Week 54: 23rd – 29th September
Although I’m very much a maker of objects, I’m also interested in the relationship between the online and offline, particularly since my transfer meeting and the discussion about Digital Humanities in relation to my topic (in week 41).
Digital Humanities spans across disciplines, but is especially relevant in the fields of museums and archives, where digital media has appeared to bridge the gap between conflicts of accessibility and conservation. This week, the Audiovisual Archives and Contemporaneity conference at the University of Leeds, invited speakers from various national and regional collections to discuss their perspectives on these new opportunities and challenges.
Creating a digital archive
Dr Tom Rice discussed his role as a senior researcher on the Colonial Film project, a collection of footage capturing images of life in the British Colonies. It was interesting to hear about the methodological decisions and challenges relating to developing an online archive resource. The three main contributors to the Colonial Film Project (BFI, Imperial war museum and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum), each had their own cataloguing system which needed to be standardised when brought together as a collection.
The selection process was another interesting topic because, as every item couldn’t be digitised, decisions about which material should be included needed to be discussed and justified. Additionally, selected footage should be representative of the whole collection, not just sensationalised imagery, to avoid creating a false archive. Finally, he discussed how essays were included to contextualise each of the collections and shown in dialogue with the films to create a new interpretive resource.
New media possibilities
Other presentations discussed the unique attributes of digital technologies to create and share moving images with new audiences. Bryony Dixon, Curator at the British Film Institute, showed an example of chronophotography which had been digitised on vine, while Sue Howard from the Yorkshire Film Archive shared her experience of working with the Harrogate-born man who shared his own archive of pictures of his son and went on to create the YouTube video 21 Years.
Digital technologies, as well as collating and sharing archives, can also be used to create new archives, particularly in the case of curated online content or digital storytelling. For example, Simon Popple, discussed a previous AHRC/BBC project that he had worked on called the Open Archive Project, in which he had worked with communities from the North of England to re-examine BBC footage of the miners strike and to frame it in the context of their stories and memories of that time. Despite the range of possibilities however, this creates an interesting technical and philosophical conundrum when these digital archives become cultural artefacts in themselves, or indeed when the collected artefacts are already digitally native.
90s Net Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art faced such a dilemma recently when reinstalling their first Internet-made artwork, which they acquired back in 1995. The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, created by artist Douglas Davis, was an early example of interactive art which included around 200,000 typed contributions from users all over the world. However, upon reinstalling the work last year, they found that the piece no longer worked.
They were faced with a decision about how to recreate the piece, either adhering to the historical integrity of the original code and reinstalling it as it was created, despite its degraded state, or to rewrite and restore the functionality of the work in accordance with new technological specifications, so it could be used as it was originally intended. After considering several possibilities they decided on a solution which would satisfy both criteria: to display it in both its original and updated form.
Somewhat paradoxically however, the original version of the work, despite being frozen, still shows the contemporaneous response of the work to 20 years of digital development, as opposed to the updated version, which replicates the programme as it was when it was first conceived, creating an interesting sense of historical flux.
Further Reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/arts/design/whitney-saves-douglas-daviss-first-collaborative-sentence.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://cool.conservation-us.org/coolaic/sg/emg/library/pdf/hodin/hodin_2009.pdf
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/salvaging-digital-art-at-the-new-museum
http://museumgeek.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/cooperative-conservation-on-cooper-hewitts-acquisition-of-a-living-object/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/29/241645097/when-the-internet-is-your-canvas-you-paint-in-zeros-and-ones
Digital Art Organisations:
Matters in Media Art
Variable Media Network
Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology
Rhizome
