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The Digital Object
A conference at the American Museum of the Moving Image
October 16, 2000
Edited transcript of a talk by Steve Dietz
http://www.yproductions.com/writing/archives/000036.html
I'm going to ask more questions than offer answers, while showing one particular thing that has happened at the Walker Art Center, in terms of the digital object.
In 1996 I started the new media department at the Walker, which is a contemporary arts center in Minneapolis. From the very beginning we thought about the Internet as a site for digital Web-based objects and events; as an online space independent of what was happening in the galleries or in the performance spaces. But of course, in good McLuhanesque fashion, we couldn't quite get beyond thinking of it in terms of old media. We named the site Gallery9, which is basically a floor that doesn't exist at the Walker. in 1997 I commissioned our first Web art piece for Gallery9. It was a Director piece called Ding an sich by Piotr Szyhalski. As a digital object it's a very contained piece, and the Internet is being used as a delivery mechanism. It could run off a CD-ROM, it could run off a hard drive. It's not necessarily a network-dependent piece.
Then in at the end of 1997 I received a call from Benjamin Weil, who a matter of hours earlier found out it was a different situation at äda'web than they had imagined. America Online, their new owner, apparently couldn't figure out what to do with äda'web. Benjamin said they had to shut it down because AOL was not going to support them anymore, and would the Walker be interested in something? At that point I had been considering how the Walker, as an institution, as a museum, could integrate digital media into some of the normal museum functions, like collecting. I had been wanting to start a digital collection, and said yes, we would love to do that, and take on äda'web, keep it accessible. So at that point there was an institutional context for how do you take this digital object?
On äda'web there are about twelve different artist's projects. For instance, Darcey Steinke's Blind Spot was one of the later ones. It's a hypertext story. Blind Spot was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial recently. Besides these projects, there are screen savers and projects you can download. There are also a series of essays by Tim Druckrey. And there is an example of a hybrid kind of project;a small demo of Jodi's work is linked to their own site. In that sense, äda'web acts as a hub to Jodi's online work, although these links are no longer valid because Jodi has since changed their site. And that raises the issue: what does it mean to archive/collect network-based digital media that has connections outside of the physical projects, the actual files you are holding? This is the exchange, of course.
There were are interesting interfacesto projects. For instance, a visualization project where John Simon created Alter Stats, a visual interface of web logs--though this one is no longer alive. The site has links to projects; there are hyper-essays about particular topics, including, a project Laura Trippey did a project called Drawing on Air. It's both a contained project and a linked project. What I'm getting at here is that the digital objects on äda'web had have many different dimensions. It was and is a website, it was and is a series of specific and individual artists projects, it had a context, it had a timeline, it was a portal to other artist's projects on the Internet. So it immediately raised lots of questions about what it could possibly mean in relation to the Walker's mission; the Walker's collection.
In a way, there was this need to create a kind of strategic wedge into the institutional setting. Because we had never had a new media department, we didn't really know what digital media was, per se, and so I did a couple of things. I created this online digital arts study collection, which was what we called it in good museum fashion, and said, Okay, we will put äda'web up there. The Walker had also done an earlier installation of Shu Lea Cheangs Bowling Alley. This was a telematic installation that connected two different sites, using the physicality and the metaphor of a bowling alley. I had also curated an earlier exhibition of online projects called Beyond Interface. So we put those together and created an online study collection.
Our study collection was based on the Walker's Ruben Film Study Collection. The film and video department, which programs film and video throughout the year had a study collection of either exemplary or hard to find films that were not necessarily unique or permanent collection items. It's sort of an in-between collection. Rather than go through the issue of "Is this project by John Simon as good as the work in our collection by Jenny Holzer or Bruce Naumann?" and getting into a debate early on about quality -- "Is it good enough?" -- we created a digital art study collection. The collection is really in-between creating a collection of art objects and a context for those art objects. It's a hybrid collection. And that was an institutional necessity of collecting the äda'web site.
The next step in collecting äda'web was to hire a programmer, a Web administrator, to basically bulletproof the site. As äda'web had been developed over the years there are of course things that didn't work and things that weren't quite finished. As part of our institutional function we sort of fixed all that, and bought a new server and put it on there, and in a sense bulletproofed it. That became the preserved äda'web.
As part of that process, and from talking with Benjamin, Vivian Selbo, and Andrea Scott -- who were three of the prime people at äda'web -- we had to make decisions like, "Do we cut off this dynamic function, this database function, or keep it going?" One of the decisions was that any project that required artistic intervention, human intervention, sort of ended and became an archive of itself, rather than an ongoing project. But projects like Jenny Holzer's Please Change Beliefs or Staufenberg's Happier Days, in which the interaction was is an automated function, we decided to continue, because that was an algorithmic function. Even though it wasn't fixed in a way that you might traditionally think of when collecting a physical object, we could continue that function.
