distance and
>intimacy that one could see in early modern art. Maybe this is
>one of the reasons Boris Groys suggested that the internet did
>not, as many have claimed, accelerate reproduction to a
>dazzling high, but it in fact brings back the original in art.
>This sudden implosion of the reproduction space has in fact
>scattered the mass experience of art, and returned interpretation
>to a more local, even personal level. Having left the shared space
>of the museum, we are at home or in our office, or maybe even
>alone at a computer in that same museum, 'reading to ourselves'.
>We are engaging, participating, creating, manipulating, and
>being manipulated. The implosion of the art context to the
>personal level, to a level in which we are inside the art context,
>inside the art process even, is the ultimate experience of art.
>Preserving art in this environment is more then a technical
>challenge, it becomes social and cultural theory, it becomes
>concocting an explosive mixture of individual tastes and personal
>stories. The question will be how to distill grand narratives from that.
>
>Not just the preservation of the art work in a mediated environment
>asks for new strategies, but also the continuation or survival of
>the interpretation space between artist and audience (and of course
>between artist and other artists) is dependent on a conscious
>handling of these art works. Art is now entering a phase in which
>wrongful preservation can not just damage the art process itself,
>but also the interpretation of this art could become almost
>impossible. It is not unthinkable that this happens: the rigid
>copyright legislation applied to music and consumer products
>(software in particular) could easily be copied for art made
>with or from digital components, thus obstructing a lively,
>productive exchange between audience and artist. Only consciously
>keeping channels or rights open (and levels of openness can be
>negotiated from project to project and from layer to layer inside
>a project) can prevent art works and projects to bleed to death,
>can prevent a discourse to be cut off or it can prevent that new
>projects do not or hardly have the ability to connect to already
>existing ones. The interpretation of art is largely happening in
>a mediated environment, in which artists, audience and various
>authorities (from governments to critics and art institutions)
>are active, each in their own way. The meaning and value of art
>lies in the activity, the movement, the process of interactivity
>between audience and art work. For a lasting, living art practice
>it is necessary that the audience in particular has the possibility to move and express itself.
>
>
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