I think Myron is correct, there is something needed which moves beyond classification and nomenclature.
It is for this reason I did extensive interviews with the artists whose work I chose for my Shifting Polarities project. For those of you not familiar with it, I named exemplary works of Canadian electronic media art from the 1970s and 1980s. The interviews contextualize the artist's practice and then offer anecdotal, as well as important historical information, about the chosen work's conceptualization and fabrication. Availability of these interviews online (for how long though is a question) enables scholars to situate the work beyond a taxonomic description.
Also, and this goes back to a conversation I had with Simon Werrett on the Banff shuttle at Refresh!, works could be kept in a degraded dysfunctional state in order to keep the technical components available. Simon pointed out that for scientific historians the components of scientific instruments - even fasteners - contain important historial information which speak very specifically about the historical narrative of the instrument. We could apply similar thinking to new media works which are no longer active.
Finally, we lost an important artist in Canada recently. Juan Geuer, who worked with optics, lasers, and seismic sensors to produce exquisite real-time projections of the earth's activity, to name one part of his practice, passed away on May 2nd at the age of 92. Now, Juan was active until the day he died, so there is a vast body of work which now needs to be dealt with, placed in museums, etc. One of his works is permanently installed in a basement gallery of the Ottawa Art Gallery. The work, Al Asnaan, has a very sensitive horizontal pendulum which senses the earth's movement, but also the movement of the audience in the gallery (this work is very close to the earth's surface since Ottawa sits on the Canadian Shield). The work is very complex to install and Juan, because he lived for so long, was solely responsible for installing and maintaining the work. Anyone can see what is coming here. The gallery realized, due to his advancing years, that they would need to have a record of his knowledge, beyond the owner's manual accompanying the work. They had the foresight to make a videotape (is that what we call it now?) of Juan installing the work, two weeks prior to his passing. The video document will provide details which will be integral to an understanding of the work, not just in terms of setting it up in the gallery, but also how the artist's hand produced, and maintained a relationship with it.
I expand on with some of these questions in an upcoming article in Convergence.
Here are some links related to what I've been talking about above:
Shifting Polarities: http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1949
Juan Geuer: www.juangeuer.com (make sure you scroll down beyond Juan's photograph to get to the website link).
All for now,
Caroline
> Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:12:04 -0500
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] documenting and archiving - results archive 2020
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> I've been following along and recall that we've had similar discussions
> in the past, often cropping up when we've attempted to come to terms
> with just what net art is. We do of course need techniques for
> descriptive documentation of projects. But I think there's a need for
> more than just taxonomic and technical description. If the physical
> presence of a work is going to disappear or almost disappear, it's
> important to have descriptive responses which recreate the presence of
> the work and the contexts which informed it. This would take some
> curatorial management, but the tools are there for involving audience
> and developers.
>
> Myron turner
>
> Sarah Cook wrote:
> >
> > Sandra Fauconnier and Gaby Wijers at NIMK: how has involving the
> > public in curatorial selection of works in the archive (through the
> > new mediatheque, or curator for a day project, for instance) led to
> > new ways of thinking about preservation and documentation of the
> > works? Can you tell us a bit about inside-installations.org and the
> > OASIS project (Open Archiving System with Internet Sharing)?
> >
> > Aymeric Mansoux at GOTO10: do you think the idea of 'open-sourcing'
> > documentation tasks, by distributing them to the makers/developers, is
> > a good solution?
> >
> > any thoughts from any others would be great too,
> > thanks
> > sarah
> >
> --
>
> _____________________
> Myron Turner
> http://www.room535.org
> http://www.mturner.org
> http://net18reaching.org/cityscapes
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