Archiving New Media: Notes and Quotes

01

"We are just beginning to grapple with the question of what it means to collect and archive work that is based in such a fluid substrate. In theory, digital files can be easily and perfectly copied. In practice, technological obsolescence, mutability due to dynamic interactivity, and the unbounded qualities of networked space all conspire to complicate both the ability and possibly even the desirability of collecting and archiving 'new media.

"Nevertheless, important early efforts, significant and accomplished works of art, are literally disappearing--wiped from our collective hard drive of memory. The Walker's Digital Arts Study Collection is a nascent attempt to harness the institutional imperative to successfully preserve--selfish memes that we are--this most ephemeral of media and its related contexts."

02

"Death, in particular the death of creative people, plays such a fundamental role in societal development. The flowering of cultural prestige through the accrual of death is absolutely phenomenal if the accomplishments of the deceased are well documented and promoted aggressively. This is why information technologies and communications media have been able to take their place alongside traditional cultural institutions."

03

"The effect of concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of tool driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explored."

04

"When critics approach unfamiliar art practices they [should] hold their criteria and taste in reserve. Since they were formed upon yesterday's art, he does not assume that they are ready-made for today. While he seeks to comprehend the objectives behind the new art produced, nothing is a priori excluded or judged irrelevant. Since he is not passing out grades, he suspends judgment until the work's intention has come into focus and his response to it is - in the literal sense of the word - sympathetic; not necessarily to approve, but to feel along with it as with a thing that is like no other."

05

"Finally, part of the curator's function is to find adequate links between online art production and its possible presentation in the traditional art-viewing venues. Indeed, art institutions have started showing interest in displaying online artist projects, and that requires some thinking. For instance, some of the artists who were invited to participate in Documenta last year were appalled by the way their projects were presented, with computer stations displayed in an office-like environment. Along with the artist, the curator has to address these issues so as to be satisfied with the potential effect these presentations may have on the understanding of their work. I also think curators need to think about the ways this type of production can be accommodated within the institutional walls. Map The Gap, organized by the "da'web team in the fall of 1997, was an attempt to address those issues. With the demise of "da'web and its transfer to the Walker Art Center comes a whole new set of questions pertaining to the collection and conservation of art online. This probably constitutes a new challenge while bringing the curator back to issues that have very much been part of her or his function with more traditional media."

06

"The standard question has been, 'How do we prevent infringement?' If we re-frame the question as 'How can we allow re-use?', the solution may be simpler and more powerful than everyone thinks, with benefits for everyone."

07

"In our ever-so-contradictory postmodern era, however, the situation is far more complex than it once was: it would be sentimental and false to suggest that many artists would resist the acquisition of their work by museums today. In fact, it is more often than not a heady rite of passage (unless the artist is elderly and unjustly neglected). But in the case of aeda'web, institutionalization signals not only arrival into the arena of art history, but also the end of an era. aeda'web's acquisition by the Walker brings with it a melancholic sense that a vital moment--the birth of online art--has already passed. (Lest I be accused of romanticism, I want to point out that new art mediums arise only once or twice in a lifetime.) Even in our speeded-up century, it is astonishing how quickly this evolution from nascent to recognized art form has taken place."

08

"Macedonian arms had made the Greeks masters of the entire known world, from Sicily to North Africa, from the Balkan peninsula to Asia Minor, and from Iran to India to Afghanistan, where Alexander had halted. They did not learn the languages of their new subjects, but they realized that if they were to rule them they must understand them, and that to understand them, they must collect their books and have them translated. Royal libraries were accordingly created in all the Helenistic capitals, not just for the sake of prestige but also as instruments of Greek rule."

09

"To achieve order, to tame wild thinking, is the essence of scholarship. The linear text is its main tool. Yet how quickly this obsession with order ends is already visible in an early Chinese encyclopedia. Among their 14 categories of animals, such as "animals belonging to the emperor," "milk swine," "animals which have broken the water jug," and "embalmed animals," there are also three categories which resist any categorization, namely, "belonging to this group," "etcetera," and "innumerable." Libuse Monikova commented on this emerging insufficiency in tamed thinking: 'The inconsequence of thinking are reflected in the language. When nomenclature principles cannot be maintained in a system, then the commitment, the comprehensibility of the system is limited, and the orientation which it is supposed to give is only one way to see things, one interpretation.'"

