User:Jules/approach

Lucia's pratice is embedded within Online Art
She has an interest in interfaces, which is to say, the border and delimitation between the milieu of the information and the milieu of the receiver. This border is in constant redefining, and will be potentially redefined very soon after she has presented her graduation project.

Her past work has explored the potential of interventions, altering the experience of the user with the interface, by giving meanings to captchas (which we usually enter automatically as if they were letter forms without content) or by slowing down the process of buying on amazon with Let me think, an application forcing the user to be more conscious about their purchase.The free association database explores the construction of subjective relations between words and their legacy. This was meant to make us think about our daily contact with suggestions, associated to what we seek when we browse the web through interfaces and how these relations are built.

What is a document :
Latin etymology : basis, proof or support for anything else. Idea of substanciation, corroboration, validation, verification.
Any material substance on which the thoughts of men are represented by any species of conventional mark or symbol.
→ idea of re-location into another form for the posterity and transmission


Why is it necessary to document Lucia's work: To keep a track of what has been done, anticipating on the evolution of technologies which will make it inaccessible in an undetermined period of time.

Also because the only two options for the work to remain as it is are the:
- Emulation
- Updating the work

If those approaches are acceptable with analog works which are not meant to interact with their environment and are embedded within the tangible, this is weird to apply it to a mediated space. The pace of evolution within digital ecologies is quite different. An hour in human-life time may be about a decade in program-life time. Assisted living seems like a bad tendency. This seems like a waste of time and energy.
Would it make sense if a performer re enacted a performance ad hitero for the sake of maintaining the art work alive ?

Funnily, those approaches are not too much applied to Land Art and Performance Art, which as much as Internet Art, are "site" specific.

As critic Dave Hickey wrote in these pages in 1971, Pop Art and Land Art «are both arts of location and dislocation, deriving energy from sophisticated forms of trespassing.”
Moca's landart website indexes online what people could go to see offline :
http://www.moca.org/landart/
The art is in a specific tangible location

TATE WEBSITE SAYS
« Land art was usually documented in artworks using photographs and maps which the artist could exhibit in a gallery. Land artists also made land art in the gallery by bringing in material from the landscape and using it to create installations. »
Marina Abramovic and Ulay's Imponderabilia original and digital reenactment
http://youtu.be/sTQPZhre50g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgeF7tOks4s


How to leave traces of Lucia's work that can potentially survive the work?

Some characteristics of Lucia's work has to be taken into account.

1. Substance of the work

The core of her work resides within the interaction, the experience of the interface.

If the documentation had to be visual, we would have three possible points of focus :
a. The screen side (deployment of the work)
b. The human /computer interaction (contextualization)
c. The human's physical reaction to the encounter (psychological stimuli)
Images are perhaps more stable but show only one frame in time, videos can keep the timescale but have also to be preserved.

2. Materiality of the work

INSERT STUFF about performativity and mediation by the machine

3. Materiality of the document

I have to differenciate the document itself and how it is meant to live its life.

More and more paper publications are being created on Internet based Art. It seems like an attempt to overcome the ephemerality of the digital content. Those publications may rewrite the history of Internet Art in the future if this is all that remains. Are those publications very accessible? More or less. My main concern is that they are edited by some curators with a certain authority within the Art world, somehow superimposing their very own views and promoting their favorite artists. The narration of Internet art remains therefore very controlled, at the will of an elite. It may be necessary to have some publications to document the past existence of these works, but the idea of a finished product dictated by my personnal view on the subject doesn't satisfy me much. It seems to override the core of the Internet itself, which is a system where things work more organically. It would be nice to try to leave things to happen more openly. (I am mainly refering to Art and the Internet, which I'm not too happy with).

Can a problem that was created online be solved online ?
- Net.artdabatase.org >> relying on Youtube, is that a good strategy? Lots of videos have alread vanished.
- Petra Cortight vvebcam got banished from youtube, the context for its viewing– you have to comply with the conditions of a private company
- Olia Lialina's vine account : https://vine.co/olia.lialina. Gives a great feel but once again the preservation of the archive lays in the hands of the corporation's will.

Apart from the problem of not being the decision maker over the hosting of the data you need to preserve, you just don't want to put all your eggs in the same basket. A machine's hardware can crash, you can have software issues as well.

"A computer will make copies of all the data it operates with, and so the Internet is basically a huge assemblage of copying machines. In the digital world, practically everything we come in contact with is a copy."
Michael Seemann (Digital tailspin)

So we should take advantage of the potential of copying for the document to increase its chances of survival.

The Pirate Bay is an online index of digital content, allowing search, download and contribution through magnet links and torrent files. it facilitate P2P file sharing amongst the users of the BitTorrent protocol. Since it's creation in 2003, it has been pretty indestructible.
The things which are nice are the possibilities for users to submit and disseminate their media, with a description alongside and other users comments about it.
I like that the content is not hosted on the website itself but spreads accross different machines. The website is just an index that can be mirrored as well.