Recreating Imaginary. Strategies of Preservation, Archiviation and Reuse of Media Art Histories (2013) (original) (raw)
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
My present work focuses on the new relationship generated by electronic information between the virtual archive (the Web in a broad sense, certain specialized archives in particular) and its referent (material reality in general, museums, inter-art practices, and artworks in particular). What Nam June Paik conceived as a shift from the telecommunications network to a "multilevel digital communication network," is now taking place at a highly accelerated pace; with vast unexpected consequences and possibilities for the artistic field. Moreover, it also has a close relationship to what Manuel Castells defined as the "space of flows" or "real virtuality." 2 "The space of flows" is the abstraction of time and space and their dynamic interactions within digital age society. Castells developed this idea to "re-conceptualize new forms of spatial arrangements under the new technological paradigm"; a new type of space that allows for distant, synchronous, real-time interaction.
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.
The New Image: On the Temporality of Photographic Representation after Digitalization
2002
off from the post-photography debate and its notions of a general crisis of representation, this article discusses the temporal relationship between image and referential reality in photographic representation; first, that is generally in terms of the semiotic concepts of icon and index, secondly in a retrospect of Pier Paolo Pasolini's heretically realist contribution to film semiotics, and thirdly in a general discussion on notions of temporality in theories of photographic representation with special reference to new media. The point made is that notions of iconicity and especially indexicality call for a systematical reconsideration after the post-photography critique, and that a stronger concept of indexicality may serve as a theoretical framework to systematize photographic representation in terms of grammatical tenses. Finally, Pasolini's theory of a cinematographic foundation of meaning is reconsidered more generally in terms of post-photography and digital aesthetics.
Memory and the Digital Archive of Contemporary Art
2021
This article outlines some reflections about digital reality, contemporary art production, and possible ways of archiving and constructing memory through and for a historiography of contemporary art in light of the project Archivo Español de Media Art / Spanish Archive of Media Art (AEMA/SAOMA). In the first part I propose a definition and an account of media art and its artifacts. In the second part I present and describe the SAOMA project, and its antecedent, the MIDECIANT museum project, and discuss the conceptual and technical requirements of an archive devoted to the media arts. In the third part I sketch some interconnections between the concepts of memory and archive with reference to new media art and outline the difficulties that are inherent to any effort to define and archive these art forms. The final section includes some concluding thoughts and a brief explanation of what I regard as the most urgent needs for any archival project in the realm of digital art (digital re...
This chapter will, on the one hand describe the project, as it was conceived and is unfolding as a typical Digital Humanities Project, and on the other hand focus not on strictly technical questions but dig deeper into the core humanities topics at hand, such as the impact of digitization and IPR issues. It will talk about selection, digitization, metadata, preservation and dissemination -with special attention given to the exhibition, which is meant to be attractive as a cultural event for a broad public, but at the same time to spread the Europeana message to European citizens, and to function as a somewhat thought-provoking statement, through the radically unconventional way in which the historical photographs are showcased in the exhibition. The project While many of the current issues in Digital Humanities involve analytics and quantitative analysis of big data somewhat reminiscent of the "Humanities Computing" of the eighties, we feel that the "Humanities" approach presupposes a relationship with the individual object, its particularity, its uniqueness. This is why many Digital Humanities projects involve digitization. Very early on, the mixed nature of the project consortium fostered a need to develop and nurture shared and convergent views on content selection criteria, methodologies, workflow & best practices, IPR, dissemination and sustainability. As IPR issues in particular are inextricably linked to photography (the photo is an abstract, intellectual object), this theme has defined our project from the beginning. As is typically the case in such CIP digitization projects, the complete workflow was broken down into work packages, of which one focused on digitization, others on Indexing and Multilingual support, on metadata transformation and Ingestion, on IPR and sustainability and on dissemination. A specific work package was dedicated to Themes and collections: a unique opportunity for the KU Leuven team and for all content providers, as such a large scale digitization effort would allow us to jointly delve into archival
2006
The rapid evolution of technology and the processing aspects of some contemporary art forms make maintenance and re-fruition of a number of past masterpieces a difficult task. This is especially true of multimedia installations, with multiple audio and video sources coordinated through some control device, which also accounts for user interaction issues. So, it is not inappropriate to speak of "archeology of multimedia" in the case of the remise-enoeuvre of an installation. This paper describes a complete example of archeology of multimedia. In particular, the art exhibit is the reprise of the first truly multimedia show of the electronic era: Le Corbusier's Poème électronique, displayed at the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958. The show, conceived for the Philips Pavilion and consisting of a black&white video, color light ambiances, music moving over sound routes, visual special effects, has never been reprised after the end of the exhibition. The Poème électronique has been entirely reconstructed after a philological investigation through image archives, project sketches and technical documentation from Philips and then delivered in two virtual reality settings. Moreover, two aspects of the project are worth being abstracted from the design and realization of this specific reconstruction and contribute to the design, pre-visualization and fruition of novel contemporary artworks: a language for the description of the control score and an architecture design for the integration of several media sources. The language and the architecture, with a sketch of a friendly interface, are illustrated at the end of the paper.