Just as I was beginning to feel comfortable with the ebullience and happy
raggedness of the Run_Me Festival which Peter has so engagingly described
for us, Ana brings us back to an issue which we spoke about earlier in the
month, but with a greater sense of urgency.

Yet Run_Me is not beside the point here. If you got their web site you'll
find dozens of search terms representing categories for the digital work on
the site; these are not merely the concoctions of runme.org but also of the
participating artists who, if they can't find suitable categories to
describe their works, can add their own. I suppose it's a kind of anarchic
inclusiveness, of the kind which Peter found in the three days of artists'
presentations. Peter found a similar indeterminacy in the Read_Me/Run_Me
lecture series:
           What the lectures also made clear is that software art is still
a hard
           to grasp term. Here we can see a similarity with the term conceptual
           art that arose in the 60's and even today is still hard the define.
Early in the history of Rhizome, the relationship between Conceptual Art
and what we were doing was, certainly for me, an important part of our
discussions. I would like, however, to push Peter's point a bit harder,
that is, that a significant meaning of Conceptual Art is the
indefinability of art. Where abstraction called into question art as
representation, opening the door to artists who could not represent,
Conceptual Art called into question the material basis of art and shifted
art-making from its external manifestations onto the artist--not just to
Ideas--but to an attitude, the attitude of being an artist and thus opened
art up to what serious people had often feared, the artist as poseur. And
this is where we were on Rhizome--art as talk, as email, as spam, as
personality--it was a lot of fun, even if sometimes tiresome. But the
important point is that we were encouraged in what we were doing by the
understanding that art did not need a material basis and that if we came at
our work as "artists", it was art. Which of course was the motive force
behind a great deal of post-60's art.

I know, one could not be vaguer than this. It would be futile and foolish
to ask preservers of media art to first ask the maker of an object whether
the object was made as art. And yet maybe it isn't so foolish, maybe it
only sounds like a reductio ad absurdum. This a.m. a post came from
Josephine Bosma where she observes that
     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 realize that I am disposed towards the first of these approaches. Yet
there is no reason that there cannot be some attempt at accommodation
between the two where it comes to the urgency of preservation.

Ana refers to Dublin Core and MARC records. I've in fact worked with MARC
records and so have some knowledge of them. The Dublin Core is by
comparison elegant simplicity. Moreover, unlike MARC records, which more
or less require items that fit into traditional library contexts, the
Dublin Core is totally non-prescriptive and open-ended. The most directly
applicable Dublin Core fields, for our discussion, are Creator, Format, and
Type. Format is defined simply as "The physical or digital manifestation
of the resource" and Type can be one or more of the following:
    Collection, Dataset, Event, Image, InteractiveResource, MovingImage,
     PhysicalObject, Service, Software, Sound, StillImage, Text
It is so fluid and open that I can't see how any object which has so far
been mentioned in our discussions would not be able to be described by the
Dublin Core.

So, we are still thrown back to the question of what to include in our
archive of "new media" since the Dublin Core, at least, wouldn't seem to
exclude anything. And that of course is one way to go about it. It's the
way the library of Congress goes about it. Anything that fits into the
broad category of book is accepted and catalogued by the LOC. And if there
were an institution with enough funds available, that's what should be done
for new media art--if we could come to some broad definition of "new
media". The Dublin Core makes such a definition possible, if not
perfect. Our all-embracing institution would, first of all, collect items
in a digital Format--maybe everything digital including music DC's and
DVD's of The Lion King. That would be the perfect solution and one in the
spirit of all-inclusiveness of Read_Me/Run_Me. Otherwise, we are again
faced with the question of what to include. But if we are, because we
don't have the limitless resources of the LOC for our collection, then we
are thrown back again on the Creator.

Obviously, I don't suggest that we approach each digital Creator--even if
we could--to ask whether a particular object was made as an art
object. Here is where cultural criticism comes into play. The question to
ask is whether or not the Creator of the work approached it from within one
or more of the cultural contexts that define and have defined digital
art. Unfortunately, this is rather tautologous and self-referential and so
open to abuse and exclusivity. Nevertheless, I think it's where one has to
start. Every effort would have to be made to be inclusive and not to
conflate cultural criticism with aesthetic criticism, though it will not
always be easy to separate the two--maybe even impossible (but that's
another discussion). Clearly, the fewer the resources an institution has
the more likely aesthetic judgments will come into play. But this isn't
anything new.

One final point on preservation. I think that artists are less concerned
with preservation than those who are charged with preserving. The
uncertainty of the works's future is part of the exhilaration of its making.
It roots the work in its conceptual origins, art without a material basis
or placed on supports without a foreseeable future.

Myron Turner

At 02:48 PM 23/09/2004, you wrote:

>My thoughts after talking about metadata with other folks is that there are 2
>main positions: some think that by discussing metadata for digital art you’re
>condemning it to be “frozen” in time and that that is contradictory to its
>nature - net/ digital art should be an exception to this effort of
>standardization… Others (me included) believe that archiving and preservation
>are vital. I quote Richard Rinehart "With digital art, … if you don't do
>something to preserve it within a span of five years, it's not going to
>survive.[…]"Some works of digital art are already gone. Our time frame is not
>decades, it's years, at most."
>
>BAck to the insight that metadat can bring to taxonomies: specifically in what
>concerns digital art, how does the Dublin Core, the CDWA and the MARC map to
>one another? What are the essentials of the standards the Getty team is coming
>up with? Last but not least, how do these reflect (and may have an impact in)
>the taxonomies of digital art? What metadata schemas are out there that, while
>categorizing digital artworks, may equally accommodate legacy systems of
>analogue works?
>
>Best to all,
>Ana Boa-Ventura