I was taken with Kelli's summation: "Challenging our established notions
of permanence may well be useful." Like much in this discussion, I am
reminded of Wallace Stevens.
Beauty is momentary in the mind --
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
At the risk of simplifying, the flesh is what he understood as the work
itself, but ours is a world where the work may already be momentary and
requires the flesh of other forms of transcription. As Stevens says
elsewhere there are 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, or a work of art,
and every way of looking adds to our knowledge of the object.
There's no substitute for our own experience of a work of art, but we
all know that our own experience can be deepened when mediated through
the experience of others. So using any and all of these means to
preserve the character and quality of a work shouldn't really be thought
of as any different from what we might ordinarily do when trying to come
to terms with any work of art that we take seriously.
I am not familiar enough with the available software, I suppose that the
challenge for institutions might be to develop database models that can
handle the diversity of these kinds of documentation.
Myron Turner
Kelli Dipple wrote:
> Documentation can be many things... anecdotal, technical, descriptive...
>
>
> It is rarely impartial though. An authoritive, tightly edited film about
> an artist's work, compared to a more informal interview, a recording of
> the artist speaking in front of a live audience, in discussion with an
> interviewer or a conservator, or a bunch of mobile phone videos uploaded
> to YouTube by audience members will all give different insights into the
> work.
>
> The notion of a networked model put forward in Annet's summery is an
> important point. Centralisation and autonomy can put things at greater
> risk.
>
> Ironically methods employed by other sectors, say archaeology, often
> involve digitization. Capturing a stone wall that has lasted a million
> years, for example, and transcoding it into a short-lived digital
> format. I can't help but view the irony in this, but these activities
> are often tightly linked to issues of access rather than preservation.
>
> Challenging our established notions of permenace may well be useful.
>
> Kelli
>
--
_____________________
Myron Turner
http://www.room535.org
http://www.mturner.org
http://net18reaching.org/cityscapes
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