Hi Everyone,
Great discussion here, let me jump right in....
Sarah; here is one take on the difference between documenting and
preserving (though it's true; the are running together) - a recording
of the London Philharmonic Orchestra performing Scheherezade is
documentation; Rimsky-Korsakov's score for Scheherezade is
preservation. One is past-oriented (a snapshot of an historical moment
in the lifetime of the work, frozen in the past for all time), the
other future-oriented (the recipe for re-creating or re-performing the
work hundreds of years into the future, allowing for cultural re-
interpretation technical variation over multiple/infinite variations).
Here's another: Ant Farm's piece "Media Burn" consisted of driving a
modified Cadillac through a pyramid of TVs on fire. To park that
cadillac in a museum and call it an "exhibition" of the work is
really just documentation (a prop). The real work involves an event, a
performance, the heat of burning TV's the speeding 3000 pound car, the
splintering of glass and fire across the audience. To modify a Mini
Cooper and drive it through a flaming stack of iMacs; that might be
closer to preservation.
Now toward Aymeric's comments on using open standards to help document
and/or preserve new/media works, and not re-inventing the
wheel.....one such proposal is already out there being tested. The
Media Art Notation System (http://www.coyoteyip.com/rinehart_leonardo.pdf
) is an adaption of the MPEG-21 metadata standard specifically for use
in preserving media art. Toward the comments on using distributed
labor to help create/maintain/document the archive, MANS includes a
feature called "Accounts" in which anyone can create a "memory" of the
work in addition to any official institutional memory/record that was
recorded using MANS (this assumes that institutions share all such
documentation in an open sense online, etc. but c'mon; of course they
will, right?! :)
So of course I agree that standards and especially context is
important for "remembering" new/media works, but I would counsel that
one can go too far in this direction as well. For instance, true
Archives (accredited, etc.) follow very strict professional guidelines
that are different from those in museums and libraries, and one
Archival tenet is to exhaustively record the context of ownership; how
the object came into the archive, (ie "provenance"). I agree that this
kind of context is important, so MANS is all about context, but one
can go overboard in this direction too. I think that a strict Archival
approach in fact emphasizes provenance to the exclusion of other
important types of documentation for media art (one good example is
that if you find an artwork in a true Archive and you look up the
"creator" of that art work, it will not be the artist, rather it will
be the collector who created the collecting containing the artwork and
gave it to the Archive. In a real Archive, "creator" means collector.
Perhaps that's a bit confusing in an art context, but the point about
context is well-taken nonetheless!
Lastly, MANS is being tested in a project called "Forging the Future",
lead by Univ. of Maine, that is also hard at work developing software
tools for preserving media art. One such tool is the folksonomic
"Vocab Wiki" set up by Rhizome.org - just by way of another example of
how some archival work is indeed being farmed out to the
masses....but not all of it; it's more of a hybrid model where we
don't put all our preservation eggs in either the loose fan-base, nor
the stolid institutions, but rather we try to get them to work
together. Seems a good approach to me!
Richard Rinehart
---------------
Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
bampfa.berkeley.edu
---------------
University of California, Berkeley
---------------
2625 Durant Ave.
Berkeley, CA, 94720-2250
ph.510.642.5240
fx.510.642.5269
On Jun 19, 2009, at 4:05 PM, NEW-MEDIA-CURATING automatic digest
system wrote:
> documenting and archiving - results archive 2020
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