User:Max Dovey/Thematic Seminar/Testing the shelf life MD
Week 1 Testing the shelf life - Annette Decker 24/09/2013 Trimester 1
a bit about Annette - Currently doing a phd in conservation & Documentation of internet art at Goldsmiths university, UK. worked on Multivideo core - foundation for art in public space virtual platform impakt festival moo exhibitions in Eindhoven (fat lab)
_ Ignor Stromajer a famous net artists deletes his history of online based work. This act causes conversation and discussion about preservation of work on internet and the lifespan of digital art (a lot of the work had ceased to function due to browser upgrades etc). The Pompidou famously asked him for a hard copy of his work which he gave them on CD rom , this is now defunct, but the institution still own the 'authentic copy'.
Digital degradation starts to occur when the speed of tech development expires digital art that is reliant on a systematic / networked context to operate and be experienced.
ARCHIVE AGENDAS
Archives are dubious in many ways national archives are set out to 'archive everything' with an honest appearance (state run - people assume this is the basis of authenticity / records. all archives although appear as platonic, neutral, objective and systematic are all based on subjective selection of what is deemed important at the time.
ARCHIVE TODAY
Adapting the terms 'original' and 'reproduction' in a world where everything is a copy. formation, use, implication. post prism view of the archive - We encounter a difference between state/institutional public archives and private (online) archives. The public or state archive is often celebrated, trusted as providing records of history of the facts.
Private archives of digital services in a post prism age are now viewed with scepticism , as our data constitutes archives that serve the digital economy.
"We are living in a library of libraries" Foucaut establishing the possibility of what can and cannot be said, " how do we record what is never said" reversing the methodologies of archives to record everything, lets record the invisible. is that even possible any more?
"There is no political power without control of the archive,if not memory' Derrida (archive fever) Derrida looks at the archive as the formation of collective memory that is a discourse that maintains power hierarchies. Derrida introduces the idea that the archive as memory produces new knowledge and is not static, it is a flowing discourse as people retrieve information this is then adapted, rethought and shared. archive storage > static memory > a productive process
The first networked library
The Mundaneum - Paul Otlet (1920s) the first attempt to create a relative centre for all knowledge to be accessed remotely. although only successful in concept Google have now backed a museum in Belgium to display this initial attempt for an archive for everything (aka internet) article Mnemosyne - atlas - Aby Warburg created art from editing and combining artefacts.
Lynn Hersham talks to Michael Shanks "evidence always remains' - trying to reconstruct events via records via autonomous agents. what is the definitive record of an event? there never is one. the politics of presence. We are never completely invisible because we will always be traced and recorded. Article
ASSESSMENT
each 2 weeks 2 of us will analyse a text and then present to the class.
end of year we shall work on documenting 2nd years work that engage with the subject of the archive.
REFERENCE/ READING MATERIAL
Archeology of knowledge - Michael foucaut Derrida (archive fever) 'The enduring ephemeral, or the future is a memory' Wendy Chun (2008) critical enquiry 35.1 article Michael Shanks in conversation with Lynn Hershman.
Week 2
annotations on 'The Task of the Translator' and 'A Work of art from a work of art' by Becky Edmonds The Task of the Translator
A theory that looks for other things in translation than the reproduction of meaning. Translation of a text is a documentation, an interoperated representation of an original. The Translator is in a privileged position where the process of their work cannot be measured by most audiences (knowing the difference between the original and the translation) Translation is the beginning of the original's afterlife, a new definition in a different discourse. Translations carry the promise of an eternal afterlife (like art works)
Successful translations can heighten the original - unlike reproductions that can offer erode value o the original.
"Even words with a fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process" The audience that interprets the language changes .
It is only in relation to the intended object or meaning that two words ever mean the same thing, there is subjeive difference in each different language.
Good translations require the translator to creatively gain an understanding of authors intention that often defies the language constraints (of the relation coming from the same object definition)
Letting go the language rules so the translation gives voice to the intent of the author. (The translator is granted a creative, privileged position)
However the translator comes from the wrong position - trying to conform something to their language - is against the agenda of the original.
The text is unconditionally translatable.
The interlinear version of the scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all Translations.
In A work of art from a work of art by BECKY EDMONDS
Becky Edmonds is a dance choreographer filmmaker and has developed a methodology and technical approach to distinguish her work from other forms of visual documentation.
"Documentation requires as much creativity as the original production"
artists talk about capturing the event when making documentation of live works. This hints at seizing a fragment of the original , however in the attempt to record the event accurately the videos actually degrade the original. see "what the good of a history if it degrades the quality of the art' (1988) by Daniel Nagrin.
Becky goes onto to highlight the shortcomings of video documentation, calling it the gap. within this gap the documenter should creatively explore the gap between the original and the fallings of the visual documentation. She attempts to create a documentation based on view experience , doing in camera editing so her experience as audience member is truthfully recorded. She focuses on the patterns in the work.
The act of the documenter should not be a scribe or translator but to explode that gap between art and documentation. To make the documentation part of the live event and not an add on.
In my own work i make creative acts from the archive (documentation) of peoples lives. user data is generated by people to broadcast/ perform, the data is the residue that i reinterpret.