What other kinds of decisions? Should we keep the email function alive or not? People can still email äda'web, but no one responds. I don't think Benjamin ever responded either, so that's really continuing the tradition! So we followed the traditional notion of: you collect a piece and preserve it/conserve it, and make it available; you put it online as adaweb.walkerart.org and alias their original URL to that, and it continues to be available.
I think the other aspect that we wanted to do in relation to collecting this digital object was to provide a context for it. In that regard the initial context was commissioning Benjamin Weil and Robert Atkins, a wonderful art critic, as well as Andrea Scott and Vivian Selbo, who were involved with the site, to write essays which, in their own words and own way contextualize the history of äda'web, and, in a sense, the end of äda'web. There was a lot of discussion on the various lists about whether äda'web is "really over." Is it dead, why are you even keeping it on life support? Because äda'web is supposed to be a living organism, a continually, growing kind of process, and if that's not happening you might as well just cut it off completely. I think that was one of the philosophical issues that Benjamin and I, and the Walker had to contend with: what is the value of preserving what was formerly a living ecosystem? That is one of the questions I want to raise later for us to discuss.
The Walker was philosophically museum that was an art center committed to being a catalyst for creative expression, including looking at artists who are working in digital and online media. So we are going to program in that area. [Since this talk, the Walker has discontinued its new media curatorial program. See http://www.mteww.com/walker_letter/index.shtml] But we are also a collecting institution, so we are going to collect when it is opportune to collect a really exemplary existence of the early history of art on the Internet, and of particular artist's projects. So we collected it. As a responsible institution, we are helping to preserve ädaweb and keep it running. As a research institution we provide commissioned texts, an intellectual context for this project. But at the same time, as I was saying, there was all this debate and doubt and issues around collecting ädaweb. So, for me, a really critical part of the contextualization of äda'web was commissioning a project The Unreliable Archivist by a group called three.org, which is Jon Ippolito, Janet Cohen, and Keith Frank.
This seemed like a perfect way to both fulfill this traditional function of collecting, or archiving, and at the same time question it by commissioning an artist project around the idea of archiving digital media, and äda'web in particular. The Unreliable Archivist works with some of the elements of the idea of a database, the idea of an archive, the idea of catalyzation, deconstruction, metadata, etc.... .
Here is a very simple interface. We are home, there is a caption to explain the image, there is an arrow. What do we do? Well, we click on the image, doesn't work, click on the home, doesn't work, click on the arrow. You get your navigational or interface toolbar. Pretty easily you can see that these are kinds of categories language, images, style, layout. Now, they're not the traditional categories that you see in a museum database, but they signify those categories. Then the values for those categories are from plain to enigmatic to loaded to preposterous. Each time you select one of those values in the data field, the display changes, so we are changing the language. The language that is displayed comes from a kind of atomic dissection of äda'web. So what Jon, Janet and Keith did was to look at äda'web not as it was constructed by Benjamin, Andrea, Vivian and the rest, but, in a sense, as a set of flat files. It just existed, and they could pull from it whatever they wanted, however they wanted. The same with the images. You can have enigmatic images, loaded images, preposterous images. Of course, because it's a database and because it's not either/or, you can combine these things and change the style. Or change the layout. I think this is really a perfect example of the idea of the database. It's not actually database-driven, but it's the idea of a database that is pretty unreliable. At the same time there is this ability to act as a navigational device, so by using the source, you can find out that the images are from, for instance, Julia Scher's Konsent Klinik. You can see the original source for those images, and the context that the artist created them for, and then as you back up, you see the larger äda 'web context. Of course, what we haven't managed to preserve is the larger Internet context. So that was one aspect of collecting this project which I though was very important.
I've spent many years sitting in conference rooms thinking about the inter-operability of museum information standards, and it's all important, baseline stuff. On the other hand, it seems to me that the part of the danger of collecting äda'web is the denaturing of that system -- not just in the collecting, but in the classification. Part of what Unreliable Archivist points to is: how can we build into our systems the ability to maintain, present, produce individual points of view? In some ways, that's been a main trajectory that I've been trying to work through at the Walker. How do we acknowledge and present the curatorial vision, the systematic vision, the expert vision, in interesting ways? While at the same time, how do we introduce individual points of view, and the ability to combat the institutional point of view, etc.? In a way, that started my mulling around with this process of collecting äda'web and working with three.org on Unreliable Archivist. As an object it becomes a field of study. I conduct ongoing interviews with Vivian Selbo and other people, and imagine that the site is something that could go on, becoming a research project that turns into a kind of snapshot, or a history of the Internet at a certain point and in time.
