Recreating Imaginary. Strategies of Preservation, Archiviation and Reuse of Media Art Histories (2013) (original) (raw)
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Media Art needs Histories and Archives. New Perspectives for the Digital Humanities
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Tritonic, 2022
This aim of this paper is to identify and comparatively analyse collections and digitized/digitalized archives within the framework of international cultural institutions from Europe, America and Japan, to highlight the strategies and practices proposed by these organizations regarding both the organisation of the information and the presentation of their digital collections, along with the social dynamics of the digital object and its historical trajectories. Another objective is to classify this grouping of international case studies into different categories of organisations that hold digital collections/archives, as well as to describe the projects and the types of initiatives launched in Romania. The research includes the results of the work carried out during my doctoral studies, a field ethnographic and netnographic investigation of 37 case studies from Europe, America and Japan complemented by another 19 Romanian case studies. These are reviewed through the lens of an innovative theoretical and technical framework drawn from different sources in the academic literature.
EVA-Berlin-Konferenzband_Documenting Media Art And Beyond.pdf
The article explores both the challenges and possibilities for art online exhibitions. Based on an analysis of the relationship between born-digital art works and traditional art works, their differential mediality, and the interpretations of the physical exhibition space with current methods of internet presentation forms, we investigate how digitised objects can profit from the possibilities of their online presentation in comparison to physical exhibitions. As a case study, the first online exhibition of the Archive of Digital Art CODEDOC REMEDIATED is presented and analysed.
The semiotic turn in digital archives and libraries
To-day, we witness the massive digitization of any kind of media objects, the storing and diffusion of it in form of digital (multimedia) libraries, archives or any other form of digital “(multimedia) information spaces”. The general policy is to make available the enormous quantities of media data in form of relevant (critical) knowledge or knowledge resources for a target public – a person, a social group, an institution (this policy underlies the shift from an “information society to a knowledge society” as proclaimed, for instance, in the Lisbon 2001 Declaration or again in the actual Europe 2020 program). However if we want to progress in this historically and culturally certainly highly exciting and innovative direction, a series of serious – technical, social and scientific – problems has to be solved. One of the most complex ones is without any doubt the question of how to process the symbolic or the meaning of (digital) media data with respect to a given – analogically speaking - market place of meaning production, sharing and consumption (potential users of meaning, cultural expectations of meaning, needs and desires of meaning, uses and exploitations of meaning, added value of specific forms of meaning …). Indeed: … a (digital) media data (a still image, a video, a sound record, an oral record, a printed document, …) is not in itself already a genuine cognitive resource for a given “reader” or “community of readers”, that will say a relevant “means” for an agent to solve a problem, to answer a question or again to satisfy a (personal or collective) goal or a need. A digital media data is, in other terms, only a potential cognitive resource. It has to “undergo” more or less significant qualitative transformations in order to become a user or a user community relevant one. These qualitative transformations are performed through series of concrete operations such as the constitution and classification of relevant corpora of digital records, the description and indexing of records, the processing of digital data (segmentation, tagging, linking, montage, …), the (cultural, linguistic) versioning (commenting, translating, …) of given source records or again the (re-)publishing of digital records. These and other operations constitute what we call the semiotic processing of (digital) media objects, corpora of (digital) media objects or again entire archives and libraries. They demonstrate practically and theoretically the well-known “from data to meta-data” or the “from (simple) information to (relevant) knowledge” problem – problem that obviously determines the effective use and also the future of digital knowledge archives. In short, the central question here is that of the semiotic structure of (digital) media data, i.e. the structural organization of (digital) media data, their status and function(s) for a given user or community of users and of how to deal with them, how to work concretely with them in order to achieve not only theoretical but also practical - educational, economical or other - objectives. Full article available online: http://lcn.revuesonline.com/article.jsp?articleId=20254
Far & Wide-Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 2013
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Title: Contemporary Artworks as Platform of Memory. From Analogue Resources of Memory to Digital Art Display: Walid Raad. Conference: Changing Platforms of Memory Practices. Technologies, User Generations and Amateur Media Dispositives. Faculty of Arts, History department, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands. September 2015. Abstract: This paper is situated in the context of Contemporary Art practice and its links with cultural memory. In it I will explain how Contemporary Art has become a medium within which to hold current discussions and debates about memory, paying particular attention to the changes in platforms of memory and how they resonate with artistic practice. Traditional storage mediums of memory, for example analogue amateur photograph and home video, have become important resources for contemporary artists working with memory. Such approaches can be used to revise or reassert historical events, epochs of social change and the way in which people record and pass on their memories. This process often involves the digitisation of analogue mediums and results in final artworks comprising videos, photographs, video installations, images projections or online archives. This paper will explore the work of Tacita Dean, Kristov Wodizcko and Shimon Attie, predominantly focusing on those of Walid Raad, in particular his online archive of photographs, videos and artworks which merge old and new ways of recording, retrieving and broadcasting memory from the private realm to the public life. Raad’s work confronts the atrocities of the recent Lebanese conflict. Although his exhibitions feature present his work in different disciplines, together online they constitute one virtual archive. The action of curating and online archive of work creates a reflexive space for the contemplation on how history is constructed, with the archive’s artwork commonality being human affect and the capturing of everyday events. In the case of the Lebanese conflict, this is recorded in notebooks, oral testimony, amateur photography and home videos. Due to this, the archive is situated in both the private and the public, occupying a liminal space as every piece of the project has been created from fragments of personal archives that, eventually, become public the moment they are uploaded. The contrast between analogue and digital platforms of memory in contemporary artworks make the viewer be aware of the ever evolving ways in which we record and document our everyday life, as well as the huge impact that the digital and the virtual have on it.