[iDC] shelf life
Kathleen Ruiz
ruiz at rpi.edu
Fri Nov 16 05:22:41 UTC 2007
Dear Danny, Sean, Annette and Colleagues,
Consuming and Archiving
If we think in a larger view about living in a culture of consumption,
including the consumption of culture itself...the shelf life of our digital
work may be contextualized in a new light.
Unless we have funding for constant upgrading and archiving of our artwork,
we become, to paraphrase Lyotard, ...thoughts without a body. Our time and
place within the history of digital artmaking, and artmaking in general
(with the now ubiquitous nature of embedded digital computing), becomes
intrinsically linked to ongoing funding support to keep the work alive and
afloat digitally (or in the future, perhaps organically or through
nanotechnology storage)
The ability to reconnect with time, technology and the dialog of the content
and the ongoing potential relevancy of its poeisis is also an interesting
concept. One can consider Cory Archangels's Mario Brothers piece which
brings me instantly back to times of play with my brother. Years from now
we may also enjoy his photoshop series works which will remind us of a
method or tool we once used, but may not exist in the form we once
remembered.
The ideas are endless, the storage space is not. Who determines what works
go on in perpetuity will be an interesting question.
I have another colleague, who I am hoping to bring into our discussion, and
who is involved in a project which will digitally preserve her performance
work until 2050 or thereabouts. She is making a piece specifically for that
year as well to be revealed only then. Hopefully she will be able to join us
now.
Also another thread of thought I am considering is the ecological nature of
digital media art- its power consumption in it's own active life and again
in its archival life and then again in its reanimated life.
This brings to mind an exhibition my students and I saw where one of Andy
Warhol's films kept breaking and one of my student's said why doesn't the
museum just put the work on dvd to eliminate the repeated breakage of the
fragile film stock? I argued that this was not the way the artist had
created the work and this is why the museum was showing the film version. A
few weeks later I revisited the exhibition and noticed the museum had
replaced the film with a dvd. At the very least we could all see the work in
some form rather than not at all.
I would like my work to be seen/experienced by those who may want to in 2050
or beyond, but right now, I too, am wondering about upgrading to Vista and
not being able to show my work now.
sincerely,
Kathleen
____________
Kathleen Ruiz
Associate Professor of Integrated Arts
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Department of the Arts
West Hall 314c
110 8th Street
Troy, N. Y. 12180-3590
Phone: 518-276-2539
ruiz at rpi.edu
http://www.rpi.edu/~ruiz
-----Original Message-----
From: idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net [mailto:idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net]
On Behalf Of Danny Butt
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 5:54 PM
To: idc at mailman.thing.net
Subject: Re: [iDC] shelf life
Hi Sean,
Heh, I like axiom two... but in relation to axiom one - the issue
which underlies my very dissolute post is probably this: isn't the
"shelf life" of oral communication and bodily movement shorter than
all those media you list?
Now my gut feeling is that media studies has often taken (from
structuralism) such activities to have a "natural" presence which
disqualifies them from the condition of media/representation/art as
such. But for me Derrida's "Of Grammatology" rigorously took apart
that distinction - or at least highlighted the danger of that
distinction: privileging speech as the source of writing ultimately
leads to a form of ethnocentrism whereby speech's guarantee of
presence suppresses our ability to treat speech as we would any other
medium; thereby leading to all the hierarchies we know well in
modernism.
So the questions of temporality seem a bit more complicated for me,
hard to place on this incremental axiom, and again, my aim here is to
ask in what ways the issues of "preservation" in new media are
completely distinct from other fields, and where the opportunities
lie for connecting our experience to others....
Regards,
Danny
--
http://www.dannybutt.net
On 16/11/2007, at 10:59 AM, Sean Cubitt wrote:
> axiom 1: every new medium has a shorter shelf life than the
> previous one (stone lasts longer than paper lasts longer than film
> lasts longer than magnetic lasts longer than optical)
>
> axiom 2: with each step, recording media come closer to becoming
> erasing media
>
> Sean Cubitt
> scubitt at unimelb.edu.au
> Director
> Media and Communications Program
> Faculty of Arts
> Room 127 John Medley East
> The University of Melbourne
> Parkville VIC 3010
> Australia
>
> Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667
> Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494
> M: 0448 304 004
> Skype: seancubitt
> Web: www.mediacomm.unimelb.edu.au
>
> Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series
> http://leonardo.info
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net on behalf of Danny Butt
> Sent: Thu 11/15/2007 8:35 PM
> To: idc at mailman.thing.net
> Subject: Re: [iDC] shelf life
>
> Interesting topic and much in Annette's analysis that resonated, but
> let me pick out a tension related to the question of performance
> which is on my mind a lot right now probably because I know so little
> about it:
>
> I've recently looked to artists with a performance orientation to
> help understand new media practices, and I think the question of
> documentation is understood in a much more sophisticated way in that
> field than it is in new media practice, so an engagement with that
> history could be a great opportunity (of course, many artists are
> already working that thoroughly). We get sucked in by the short term
> stability of a digital object (or platform/algorithm) and generally,
> new media is interested in what's new, so archival practices are not
> only de-emphasised, but there are few models around to discuss.
> Personally, when I look at some works I was involved with more than
> ten years ago, I'm grateful to be able to just describe the ones that
> don't work, as the ones that do seem pretty dated. But then maybe I
> should have been producing "better work" lol.
>
> I'd describe the idea that
>
> "Barring physical destruction, but acknowledging cultural difference,
> contextual change, and continuous reinterpretation, the [traditional]
> art object has a kind of inner stability/integrity that defies time.
> This is often irrespective of judgments of quality or fashion, but
> something that resides in the object itself, an indissoluble
> lamination of medium and idea"
>
> as more to be a statement of modernism than of art generally, and the
> persistence of that ideology within the new media sphere has always
> been a source of great discomfort to me, because it's not really true
> from my pov. Here is a further, heavily politicised link to
> performance: performance is a medium which found very little space in
> the modernist aesthetic (Michael Fried), or we might even follow
> Amelia Jones in suggesting that performance art can be read as an
> often deliberate displacement of the modernist subject.
>
> To add to this, I'm not sure I agree with the statement that "There
> seems to be an odd paradox of 'long gestation, short lifespan' that
> seems very particular to new media", or the characterisation of
> performance art as "spontaneous, gestural, open-ended and casual".
> Yes, there is a tradition of improvisation in the performance sphere,
> but I see performance generally as being similar in its long
> gestation period, and with often even shorter lifespans.
>
> So a tension between the temporality of media practice and that of
> institutional (or subjective) demands for stability could be an
> opportunity to forge stronger alliances with other fields that have
> failed to be "real enough" for the institutions - performance, video,
> storytelling, "craft", etc... and perhaps media art is less unique
> than we might think in this respect.
>
> On this whole question, I've really enjoyed the work of Caroline Rye
> and others in University of Bristol's PARIP (Practice as Research in
> Performance) project which, while dated (2001-2006) raised some of
> these questions for me initially <http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/
> index.htm>. I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone doing further
> work in this area.
>
> Regards,
>
> Danny
>
> --
> http://www.dannybutt.net
>
>
>
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--
http://www.dannybutt.net
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