Over time with äda'web the completely predictable has happened. For instance, a project like Happier Days -- where people can basically create their own stories off the images that are provided -- we discovered that we didnt have all the dates quite right during the changeover! I don't think this is hugely important, but there is this issue of: it existed in one state when we collected it, now it's in the wrong state, in a sense. Do we correct that, or do we leave it? My opinion is that we correct it, although we try and create a record of the correction so that someone who really really wants to know can find out that this correction was made at a certain point and time, and what the correction was made was. In another instance, one of the artists in Group Z, who now goes by the name Michael Samyn, wanted to upgrade I Confess from one version of Shockwave to another. Again the question was: do we do that or not? And we did. Again, part of the solution was to document the change, but to let it happen.
Another thing that is much less resolvable is Maciej Wisniewskis project Jackpot, which is essentially a randomized linker to the Internet in the form of a kind of one-armed bandit. It's not drawing dynamically from an existing database of valid Internet addresses. Maciej created a subset, and over time that subset becomes increasingly 404.
It wouldn't be that hard to save the actual pages of the original work, and then redirect links so that instead of going out into the Internet, links connect to a local cache. If you don't do this, over time you will get a uniform 404 for ninety percent of the projects.
Just yesterday Benjamin Weil sent me an email, saying that he wanted to work with Matthew Ritchie on continuing this his game project. They want to, in a sense, finish it. It wasn't a finished project, and they would we be willing to add a link on the site, and they of course would link it back. Again, for me, what this all leads toward is the idea that, at least what I'm most interested in doing is providing a platform for artists to do their work. As often as not, that may mean specifically providing that platform and it being an ongoing project, rather than saying: you've done a project, and we'll collect it or we'll keep it in that form, and it can't change.
In fact, we've had those kinds of arrangements on a number of projects. With Sawad Brooks and Beth Stryker's DissemiNET, which was first shown at the Wexner Center, they couldn't keep it up themselves, so we put in the digital art study collection. But they are using their project in an ongoing way -- they have now done a version two, and they very well may do a version three.
So the idea of a collection becomes itself dynamic and changing. For me, the issue is: what changes? Do you change the artwork so that it fits into the existing structure, or do you think about changing the institutional structure so it can accommodate what actual artistic practice is?
Then, finally, there is an issue of variable media. We are just embarking on a new project that is substantiating this conceptual idea of variable media, and making it an actual project for Gallery9 as a way to try to figure out exactly what it will mean.
The question the digital object raises for me, the most important one, is: why do we want to archive things? The reasons for collecting and presenting can really drive what you allow yourself to do with the digital object, or how you shape what you do with it. Here's the perfect example: at museums now, many of us have put what is essentially a subset of our collection management systems essentially online, and that is a huge boon. Now you can look up all that information about all the objects in the collection. We have done a very major project called ArtsConnectEd, where the Walker's and The Minneapolis Institute of Arts's entire collections are available online. You can search in all sorts of ways, and it's won awards and that kind of thing. But one of the things we found out in user testing was: yes, it's very usable, yes, it's very navigable. The tester can answer our scenarios. But when s/he gets to the actual information, and it's sort of like, so what? The information is too thin, the context inadequate.
Why does this matter to museums? Because what has happened is, we museums have taken the internal management systems and said, here is what all of our database information is, let's make it available to the public. I think that's an important step. But the reason that information was initially databased was to know the provenance, the medium, the year it was made, who the artist was -- and those classifications became the basis for some kind of relationship to this work. But that's not the basis that matters to someone who doesn't already know that information. If we really want someone to have an experience with this work, we need to think about what we are collecting in relation to it, or how we are collecting it.
Another way of thinking about this issue of "Why do we want to archive these things?" is to turn the question around, and ask: what's at stake if we don't collect, archives, and somehow save these cultural memories? To me, I think that the downside is a huge lacuna in our cultural memory, if we don't try to save some kind of representation of this tremendously fertile and important moment. I think it's important to think about and question differences in the convergence between the archive, the library, and the collection. This becomes very confused in the digital meta-medium, where the archive does not follow the traditional separation between intellectual access to an object and, in a sense, physical access to the object.
