CHAIR: Aleksandra Kaminska

Artur Matuck (online: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/84658429475)

Conceptual Media Design, Contemporary Teletextualities, and Digital Arts Preservation

This study has searched the archives of three tele-writing experiments carried out in France and Canada between 1983 and 1985. "La Plissure du Texte," conceived by Roy Ascott for the "Electra" exhibition at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1983-1984; "Épreuves d’écriture," proposed by the philosopher Lyotard, exhibited at "Les Immatériaux," at the Centre Georges Pompidou, from March to July 1985; and the "Hearsay Project," organized by Norman White at the A-Space Gallery in Toronto on November 11th-12th, 1985. Those pioneer events intertwined multi-phasic processes, including their planned strategies, launching statements, ensuing responses, collaborative actualization, and final co-authored clustered texts. They demanded careful media planning so that technical and creative teams could agree upon content and exchange procedures and synchronize time zones, schedules, technical devices, and archiving methodologies. The events were the first in which writers, philosophers, and artists collaborated through computer networks, reinventing textuality. The events’ multiple traces, however, needed to be appropriately archived. Instead, they were allowed to lapse, partially erased, or lost, demonstrating that their value was not adequately perceived. Those ground-breaking telewriting projects have relayed significant concepts and methods to comprehend, historicize, and theorize telemedia scripting and unheard-of forms of authorship. Media conceptual planning introduced a meta-language to media-based creative production and has provided a conceptual tool to select, review, analyze, and inform newer authoring processes. Furthermore, it evidences the question of archiving telemedia multi-authored dispersed manifestations, from their inceptions until their actualization into collective texts. Nevertheless, events involving multiple locations and multimedia exchanges have proven elusive, demanding complex, onerous, and challenging archiving procedures, demanding further archival techniques and methodologies. Nevertheless, conceptual media planning remains a distinctive valuable neolanguage, implicitly proposing that conceptual planning projects should also be preserved as an integral part of actualized media events.

Júlia Abs

Experiences with the body-archive

In this paper, I initially present the question “What does the term body-archive mean?” followed by a historical overview of practices and thoughts about archives and body in the fields of dance and choreography, beginning in the 1990s in Europe, which radically changed the dance aesthetics of our time. The Judson Church artists (N.Y., the 1960s and 1970s) played a crucial role in the conceptual disruption of dance tradition, working with scores to articulate movement and acquiring an objective form through choreography. One can say that the resulting European conceptual dance is a movement based on the critical revision of modern art archives and postmodern dance, as conceptual dance rejects the very modern paradigm of the authentic original. Secondly, I unwrap some thoughts about the body-archive and it relationship with scores and their role in processes of choreographic reconstruction through archival material. For that, I present my ongoing research methodology with scores and digital dance annotation, exposing the re-enactment processes of two minimalist choreographies: Trio A (Yvonne Rainer, 1966), Calico Mingling (Lucinda Childs, 1973) and the deconstructed classical ballet Eidos: Telos (1995) by William Forsythe. I am working with dance archives such as films, texts, photography, and scores from these choreographies by enabling new relations with their cultural memory, different from their former contexts, with other objects, persons, spaces, and discourses. Thirdly, I briefly discuss the subject of dance writing as a process that seeks to document, preserve, and trigger new ways to originate, compose, and perform dance movements in time and space and as an analytical planning stage of an artwork. In addition to that, I will briefly reflect on the iconicity of the writing (Schriftbildlichkeit) of those aforementioned scores, which evolves into an aesthetical discussion about ephemerality, presence and absence, and the openness that the idea of iconicity of writing brings to the fields of language, communication, and culture.

Jeane Cooper

Archival Preservation of Digital Art: a case study

In 1995, The Whitney Museum of American Art became one of the first institutions to acquire an Internet-made artwork. One of their acquisitions, “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence,” was created by the artist Douglas Davis in 1994, which allowed users to add their own texts to its open lines. An early example of interactive computer art, the piece attracted 200,000 contributions from 1994 to 2000 from all over the world. By 2005, the piece had been transferred from one computer server to another with different operating systems, and it stopped working. Whitney curators decided to restore the artwork as its rudimentary code and links were outdated. At the time, Rhizome’s Digital Conservator Ben Fino-Radin acted as a consultant on the project, working closely with curator and art historian Christiane Paul to lead and advise a group effort by the Whitney Museum to restore the piece. Their work involved not only updating servers and running legacy browsers on vintage computer systems but also considering theoretical and ethical aspects of conservation. This study delves into the complex issues that emerged during “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence,” highlighting the problems many institutions and individuals face in their digital conservation efforts. It also discusses best practices for the conservation of technology-based artwork with the goal of preventing problems in the preservation of digital art.