Epilogue:
How do individuals find themselves in the database?
Marketing is speeding up the frequency of new trends. The look that was
once fresh is more quickly becoming old fashioned. Bombarded as we are
with the pressure to consume new products, the need to remember, and sometimes
to preserve artifacts of events, objects and written accounts, has become
an important human value. Sometimes it is the desire to say, ‘I
was there,’ sometimes it is the desire to say, ‘ I saved this
object or account from that actual moment in time.’ Both might relate
to, ‘ I was there, I took part, and here is the proof of what it
was like.’ Web searches on eBay bring up assortments of collectables
relating to recent historical events. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall
in 1989 is one example. In the case of an institution, the message might
be, ‘ this shows what we were thinking, or this is the level (of
civilization) that had been achieved by that date.
My interest in public archiving roughly coincided with the time
period when digital format evolved to practical availability on the consumer
level. Price, convenience and space issues caused the shift in the videotaping
(television) industry and (mass) consumer availability followed. The three-quarter
inch, Umatic standard became a thing of the past in the late 1990’s.
That is when I found out that some institutions were scrambling to quickly
convert older film and video records to digital format. At the same time,
through inquiry, I became aware that curatorial decisions used during
the conversion were questionable. I realized that a lot of the experimental
works of Canadian Artists from the 1980’s were in danger of being
lost, forever forgotten as the three-quarter tape, playback machines disappeared.
Potentially, the work of a whole generation of artists could be lost.
I am not referring to the art stars, that select system will remain intact,
but to the ‘middle world’ of practitioners who continue to
experiment, to evolve and to build their oeuvre. As technology evolves
and earlier formats are eliminated, there is a danger in all fields of
study, that the knowledge base will be reduced rather than expanded; that
previously esteemed theory is doomed to disappear.
In the Canadian Contemporary Art Landscape, the digital technology shift
coincided with the artist run centres coming of age. 25th and 30th year
anniversaries were celebrated and commemorated through archiving projects.
Catalogues memorializing past works and events were being researched;
retrospective exhibitions were planned. I had, and still hold a concern
that those kinds of projects by necessity must focus on recognizing ‘brand
names’, products already well known in the milieu. A number of factors
influence the decision making process and an element of favoritism must
also come into play. Even if the work of some Artists was exceptional
in its time, if they had not been able to persevere in the field, that
work was in danger of becoming ‘forever unknown.’ Performance
Au/In Canada 1970 –1990 [1]
published in 1991 is an example of an anthology that hit and missed in
its survey. Some earlier work; from the sixties and seventies had an assured
place as it had already been documented and transferred to more recent
technology. The fact that there were fewer practitioners to document from
those decades simplified the process. The time period of the mid-to-late
late 1980’s should cause more concern as most of that work was recorded
on the now defunct industry standard of three-quarter inch Umatic format.
For several years, museums, galleries, and cultural organizations have
been looking into possible solutions to the very modern problem of being
able to continue to collect, to store, and to later exhibit artworks.
Installation, performance and works involving computers, interactivity
and other current new media, changing and ephemeral technology pose the
greatest challenges. The physical durability of support media, magnetic
tape, and other emulsion-based transport material are also factors to
be considered. As technological changes take place, methods of dealing
with these challenges multiply. In 1998, the Guggenheim Museum started
developing the Variable Media Initiative. It began with the development
of a questionnaire asking artists what they see as the most important
facets of their work. Today, the Variable Media Network [2]
conducts a proactive search for solutions to future exhibiting procedures
acceptable to the artists. The search has led has lead to other initiatives.
The organization held its second major conference this year. Through partnership
with the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology,
the Guggenheim Museum, New York hosted the exhibition Seeing Double and
the Symposium Echoes of Art: Emulation as a Preservation Strategy, March
through May 2004. As stated on the website, ‘The aim of this affiliation
is to help build a network of organizations that will develop the tools,
methods and standards needed to implement this strategy. …’
A visit to the site provides a full education of what they have accomplished
to date. They cite some of the progress to date as including: defining
art forms and their essential components; using emulation (imitating)
the original work by different means; reproducing original works; interpreting
encoded work; migrating (upgrading equipment and source material). They
state that ‘reinterpreting the work each time it is re-created’,
is the most radical preservation method to be considered to date. While
their efforts are accomplishing a lot, the process is not able to step
out of the museum into the world of ‘what else’, or as Rob
Woodbury remarked early in our conversation, when referring to library
repositories, ‘ …They have been at it a long time and librarians
receive several years of education around how to do that in terms of access
to information, sharing information and re-use of information. But they
do not present the entire solution to society; they don’t provide
the whole picture.’
