I read this discussion on one of my personal accounts, so the sig file
doesn't reflect my training or day job.

So by way of "formal" introduction, a little background.

My undergraduate work was in anthropology and has shaped my thinking with
an decidedly ethnographic approach to looking at history. I had enough
hours, I could have declared that as easily as German or anthro. I'm also a
musician, both performer and composer, and a photographer. My graduate work
(MILS, University of Michigan) focused on the application of digital
technologies in archives and special collections and as I have developed my
research ideas, I find myself looking at the intersection of history, art,
and technology.

In some of the recent work I've been doing, I'm finding that art historians
and archivists seem to be "missing" what the artists and other creators are
doing. This was especially obvious as I was writing about the New
Aesthetics and Charlotte's recent comments prompted me to respond.

So much of what I found useful was not to be found with "the usual
suspects"; rather, I was gleaning information from blogs, Tumblr accounts,
Pinterest pages and such. For the past three years, there has been
significant discussion about the New Aesthetics at SXSW than there has at
conferences such as ARLIS/NA (Art Libraries Society of North America). This
struck me as strange, since librarians and archivists are traditionally the
very group who have curatorial and stewardship responsibilities for the
record of these things. Have the tools of documentation now become
digitized and someone failed to let the art historians know? Other areas of
history writing seem to be slowly getting the message (I was again
delighted to see reference to the Zorich report)?

The 2011 Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York symposium on
Artists' Records in the Archives was one such attempt to bring archivists,
artists, and art historians together to talk about these materials. But
even then, there seemed to be  a serious minority of us looking at the
digital aspects of the problem. How long before there is a critical mass?

One of my interests is in locative, site-specific audio art and to that end
I began exploring how we approach creating documentation of these pieces,
if not preserving the pieces themselves. To that end, I've recently pulled
together this list:

We start here:


http://mashable.com/2011/05/27/the-national-mall/


http://www.bluebra.in/


...and begin working our way back through these"


http://www.open-plan.org/

http://www.open-plan.org/index.php?leonardo


http://www.drewhemment.com/

http://www.drewhemment.com/2006/last_night_an_arphid_saved_my_life.html


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_media<http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FLocative_media&h=fAQETT344&s=1>


http://turbulence.org/blog/2011/01/17/alterating-conditions-performing-performance-art-in-south-africa-johannesburg/


and lastly,


http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2621.htm / and the broadcast audio—
http://www.kuhf.org/programaudio/engines/eng2621_64k.m3u


... and to think this all started, for me, while listening to the
antiphonal brass choir music of Giovanni Gabrieli.


Best to all,


Dennis



~~
If your first move is brilliant, you’re in trouble. You don’t really know
how to follow it; you’re frightened of ruining it. So, to make a mess is a
good beginning. — Brian Eno


On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 7:27 PM, Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]
> wrote:

>
>
> I want to try and get to the question of what all this (amazing discussion
> of the early days of online art production and discussion) has to do with
> the discipline of art history. And it might be that we decide the answer is
> 'nothing at all' but let me set out some thoughts first.
>
> In the main, I'd argue that lists and art history are connected simply
> because lists were/are primary sources for any art historian wishing to
> research and analyze digital and new media art forms. They might have been
> set up at least in part to get away from the limiting structures of
> institutionalized scholarship, but truly, even with the handful of books
> that have been published on art and digital technology, where would you go
> to find out more? However, what I am interested in is what all of this
> vibrant and prolific online critical appraisal of the arts has done to the
> role of the art critic and to the resources art historians aim to work
> from,
> the products they tend to produce and the way they conceptualize their
> work.
> For example, poll a few art historians and you'll find they still expect to
> be working with static images (maybe not slides, but often the new
> digitized
> versions of slides) and producing monographs.
>
> I am currently - elsewhere - working on an argument
> (http://www.gylphi.co.uk/artsfuturebook/) that art history is in fact
> essentially 'bookish'. What I mean by that (and it's a term I've borrowed
> from digital humanities scholar Jessica Pressman who analyses the
> aesthetics
> of bookishness, or rather literature which faces the trauma of the death of
> the book by developing the codex form as an aesthetic trope) is art
> historical knowledge is partly derived from and very much made for books.
> Whilst that's not specific to art history - what scholarly discipline
> hasn't
> imagined a print-based output?  - I think the concept and indeed concrete
> form of the book serve to re-enforce many of the outmoded standards art
> historians measure art by. For starters, I'd argue that the literal
> combination of words and images bound together on paper pages re-enforces
> the idea that an artwork should be readŠrather than danced or re-createdŠ.
> It might also contribute to the power of concepts like the single
> author/artists or indeed the static artwork. I don't think it's a
> coincidence that digital and new media artworks often moved and aren't well
> represented in art history. I think there's a direct - but not a
> technologically deterministic - link and that link is bookishness.
>
> And then there's the fact - as Diane M Zorich's report on digital
> capacity-building in art history departments repeatedly states - that art
> history is an extremely technophobic discipline
> (http://www.kressfoundation.org/research/Default.aspx?id=35379). Which,
> when
> you think about it, makes very little sense because art history as a
> scholarly discipline solidifies around the invention of the camera ­ and
> what do art historians do if not make intense studies of the creative use
> of
> communication systems? And yet, where were all the art historians on
> mailing
> lists like Nettime, the Syndicate and Rhizome? Where are all the art
> historians using new technologies to ask new questions about the arts? If
> the Modern Language Association conference annually hosts upwards of 30
> sessions on the digital humanities, why has the College Art Association
> only
> offered  one or two over the last four or five years?
>
> Likewise, where are all the art critics? Over recent years we've seen a
> boom
> in online art critical discussion. What art magazine/journal today doesn't
> have a website? And sites like We Make Money Not Art, ArtFCity and
> Hyperallergic are all very popular. But meanwhile, art critics in regular
> employment are in the decline. The art critic for Milwaukee's Journal
> Sentinel, Mary-Louise Schumacher, has been closely monitoring this
> artpocalypse, mapping the job losses of art critics across America and
> recording their stories for an upcoming documentary.
>
> I'm presenting these thoughts in order to usher in a discussion on what
> online art discussion has done to the working activities and indeed the
> very
> notion of an art critic or an art historian? Can such practitioners survive
> in their traditionally-defined roles? What skill-sets are being developed
> and what is being lost through the fast-moving, collaborative world of
> online art discussion? I'm hoping to hear from some of the art critics who
> have carved a niche for themselves online, how they got started and even
> how
> they make ends meet - do they necessarily have portfolio careers. And what
> about art historians working online? There's a small but growing group of
> regular art history bloggers so why did they take to the internet and what
> has it contributed to the way they work?
>
>
>