10

"The fundamental instinct to collect and hoard is rationalized through the disciplines of analysis and classification. Whether the impulse to collect is based on insecurity, altruism, or greed, there are economic factors behind every collection which correspond to the realities of today's economy at large. ... the value of the unique artifact is determined chiefly by factors of scarcity. The ongoing evolution of an information economy, based on the duplication and exchange of free floating information, presents a critical assault on the sanctity of such concepts as permanent material value."

11

"Radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete changes but rather the restructuration of a certain number of elements already given: features that in an earlier period of system were subordinate become dominant, and features that had been dominant again become secondary."

12

Without wanting to ascribe millennial fervor to everything happening at the beginning of 1999, nevertheless, what it means to archive new media is a question of increasing import for many institutions and artists--right after figuring out what new media is. However, as Dolly the cloned sheep made clear--as if there was ever any question--events do not always wait for understanding and closure, and so the Walker Art Center finds it itself in the position of archving one of the most significant artist projects on the early Web, ada'web, co-founded and curated by Benjamin Weil, from1995-1998.

Part of Gallery 9's mission is to follow the artists. In keeping with this, we commissioned the artist collaborative of Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito to create The Unreliable Archivist, with ada'web its host. . . . The job of a live archivist is complex, with many variables, but the process of archiving materials can be broken down into two fundamental tasks: preservation / conservation and access. Access can be further divided into physical access and intellectual access. Intellectual access can be further divided into metadata and data. Whether the collection includes a letter to so and so is described with metadata--an index, for instance. What the letter says is the data and can be represented as a handwritten transcript (copy) or a high resolution image file. The letter itself is the object in the archive.

With physical objects, the difference between an image of a letter and a letter--between intellectual access and physical access--is more often clear. In order to provide intellectual access, one has to create a metadata system. In other words, you don't very often take a shoebox of letters, make photographs of all the letters, and throw them randomly into another shoebox, rather, you file them based on the information contained in the index, the metadata. With digital originals, however, such as with "da'web, the difference between physical access and intellectual access is less clear. In short, what's the difference between "da'web and a copy of ada'web?

When considering what the role of a new media archivist might be, two disparities come to mind. The first is that intellectual access may be different than the access afforded by ada'web itself. In fact, The Unreliable Archivist uses a much different access system than the navigation on the site, even though they both point to the same content, in the end. The second disparity is that while there may be a conservation issue with a paper letter to so and so, the paper standard is pretty well established. If we know how to access a letter now (generally, place it face up on a surface in sufficient light for reading), we will know how to access it in 100 years--providing it has been conserved properly. With digital media, "conservation" may mean something else. If we want to continue to access it, it could mean preserving the necessary viewing systems or it could mean pro-serving (proactive conservation, i.e upgrading) the viewing data--ada'web itself--so that it can be accessed on current (future) systems.

The Unreliable Archivist, like any good archivist, creates metadata about ada'web. In this case it just happens to be a little, shall we say, idiosyncratic. While according to standards such as the Categories for the Description of Works of Art, there are some basic metadata categories such as creator, title, date created, medium, etc., Cohen, Frank, and Ippolito have chosen "language, image, style, layout." Furthermore, while it is common to establish a standardized set of values that can apply to each category, Cohen, Frank, and Ippolito have chosen to apply the same standardized set of values--plain, enigmatic, loaded, preposterous--to each category.

The value of something like the Categories for the Description of Works of Art is their precision--at least for experts. They allow for very minute differentiation between objects. They allow for the discovery of very specific objects that you know you are looking for from vast databases. What they are not so good at is creating connections or finding something you don't know. Think of the difference between searching for a portrait made out of wood in the twentieth-century and something that has ambiguous language, enigmatic images and preposterous style.

When I first saw The Unreliable Archivist, I took it to be both homage to all the wonderful, breathtaking excesses of ada'web and those whose vision created it as well as a parody, tongue-in-cheek commentary about the kind of butchery that archiving--mothballing--such a dynamic institution could entail. I still think this is true, but the ground of the question has shifted. Rather than worrying about how unreliable the archivist is, perhaps we should map the whole Walker collection according to these categories and values. What would happen? In a future where it is possible to imagine everything being archived, from our credit data to our memories, from world events to passionate encounters, how do we create systems that allow each of us to be unreliable archivists--to create the preposterous, the enigmatic? No matter how intelligent agents are in 2020, they will be poor substitutes if they can't represent an individual point of view.