In his article Bad New Media Art, for Arts Atlantic Magazine, Summer 2002,
Jon Tupper, Director of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown,
PEI examined the necessity of criticism in the process of curating of
new media art: “ …Looking back on the video work that was
done in the late 1960s and early 70’s, so much of it looks downright
awful to me. And it’s the same stuff that looked so fresh when I
first saw it. …It isn’t surprising that so much of the discourse
surrounding new media art has focused not on content but on the technology.
It’s a sort of return to a modernist privileging of the form. …”
In other words, fascination with new media and a disregard for content
can sometimes drive the critical process. It can be the formalists’
heaven, or in other words, Marshall McLuhen’s ‘the medium
is the message.’ Tupper goes on to mention that slowly some good
ideas have emerged through events that have opened the discourse around
new media practice. It is important to note that as critical structure
for new media evolves, experimentation will and must continue, regardless
of whether it is judged to have long-term value.
To gain a well-rounded reading and to continue to build upon the cultural
and scientific knowledge of the world community, many sources must be
consulted. Many approaches must be tried. New media artwork, and in particular,
web enabled work has made it possible to gather impressions from a wider
range of sources. Through the efforts of the Variable Media Network, living
artists find themselves in the very privileged position of being invited
to discuss future representation of their work. Vera Gartley came to a
number of conclusions about her personal sense of being; when evaluating
her project Collectively Speaking, she found herself caught in ‘her
own kind of leveling of hierarchies.’ AV IR E is currently making
it possible for architectural students to benefit from the display and
discussion of their work with ‘real world’ expert and peer
groups. Netera’s proposed solution of relying on graduate student
skills to build the software, and to find solutions to the problematics
of establishing and maintaining digital repositories is sound. As archives
are testaments to witnessing, the value of interaction with living culture
is also a key element to each epoch. Recognizing and archiving current
new media experimentation is important. If history should later judge
those experiments to have contributed to no great social or intellectual
advancement, as per Jon Tupper’s assessments, then the merit of
those experiments can be re-evaluated as per future library / repository
housekeeping practices.
Equally important is the consultation of original documents and
objects. Looking at the significance of the 1428 expansion of the University
in Florence to include the study of the ancient Greek language, Michael
White states: ‘And so the first of the great factors of change was
set in place. With accurate translations of a growing collection of Greek
texts came the startling realization that everything the Florentines had
so far achieved culturally had been surpassed almost two millennia earlier
by the Greeks. White continues: Rather than this discovery acting as a
destructive force, however, it inspired them to emulate and even to dare
to consider improving upon what the ancients had achieved. [3]
In the centuries that followed the Renaissance, the barriers separating
art, science and technology grew. Today, as individuals and organizations
work to form new links between those worlds, the realm of the curator
grows. Cultural curators of present and future repositories should look
toward organizing objects and information with the same objectivity that
science aims for. The value of an organic repository versus the folly
of the fixed idea is proven time and time again. The scientific world
at its best has remained flexible to further investigation of theories
and when necessary, the abandonment of past theories. This July, Dr. Stephen
Hawking announced a reversal in the idea of ‘black holes’
being places that swallow up everything that falls into them. He stated,
“ I’ve been thinking about this problem for the last thirty
years, and I think I now have the answer to it. … A black hole only
appears to form but later opens up and releases information about what
fell inside. … We can never be sure of the past or predict the future
precisely," he said. "A lot of people wanted to believe that
information escaped from black holes but they didn't know how it could
get out.” [4]
By announcing that he is backtracking on previously formulated scientific
theory, Stephen Hawking sets a high example. It follows that any
historical data should be left open for examination and reconsideration
upon demand. Rather than suggesting reductive, revisionism, I am suggesting
expanding the posted data bank. It becomes increasingly important to realize
that facts and artifacts might not stand up in the future as the best
cultural examples of any given moment in time. A very obvious problem
with relying only upon the decisions of curators lies with the example
of Vincent Van Gogh. If we had only relied upon the critics and collectors
of his lifetime, there is a strong possibility that his work would not
have made it to the archive. On the other hand, because his work consisted
of paintings, they remained accessible to the eye. The infrastructure
for experiencing new media work poses a more complicated set of requirements.
