[LINK] Fwd: NYTimes.com Article: Preserving the Perishable Art of the Digital Age

[Dr. Bob Jansen]

Thought this might be of interest to this group.

bobj


>http://www.nytimes.com/partners/screensaver/index.html?eta2
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>Preserving the Perishable Art of the Digital Age
>http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/24/technology/24ANDE.html
>
>September 24, 2000
>
>By MAXWELL L. ANDERSON
>
>MY films are in effect a kind of sculpture," says the artist and
>filmmaker Anthony McCall. "They have everything to do with the
>cinematic apparatus, and are almost impossible to re-purpose." Thus
>Mr. McCall challenges art museums collecting his works: to preserve
>them for more than a few decades, we will have to do the
>impossible. Mr. McCall, who makes art on the Internet, was speaking
>about his 1973 "A Line Describing a Cone," which was recently
>purchased by the Whitney Museum.
>
>  Like many of his works, it uses a 16- millimeter film projector to
>create an experience that must be entered, rather than viewed on a
>screen. Over the course of several minutes, viewers in a gallery
>stand and watch as a white circle is slowly drawn on a wall through
>film projection, creating a cone of light that can be walked into
>and passed through. Like any time-based work of the pre-digital
>age, it poses an urgent question: how can we preserve it without
>changing it? I asked the artist if we might digitize the film, and
>at first he resisted. When I then offered to record and simulate
>the sound of the projector as well, he cautiously assented.
>
>  While museum professionals have always assumed that preservation
>of the past is our primary responsibility, that assumption is being
>mightily tested by the new media artists are using. The increasing
>adoption of innovations like digital photography, digital video,
>digital projection in installations, and Web-based experiences
>opens a new chapter of challenges because these media are unstable,
>prone to deterioration and hold no promise of longevity.
>
>  There are three primary obstacles for museum staffs: our
>instinctive devotion to preserving all artworks at any cost; the
>fragility of digital information; and the fluid and seemingly
>infinite permutation of any digital experience. It is important now
>to review the known implications of this new borderless language
>before charting a course to preserve it.
>
>  Institutional tradition is our first dilemma. The job until now
>has been to collect and protect. In today's creative explosion
>through the chip and the Internet, in an age in which every banal
>whispered sentiment or retinally scanned visual bitstream can be
>uploaded to a personal Web page, Solomonic decisions await us.
>Complicating the situation, this is happening at a time when the
>taste and critical judgment to decide what will survive is urgently
>needed, yet art historians and critics have been reluctant to talk
>in terms of quality, partly because it is seen as an unfashionable
>19th-century idea, and partly because these forms of art are so new
>and changing so fast that it's hard to get a fix on them. In this
>realm there is no limit to the number of works that can be
>featured, displayed, published or seen, unless they involve the
>creation of a distinct physical space. Like a salad bar or
>smorgasbord, the choices are limited only by the appetite and taste
>of the consumer.
>
>  Artists themselves, operating in a do-it- yourself spirit that
>invites the participation of a broad public, often work against the
>conservator's impulse to select by refusing to be arbiters of how
>their art is to be experienced, and neither do they look to
>curators to decide the matter. Artists who use digital video and
>the Net as their media increasingly see museums as old-guard
>institutions insisting on antiquated methods of display. The
>presentation of streaming video is not like the display of a
>painting, and certainly the old models of 11-week exhibitions in
>finite spaces don't have much to do with these new ways of making
>art.
>
>  So what we must do, alas, is introduce that tried-and-true
>technique for winnowing: a marketplace for collectors. Once digital
>artists find themselves trying to sell their work by licensing
>finite versions of it, the familiar and inexorable forces of greed,
>acquisitiveness and aesthetic judgment will assert themselves, and
>we will no longer have the same problems of scale. This may seem a
>long way off, but as digital artists come to terms with the need to
>make a living from their work, that work will begin to assume value
>based on supply and demand.
>
>  Thus far, the reactions to introducing the marketplace are as
>mixed as you might expect. Many artists who began using digital
>media in the early 80's find it anathema to make money from what
>was intended to be freely accessible. Most take the position that
>open accessibility to Net-based work is a defining feature of it,
>and that any restrictions on that access would utterly change the
>work and its intent. Some are curious about how the sale of
>editions of their work would be received by their peers. Museums
>that commission work by Net artists but try to put restrictions on
>how the work may be offered online are often confronted by the
>artists' reluctance to impose any limits.
>
>  On the practical front, we can learn a lot about the physical
>challenges of preserving art made with digital media from art of