What's the difference between a collection and an archive? Within äda'web there are projects, and they are in relation to the website; then there's a website in relation to the network, and there's a network in relation to the culture. How do we deal with those kinds of relationships? There are different kinds of objects contained within äda'web, or in a sense not contained. There are digital objects Like John Simon's Every Icon, or there are network connections like the Jodi project or Simon's project with the web stats, which are ephemeral projects that change every time you go to them. There are time- based informative projects that really only happen once, and all you have is the record of it. But to collect these things, how do you keep them physically accessible? There's the issue of plug-ins and emulation, etc. I don't think this is the defining issue, but on the other hand it we don't solve it we are going to be in trouble. How do you keep these projects intellectually accessible? The software and hardware is going out of date very quickly. If we can't keep them physically accessible, can we keep them intellectually accessible? Is there a way of thinking about them that allows the project to change with the technology?
Then there is always the question, when you talk about collections, in archives and libraries, of quality. Janet Murray refers to a notion of incunabular media in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck, and at this amazing moment, how does the issue of quality come into the equation of where you spend your time and effort? Peter Lunenfeld in particular addressed the question: just because it's new and digital, etc., doesn't mean its good. But what does "good" mean at such a moment? To me that's a really interesting and not obvious question, or at least it has no obvious answer. I think it's a process, and it's a series of experiments.
So the collection of äda'web led to the commission on web archives, which is leading to this new Tag project. It also led to thinking about different kinds of interfaces, and the Gallery9 interface in particular. Gallery9 started off with the idea of a gallery where we're a petrie dish for digital culture. That led to thinking that perhaps the portal is the kind of native format for the Internet, or at least a current native format. So how do we take that idea of a portal and treat it a little bit differently, so it's not exactly like Yahoo?
Here you see the interface that Vivian Selbo and I created for an exhibition called Art Entertainment Network. It has things that you might expect, like a web cam, a banner ad, the time, it moves. You can, of course, personalize it. Portals need to be personalized, right? So there's one yellow portal. But of course it doesn't exactly turn yellow or blue. When you click on the web cam it goes to an artist's project, or you click on an ad and it goes to an artist's project. Every time you reload a different search engine comes up. This one is the nettime search engine. And this one is Mongrel's search engine, etc. The order changes, so you don't have the tyranny of the alphabetical or whatever. It's not a perfect solution, but it's an attempt to expand in new ways.
A current project, launching in November, is called the WonderWalker: Global Online Wunderkammer. It's really an attempt to go back to a pre-database, a pre-classification, in some sense, of the idea of the museum. The Wunderkammer is a kind of pre-modern museum collection. WonderWalker allows for anyone to collect any page from the Internet and, in a sense, put it into the Walker collection. That's not exactly how I described it to the director of the Walker...! But [laughs] it's really a way to think about open source curating. How do you combine the expert with the collaborative? I don't think it's an either/or, but I do think it has to be a both.
Carl Goodman: I think that there is some doubt as to whether the unstable nature of the Web will be maintained. We take it for granted now, and it's so wonderful -- it provides you with opportunities to think about how do reorder, how to recombine elements in interesting ways. Digital media is more easily unpacked and taken apart and put back together, the screen is assembled before you, etc. But it looks like the industry is moving away from that. Businesses have put their efforts into marketing to the public, and so on. Would you expect that what you have of äda'web will be a snapshot, not just of art on the web, but of the state of the Internet at a particular time, which may not survive into the future?
Steve Dietz: One of my problems is that I don't think that äda'web is adequate as a snapshot of the Internet. In fact, much of what it relies on internally is an external context that won't exist. And so, how will someone bring äda'web to life in ten years, or a hundred? Not having that context in rock solid form right now is a big problem.
Q: I think you've identified two areas that we need to talk about. One is this notion of process-driven creativity authoring. You didn't really talk about collective authorship, and yet it's implied in everything that you are referring to. Web objects just don't end. You talked ironically about that, but in actuality there's a debate going on in the research world about trying to shift the research models from being product-based to being process-based, and how you analyze that, and think about that. The other piece that's really critical -- and there are people working on this as well -- is the relationship between the archive, the database, and the collection. And the fluidity between them. Archivists have a very different relationship to building these environments than database folks do, or collectors, because they don't care about maintenance in the same way.
SD: Archivists don't care about maintenance?
Q: Well, they care about maintenance, but....
SD: Or about the objects?
Q: Exactly. They think in really different terms. I think it's an important cross conversation to have with them in the library community.
SD: I agree. It's also this issue of preservation versus conversation.
Q: How do we relate to history, and what is appropriate to place in an archive and how much to freeze it? The other thing that comes up is the question of the physical collection, which I hope we talk about more, and the relationship between having to have a physical collection that's a kind of record that curators and theorists and historians can have physical access to, versus a virtual collection. I know that your work is primarily web based, but often has an expression in a museum and galleries.