Week 3
notes from archive fever by Derrida and OKwui Enwezor 'photography between history and the monument. '
Derrida adapts freud psychoanalytical approach in relation to the archive and defines a subconscious desire to named ' the destruction drive' from the psychic apparatus. Humans have always had a burning desire to archive, to capture meaning and gain an ethnographic understanding. This burning desire is fuelled by the concept of death and simultaneously of a future that will live beyond them. The archive depend on a concept of the future. once the mechanical reproduction of the image became possible this shifted the archive from a subjective manual indexing object to a more systematic, automated temporal object.
power and the archive.
The word archive derives through greek language to begin, rule, govern. Knowing this you begin to see how control and power can be wielded by owning the archive. Having access to the records and 'intelligence services' also drive power control, Enwezor uses the iraq war and the 'weapons of mass destruction' as an example of the records justifying exercises of power.
The act of archavization produces as much as it records and event.
Records and the digital archive
The act of recording that computational systems are built with memory, an archive of records is kept to wield power and control.
Archive vs Records The subjective choice of what gets saved is up to the individual in the realm of digital and social media landscapes. You could argue that the user still chooses what to share and keep public / private. When we communicate via social network sites we don't conducer the act a data entry to be indexed, catalogued and valued. And in fact what we are saying is of little importance to the archivist , if you look at the amount of meta-data from a tweet for example they will be over 160 attributes to that piece of data than contribute towards the data economy.
The search for objective truth
If you look back in history at newtons law for example , when one singular voice would provide the objective defined truth - certified because researched and declared by a specialist. Now people reference facts using wikipedia and google that rather base their catalogue on objective truth, is formed from mass subjective compromised / agreed truth. If we don't believe in objective truth anymore than do we still require the use of archives? a multiplicity of realities now exist. every lie creates a a parallel world - a world in which it is true. The archivists who manage the way information is structured create the truth, or the nearest thing to the truth. Oliver Loric uses the image of iranian missiles where the original photo was revealed to be doctored in photoshop to show 4 instead of 3 missiles. anonymous authors remixed the image extensively so that authenticity is now decided by the viewer as the original sits within millions of variations. The most popular ones become top of google page rank meaning that image viewed often enough becomes part of collective memory. Don't try and understand history as truth but as narrative.
Working with data as archive.
In Invisible airs Graham Harwood created 'contraptions' that completed physical operations based on open government data. He describes data as the air , all around us and invisible. we pass through it at the conclusion there are multiple more databases created.
"The steam engine has been invited but no one knows how to draw it' Graham Harwood
If we assume that everything is automatically recorded by computational systems or mobile documentation and the wealth of recordable media and devices than we the subjective selection of what is recorded is no longer an issue (as we assume everything is recorded) . Now how the artist approaches the archive and the subjective selection they make by choosing what material or data to work with has become a creative act.
If you look at Natalie Buchen's series that create a narrative from simultaneous youtube recordings of individual confessionals. The act of what is choosing becomes the art , the artist working with archive as medium and form.
Dominic Gagnon collects video clips hosted on youtube that are flagged as extremem or inappropriate before they get removed from the youtube server. By editing them together in 'R.I.P pieces of america' the political domain of youtube is revealed and how through normalising judgement a mediated democracy can be achieved.
Christoph Draegers piece recreated the munich 1972 olympics based on archive material from live broadcasts. what i find particularly interesting in this piece is that this was the first time the olympics wre being broadcast and the kidnappers were watching the news of them in the room. This ment that the police were unable to act because information was being streamed in real time , affecting the live situation.
week 4
three texts Hito Steyerl (2009) In Defense of the Poor Image. Olga Goriunova (2011) Organizational Aesthetics, Digital Folklore and Software. In: Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet. London: Routledge. Bruno Latour & Adam Lowe (2010) The migration of the aura or how to explore the original through its fac similes. In Switching Codes, edited by Thomas Bartscherer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
In the migration of the aura some good qoutes are ' only the original pocessess the aura', ' a work of art has a trajectory,a career' "if we stop interpreting , if we stop rehearsing, if we stop reproducing, the very existence of the original is at stake' Latour and Lowe also highlight how visual art reproduction is repressed while in theatre it thrives, we reinterpret shakespeare for centuries. Adaptions of originals are encouraged.
In the Defense of the poor image "as it accelerates, it deteriorates"
Imperfect cinema -defined by Cuban filmaker Juan espinosa - overcomes class division by not being reactionary and technically perfect. Like the economy of poor images , qaulity degredation merges the boundary between art and life.
Guattari and capitalism's semiotic turn plays in favour of the creation and dissemination of compressed and flexiable data packages that can be intergrated into ever new combinations and packages. "The history of conceptual art describes this dematerialization of the art object first as a resistant move against the fetish value of visibility. Then, however, the dematerialized art object turns out to be perfectly adapted to the semioticization of capital, and thus to the conceptual turn of capitalism.14 In a way, the poor image is subject to a similar tension. On the one hand, it operates against the fetish value of high resolution. On the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings."
poor images push the definition of the image. we then talked about the value of transience over permanence, valuing something on its trajectory and how far it can flow.