Testing the shelf life

Testing the shelf life, on presentation, documentation and archives (or vice versa).

‘Igor !!!!!!! Can't you do something else to go through your mid-life crisis ???? !!!!!’ This exclamation was one of the responses to net artist Igor Stromajer’s post on Facebook that he was deleting his collection of online net art works. Expunction, the name of the project, was where one could follow the process of all the deletions, byte by byte. All that remains are the debates that took place on various platforms and documentation of Stromajer’s net art works from 1996 to 2007. In the debate Stromajer hinted at several reasons for his (drastic) measure ‘… to be honest, most of the projects I’m talking about, are nowadays appearing totally different in browsers, as they were in originals. Some of them you can’t even see/experience anymore. I was doing updates all these years, reprogramming, updating etc. But now it makes no sense anymore. (..) they are disappearing/dying anyway. So, it’s better if I ritually delete (and document) them. Because it makes no sense for the audience to watch/browse “damaged” works, to watch/browse something I didn’t actually do’.

The question of documentation and archiving is particular pertinent in today’s digital world, both from an artistic and a societal perspective. Some already predict a Digital Dark Age when nothing is done to safeguard digital data. What this remark shows foremost is an anxiety and urgency upon noticing that digital material has a short expiration date. That digital data is different from previous material is obvious to many people, but the practice shows that this does not automatically mean that a new approach is developed thinking from the new material In this thematic project attention will be paid to the importance of documentation and archiving: to their structure, organisation and power.

French philosopher Jacques Derrida made the claim that ‘the mutation in technology changes not simply the archiving process, but what is archivable – that is, the content of what has to be archived is changed by the technology’. What he means is that not only the style of the content is different through new processes and production, moreover the relation to time and space, being reduced to mere seconds one can reach someone in every corner of the world, has effected the content. The knowledge that information reaches someone within a certain time frame, which could immediately influence a situation, has of course an effect on power relations, in decision-making and accountability. It is generally known and accepted that archives construct a specific account of history, many things end up in an archive, but even more remain outside, to be forgotten. Questions like who is in charge of an archive, who selects, and for whom is the archive, have been plaguing archives from the beginning. One could argue that the digital accelerates this process and at the same time is making these processes more transparent. Some even claim that the Internet has become the archive of archives.

Digitisation has led museums, organisations, libraries and national archives to open their archives to the public, using the Internet as their interface. At times information is made more accessible in a way that people can add their own information, tag existing documents, or make relations between different documents. At the same time, the Internet audience is making their own archives uploading and posting their documents to peer-to-peer networks and/or large (commercial) databases. Derrida rightly assumed that technology has changed power relations; moreover, with the open structure of the Internet everyone has now the ability to be heard and influence existing content by adding their own. Such initiatives show multi-layered and multifaceted meanings of archiving. More than anything they exemplify that an archive is not simply a recording, a reflection, or an image of an event, but it shapes the event. Nevertheless old questions remain important, for example in what way the organisational structures influence the building and maintenance of archives: How are decisions made, where is the archive kept, who is making them, and with what aims?

Guided by many examples – theoretical texts, lectures, hands-on experience, artworks, screenings, visitors and visits – the performativity of documents, the art of documentation, and the presentation of processes will be discussed. While challenging and expanding existing notions, jumps will be made from the present to the past to the future, and back again. Throughout the course students will work on keeping track of their own documentation process.