SD: Part of the upgradability has to be upgrading the institution. Not just the software. It's interesting... We are working with the architects Herzog and de Meuron on a major expansion of the Walker. One of the other buildings they created is a storage space, quote unquote, for installation art. So there would be a huge Robert Gober28 piece with the stream going through it, but it's in storage, it's not in a public display space. But the only way to store it is as itself. And so it really is this hybrid thing.
Q: A question about the quality. If I died and gave you my living room, you'd be faced with a decision between freezing this snapshot in time or sending the furniture to the furniture collection and the prints and drawings to the prints and drawings collection. I am assuming that choice would be made roughly in inverse direction to the quality of the objects in the room. By curating äda 'web rather than the art within it, did you face the decision of, is this art good enough to collect on its own? Should we take äda 'web as a collection of art and disassemble it?
SD: I didn't face that question because it didn't go directly into the permanent collection. That was part of the strategy. Because, frankly, we are not prepared as an institution to have a good conversation around that yet. What I would argue for, is that äda 'web as a whole is an artwork, and should be preserved as a whole. The nice thing about the Walker is that they have a huge collection of Fluxus work and Joseph Beuys work, and so we are more used to working with agglomerations. A particular piece in a Fluxus thing you might not feel strongly about, but still you have to collect it all.
Q: So then do you then feel that the individual works of art which were used as raw materials for the äda 'web curators aren't strong enough to stand on their own?
SD: I think some are. I personally think some are and some aren't.
Q: Now we have a great opportunity, because people's unwillingness or lack of interest, lack of understanding of this new realm, could give certain creative people a lot of leeway they wouldn't have had in arts organizations otherwise.
SD: One thing you might say about the Crash symposium29 is that it was hard to have conversations sometimes with people outside the digital arts about this work. The Crash symposium was an attempt at Berkeley to bring art historians who haven't had any particular interest in digital media together with people who have, and try to engage a conversation about why they should be interested in the work, or why they might be. But that conversation was hard to have.
Copyright Steve Dietz 2000, 2003
Links:
Participants in the conference:
Jay David Bolter
Director, Center for New Media Research and Education School of Literature, Communication and Culture;
Georgia Institute of Technology
http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~bolter/
Author, Remediation: Understanding New Media
http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/%7Ebolter/remediation/index.html
Peter Broadwell
Thinker, Distributed Systems Laboratory
Sony U.S. Research Laboratories
http://www.plasm.com/peter
Jennifer Crowe
Coordinator, Rhizome Artbase
http://www.rhizome.org
http://www.artnetweb.com/protocol
Sara Diamond
Exec. Producer, TV & New Media; Artistic Director, Media and Visual Arts
The Banff Centre for the Arts
http://www.banffcentre.ab.ca
http://www.codezebra.net
Steve Dietz
Dir. New Media Initiatives
Walker Art Center
http://www.walkerart.org
http://www.yproductions.com
Peter Esmonde
VP, Information Architecture
Sapient
http://www.sapient.com
Carl Goodman
Curator of Digital Media
American Museum of the Moving Image
http://www.ammi.org
John Ippolito
Assistant Curator of Media Arts
Guggenheim Museum
http://www.three.org
Barbara London
Associate Curator
Museum of Modern Art
InterNyet: A Video Curator's Dispatches from Russia and Ukraine
http://www.moma.org/onlineprojects/internyet/index.html
Peter Lunenfeld
Dir., Institue for Technology & Aesthetics/Graduate Faculty, Media Design
Art Center College of Design
Author, Snap-to-Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures &
The Digital Dialectic: New Essays in New Media
http://mitpress.mit.edu/Cover/2000/02/essay.html
Lev Manovich
New Media Research
http://www.manovich.net/
Assoc. Professor, Visual Arts Dept.
UC San Diego
Author, The Language of New Media (Forthcoming)
Randall Packer
http://www.zakros.com
Author, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality(Forthcoming)
website at http://www.artmuseum.net/
Professor of Media Art, Maryland Institute, College of Art
Celia Pearce
Principal, CP and Friends
Interactive Track Head, USC School of Cinema and Television
http://www.cpandfriends.com
Author, The Interactive Book
Joan Shigekawa
Associate Director, Creativity and Culture
The Rockefeller Foundation
http://www.rockfound.org
Clay Shirky
Partner, Accelerator Group
Professor of Media Studies, Hunter College
http://www.shirky.com/bio.html
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