Re: [-empyre-] Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] let it go

[timothy murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

> I'm sorry to have remained on the sidelines during this important 
> discussion.  As many of you know, I founded and curate The Rose 
> Goldsen Archive of New Art in the Cornell Library and co-curate with 
> Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA 
> (http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu).  The latter is a net.art 
> gallery whose issues are shaped around conceptual themes of 
> political and social importance to the development of digital 
> culture.  I hope you'll find some to visit the site, which hosts up 
> to 15 artworks per issue.

Among the projects we're working in the Goldsen Archive is off-line 
preservation of Doran's computerfinearts.com, and Melinda and I have 
been in discussion about various ways of archiving empyre.

I want to jump into the conversation issue on a couple of fronts.  I 
suppose I became interested in committing a good deal of my energies 
to issues of digital preservation for two reasons. First, the most 
obvious and challenging concerns preservation itself.  A number of 
years ago, I curated a travelling exhibition of CD-Rom art 
(http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu).  As I mounted the show over 
three successive years, I became more and sensitive to the difficulty 
I had running certain early CDs on updated machines.  The Goldsen 
Archive reflects my attempt to build a critical mass of materials in 
the Cornell Library, which is an institution commited to digital 
preservation.  I also am working on gathering together a number of 
net.art archives for preservation off-line assuming that many of 
their hosts may abandon them in the future.  Our hope is to work in 
collaboration with similar collections to create something of a 
networked incubator to solve future preservation issues.  A number of 
the participants on this listserve are engaged in parallel projects.

The second reason is what's most important to me, and I hope will be 
to the international community, as a writer and curator trained in 
philosophy and intellectual history.  The vast majority of the early 
CD-Roms and net.art pieces, and I would venture to say the majority 
of interactive work being created now, is deeply conceptual in 
nature.  At stake is a reflection on the relation of representation 
to the nuances of digital culture, a critical intervention in issues 
pertaining to the digital divide, ethnic paranoia, and digital 
terror, as well as conceptual experimentation with the fluid digital 
interface itself.  While some of this work is indeed designed to be 
ephemeral, the criticality of its conceptual intervention in machine 
culture needs, I feel, to be maintained for the sake of engaging in 
debates frequently absent in the academic and artistic communities. 
The issues articulated in the first years of empyre, for example, 
constitute important reflections on the evolving history and practice 
of the medium, whose preservation and memory could and should inform 
future endeavors.

Something else that I feel that is important to appreciate is the 
particularity of conceptual interventions made in the rather 
free-flowing, if even rather ephemeral, environments of artistic and 
computing practices.  D. N. Rodowick has emphasized Lyotard's concept 
of the "figural" as a way of articulating a critically engaged 
artistic practice particular to digital intervention (I also think of 
Benjamin's concept of "the philosophical").  My commitment as a 
curator is to enhance the opportunities to document the development 
of such artistic criticality and to provide multiple venues and forms 
for its evolving interaction with a engaged audiences.   When things 
work well, I value my ability to contribute in writing and design to 
the complexities of conceptual experimentation.

Of course, the web continues to provide us new opportunities to work 
outside of the parameters of the physical archive (which does indeed 
impose certain limitations) as a means of extending the terrain of 
access and creation.  This is one of the reason that institutions 
hosting archives and preservation projects are so keen on 
collaborating with each other, with the aim of moving the results 
on-line and beyond geographic boundaries.

Tim


--
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
Co-Curator, CTHEORY Multimedia: http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu
285 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York  14853

office: 607-255-4012
e-mail: tcm1@cornell.edu