>the 20th century. Beginning with artists who used collage,
>assemblage, found objects, industrial multiples, and moving on to
>Conceptual, Process, Performance and anti- form techniques, the
>preservation of artistic intention may be just as important as the
>physical work. We face a losing battle in trying to conserve
>various perishable ingredients of artworks that were devised to
>explore alternatives to, or even sabotage, traditional
>craftsmanship.
>
>  In such cases, especially in the present state of technology, it
>is important to document the intention of the artist when
>transferring analog works to digital platforms, as with Mr. McCall.
>Resistance, while understandable, may eventually consign works to a
>kind of oblivion. Yet we must ask whether a film, transferred to
>DVD, remains a work of art in the eyes of the artist or becomes a
>documentary equivalent lacking in its fullest experiential
>dimensions? Will a video from the 80's, if streamed through a Web
>site, in losing the granular quality of its original presentation,
>lose its value?
>
>  Shirin Neshat, an artist who works with video and film, is only
>slightly more open than Mr. McCall in allowing digital tools and
>techniques to play a role in her work. She works with a digital
>Avid computer to edit footage shot on locations in Morocco, Turkey
>and elsewhere, but the shoot is entirely analog. "Romanticism goes
>with more traditional filmmaking," she says, "and I fear losing
>that relationship. I know my cinematographer is very romantically
>involved with his 16-millimeter camera." Far from a Luddite, she is
>curious about how digital media will reshape the cinematic
>experience, but her focus on filming in black and white is bound up
>with her search for "absolute simplicity." Similarly, she has no
>interest in having her work made available on the Web or even just
>in a cinema because, like Mr. McCall, she sees her work as a
>"sculpture in a socialized space."
>
>  On the second point, while artists of every generation are
>beginning to use some form of digital technology, conservators are
>struggling to understand how long these works might last. At
>present, although estimates vary, the contents of a CD-ROM are
>believed to be subject to corruption within 10 years, and a
>three-and-one-half-inch floppy disk can begin to deteriorate in 18
>months. Digital information, even in laboratory conditions, cannot
>remain stable forever. Disks and tapes are perishable, and unlike
>their paper-based precursors, don't give much warning. Films may at
>least begin to reek of vinegar when the end is near. As the volume
>of work increases, the task of upgrading digital work onto new
>platforms is becoming more daunting, and many artists resist seeing
>their work transferred and in some sense changed in the process.
>
>  While it is necessary to push forward with the most advanced
>hardware and software, we must also ensure that these new solutions
>don't make older ones obsolete. This, of course, flies in the face
>of a primary corporate strategy in a market economy, which is to
>force us to buy a new version of each hand-held device every school
>vacation. The next frontier of the Justice Department may not be
>breaking up monopolies but coercing manufacturers to comply with
>certain assumed standards of information longevity by mandating
>adaptability from one generation of hardware to the next.
>
>  Individual artists today find themselves tempted to work in
>combination with other artists around the world, because art-making
>is not necessarily isolated from other kinds of creative exercises
>on an instantaneous global network traveling through the air to
>hand-held and eventually implanted receivers and transmitters.
>Automatic gestures have been part of the history of art from Dada
>to Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism to scatter pieces. But
>these are early manifestations of what would be possible with
>countless participants free-associating through voice-recognition
>technology. It may be that originality will no longer be essential
>to making art, and that an artwork may never be "completed" when
>its continuous refreshing becomes the artist's prerogative. The
>issue has presented itself explicitly for decades. Dan Cameron's
>formula of "open piracy" and the replicative works of Sherrie
>Levine were early signals that the concept of originality is
>disposable in our media-saturated world.
>
>  Three-dimensional projection without headgear made its formal
>debut at the Whitney this summer. The artist Tony Oursler began
>experimenting with a newly patented projection technology called
>HDVD, or High Definition Volumetric Display, with the nickname
>"free-space projection." Unlike a hologram, which needs a vacuum
>tube, or virtual reality, which requires goggles, in HDVD the
>viewer will be able to enter the projected image, which will appear
>wholly three-dimensional and highly resolved.
>
>  Mr. Oursler is attuned to the problem of preserving his work,
>noting that: "Video artists have been hip to this problem for a
>long time; we keep updating formats roughly every 10 years and
>remastering work. I have worked with conservators on how to
>preserve the tonality of images through a quantifiable register: an
>electronic oscilloscope."
>
>  As far as staying faithful to his original intentions when
>updating a work from years ago, he says: "That gets very blurry and
>philosophical. One has to define the parameters of the work. In 100