Decisions to acquire and to preserve work must be made within a more limited
time frame.
Who makes public records and how? In the future, how will archiving be
carried out for the Internet? What sites will be included, what will be
discarded, and for what reasons? Will market pressure alone determine
online content? Who will work to check the facts? Any number of cultural,
economic or political factors could figure into the equation. There is
a danger that the ‘footprints’ method will be adopted by governments
and institutions and used to track individuals. Fictional representation
of this possibility was presented in the popular culture movie The Juror.
Alex Baldwin's character traces his prey to a village in Guatemala by
virtue of performing a simple Internet search. Finding a photograph in
the home of his victim, the hit man researches costumes particular to
the specific village. Recent interest in placing family tree information
on the Internet could conceivably fall into use for establishing categories
of discrimination and exclusion of individuals and cultural groups. The
perceived dangers of organized and systematic tracking of ‘footprints’
run the full gamut from mild snubbing to eugenics to genocide. The need
for development of strong Codes of ethics, copyright, and other laws to
safeguard human rights before installing a system has never been more
crucial.
In the dilemma of ‘who’ is entrusted with curatorial tasks,
one of the best examples of Machiavellian curating has to be the current
race by building contractors to modernize Moscow. The Russian Artists’
Union Commission on Preservation of Historical and Cultural Heritage is
fighting a seemingly losing battle to preserve 19th and 20th century landmarks.
Alexei Komech, Chairperson for the Commission explains one argument for
the destruction is that many of the 20th century buildings are monuments
to the dreaded Stalin epoch that no one wants to remember, “but,
when the Communist era ended, the things left over from this time began
to acquire historic importance as symbols of that time. “ The destruction
of the Hotel Moskva is one example of what he and other architectural
experts are calling ‘an attack on the historic heart of Moscow.
‘ There are accusations that City Hall is cashing in on the move
for modernization, new construction, and destruction of landmarks. As
Moscow’s Mayor Yuri Luzhkov is leading the push to ‘modernize’
the look of the Russian capital, while his wife controls the giant Inteka
firm, one of the companies that get the contracts to build on the cleared
sites, we could think that the accusations are well founded. [5]
The A VI RE project of creating and posting an evolving archive holds
the promise for organic cultural and scientific, development. Although
leaving records posted stands to create vast and unwieldy data, if the
process is matched with technology resource development through cooperative
organizations such as Netera, the problems of space and time management
can be reduced and, in an ideal world, eliminated. The value of maintaining
accurate historical records persists in human development. The significance
of keeping records, and referencing them in contemporary life is evident
through the availability of news article archives on line. Most newspapers,
some magazines, and other news agencies now make references to their latest
features online, with the option to purchase full stories and past articles.
There are almost as many examples of this as there are publications.
Leaving the record posted might arguably, have the eventual effect of
eliminating some of the humanitarian tragedies that we witness daily,
if only for reason of fear that responsibility might later be judged,
accountability determined and demanded. [6]
Internet searches bring up banks of information, what won’t be found
is the deleted information; circumstances are simplified when evidence
vanishes. As Rob Woodbury suggests, we must continue, ‘to have the
role of the critic in the gallery, to pull that (information) out from
all of the noise’, but we must also listen to the noise as our own
voices might be found there.
- Valerie
LeBlanc
August 18, 2004
NOTES:
[1] Performance Au/In Canada 1970
–1990 © Éditions Intervention, Québec 1991.
ISBN 2-920500-04-X
[2] Variable
Media Network http://variablemedia.net/
[3] Leonardo, The
First Scientist ©Michael White, 2000, St. Martin's Griffin, NY, p.
43.
[4] For more information
see:
Hawking backpedals on theory
of black holes, The Associated Press, July 16, 2004.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5452537
[5] for more information
see:
Modernizing
jackhammers tear at heart of old Moscow, Globe and Mail, July 13,
2004.
http://archi.ru/photo/english/komlev/moskva/ind_mos1.htm
[6] for related information
see:
http://www.thetrialsofhenrykissinger.com/trials.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/feature_kissinger.shtml