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Collecting and Presenting Born-Digital Art

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In this guest post, Jesse de Vos reports on the conference Collecting and Presenting Born-Digital Art. Jesse works at Sound & Vision as an embedded researcher from VU University Amsterdam. His research means to answer the question: What requirements do artistic, interactive media productions impose on archives and cultural heritage institutions?

The Collecting and Presenting Born-Digital Art conference took place at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven on the 14th and 15th of December, 2012. It was initiated by Baltan Laboratories, an organisation that intends to initiate "future thinking" about art, design and technological culture, and welcomed people from a variety of backgrounds: artists, curators, conservators and researchers as well as art historians.

Annet Dekker opened the conference. She's a PhD candidate at Goldsmith University who conceptualised the conference programme. She described the trajectory that led up to the conference: in the past five years, Dutch organisations Virtueel Platform, NIMk (now called LI-MA) and DEN have been involved in a number of expert meetings surrounding the topic of born-digital art preservation. These resulted in multiple publications and a shared realisation that there was a real need for a knowledge exchange platform. The majority of the conference was spent in five working groups that dealt with different perspectives on born-digital art: Writing histories, Aesthetics, Exhibiting, Collecting and Collaboration. At the end of the conference, all working groups presented their results. The questions that were dealt with in the groups as well as extensive reports with conference results will shortly be published on the conference website.

Unsettling Traditional Preservation

A central theme throughout the conference was that new media art, born digital art or net art (or whatever ambiguous term you decide to use), deeply unsettles traditional preservation and presentation strategies. On the bright side, it forces museums and archives to engage with their audience in new ways, which might well be an advantage to their entire collections. Digital, computational and networked technologies are here to stay and as was pointed out, the market value of art works that make use of them is increasing. A discrepancy remains, however, between museums and new media art, between contemporary art and net art. To illustrate: respected artistic duo Jodi told how they offered their work to several big museums as a free gift and yet still found it to be rejected. 

Naked on Pluto (2010): a Facebook Game exhibited as an installation at ARCO.

Speculative archiving

The discussion touched upon the dangers of passivity in the process of developing taxonomies and an aesthetic for new media art. In the end it is first and foremost to be seen as an art form. Speculative archiving was mentioned as a concept that stresses the need to be moving (i.e. purchase, exhibit, conserve, etc), and create the stories as you move. This is, I believe, a helpful corrective to the passivity that often comes along with not having a finite or exhaustive solution. Art historian Edward Shanken argued that the history of new media art can be traced back further back than art CD-roms from the '90s and begins with the cybernetic art of the 1950s and '60s. Shanken and Annie Fletcher, curator at the Van Abbemuseum, led a working group that focused on the construction of history around new media art. Is it possible to tell a sort of grand narrative? Could a canon of net-art be constructed? It was centered around the practice of museums to tell the histories of their collections in exhibitions and cataloguing systems.

The group started of by listing the characteristics of the period in general. An aesthetic framework was conceptualized, in which questions were answered like: what sort of works were produced? By which institutions? How did they look and function? The context was outlined: what events were central to that period? In what sort of society did they occur? A democracy or dictatorship? A society in crisis? Beginning with that framework they defined the major characteristics that works of new media art portrayed over the last twenty years. Categorized according to technology, social practices, time-space relationships, economies and geopolitics. They started assembling a list of art works that seemed to illustrate the time in which they were made particularly well. They found however that from this list it was impossible to create a history. They had to go back to the more conceptual framework. Breaking away from an object-oriented or thematic approach, creating a history that related to a larger story, the story of ‘lived life’.

Another pressing matter in digital art curation is that there are so many ways in which to exhibit the works, ways that have an immediate impact on the meaning and the look and feel of the work. At the end of the conference it was suggested that by way of experiment, six works of net art could be exhibited by six different museums, by six different curators, independently of one another. The differences in audience participation, reach, artist-involvement and so on could then be evaluated.

Being on the radar

It was noted that in the institutions where there's still a lack of appreciation for new media art, curators could operate under the radar, still including works of new media art in projects and exhibitions but through the back door, as it were. The conclusion of the conference however was a passionate clarion call to be as visible as possible, because it is at the management level of official institutions that changes need to take place. For a number of years now, conferences have been organised, best practices formulated, pilots run... but digital art has remained in the margins of mainstream contemporary art institutions. Museums as well as audiences need to be educated to grasp the full reach of what new media art is and does.

 

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