>years they can replace the projector with another projector, or do
>what Nam June Paik has done and use the old technologies as the
>husks for new ones." When asked if art-making is going to be
>threatened by the ubiquity and instantaneity of digital media, Mr.
>Oursler points out that "somebody still has to make the images." In
>the end, it is the hand and mind of the individual maker, as well
>as the content of the work of art, that will make it live or die.
>
>  Close behind improvements in projection- based art are "smart
>walls," meaning that no projection equipment is visible as wall-
>size images change, and the liberation of Web-based art from
>two-dimensional screens, which will add yet another layer of
>technology that museums must acquire, and pose still further
>challenges to the issues of transferring old art and preserving new
>art. But there are no guarantees about the longevity of such
>mechanical devices, since replacement parts will eventually become
>unavailable.
>
>  Even with an ambitious effort to reanimate forgotten recording and
>projection equipment, we will have to make peace with the fact that
>the original character of time- based and digital art will never be
>preserved in its entirety. Even with meticulous documentation
>assembled by interviewing artists, we must accommodate ourselves to
>the simulation or emulation of experiential conditions instead of
>their replication. A tolerance of relative degrees of accuracy on
>the part of artists and experts will be mightily tested as we make
>our way into these uncertain waters.
>
>  The "period rooms" of encyclopedic art museums offer a parallel to
>our conundrum about how precise or obvious the replication of art
>has to be. Such rooms, out of necessity, combine elements that are
>roughly compatible but not exactly so. The original denizens of
>Louis XV drawing rooms would likely guffaw at the mismatches we
>commit in the name of art-historical accuracy. The experience of a
>period room amalgamates sculpture, paintings and decorative arts in
>a simulated environment. Curators recognize the degree to which
>accuracy is limited in the results, but the public by and large
>appreciates the opportunity to imagine itself in these
>installations, unconcerned about lapses in authenticity. We will
>have to accept the historicization of time-based and digital art in
>a similar way, and our standards of accuracy in preserving it will
>have to be adjusted accordingly.
>
>  The artist Chuck Close describes himself as a "Luddite and a
>technophobe," but he too uses digital scanners. Like many artists,
>he sees little new in the digital era, other than another cycle in
>the evolving traditions in technology that began with photography a
>century and a half ago. Referring to photography's origins as a
>painterly medium, with long exposures and applied color, and its
>fleeting passage through a documentary exactitude ending in the
>variable world of Photoshop, Mr. Close says: "We should never have
>trusted it anyhow. It is the easiest medium in which to be
>competent. At the same time it is the most difficult in which to
>establish an individual vision or signature style. When morphing
>technology came along the amazing quickly becomes a yawn."
>
>  For Mr. Close, and other artists not seduced by the digital, "the
>pencil can be used a million different ways by a million different
>artists, while the numbing ordinariness of software is confining."
>
>  The artists to be featured in our forthcoming exhibition
>"BitStreams: Art in the Digital Age" would probably disagree. The
>exhibition, opening in March, is less about the impact of digital
>technology on art than about introducing extraordinary works of art
>that happen to have emerged out of the availability of new media,
>as selected by our curator for contemporary art, Lawrence Rinder.
>Artists like Paul Pfeiffer and Diana Thater would probably argue
>that it is precisely by harnessing software that they can most
>effectively probe the visceral and emotional qualities that lie at
>the core of art and the artmaking process.
>
>  While there are few certainties ahead, we should look at this new
>world of creativity as providing an extraordinary opportunity.
>Making artistic experiences will be technically easier and thus, as
>Mr. Close observes, it will be much harder to find a distinctive
>voice. But a vast public that has heretofore not taken advantage of
>the art museum will feel it is risk-free to sample such
>experiences. Artists will be able to show their work to a
>potentially unlimited audience without awaiting curatorial judgment
>to catch up with them. We are truly fortunate to be witness to this
>sea change, but museums have a major responsibility to be more than
>witnesses, and to forcefully advocate the creative potential and
>faithful preservation of the art of the digital age.ÝÝMaxwell L.
>Anderson is the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
>
>
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>
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>http://www.nytimes.com
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bobj

Dr. Bob Jansen
Managing Director,
Turtle Lane Studios Pty Ltd,
Physical: 1 Turtle Lane, Erskineville, NSW 2043, AUSTRALIA
Postal: PO Box 26, Erskineville, NSW 2043, AUSTRALIA
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Email: Bob.Jansen@turtlelane.com.au
WWW: http://www.turtlelane.com.au/

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