[-empyre-] story-time and the archive

[timothy murray]

>Hi, Norie and Monica,


>Your interwoven threads are extremely interesting and directly 
>engage my own sense of archival practice.  I think that Monica is 
>right on the mark when she says "the desire for an event/artwork to 
>have duration is primarily concerned with unconstraining the artwork 
>from its chronological assignment (to become untimely) so that it 
>has the potential to continue to be to communicable within a 
>continuum whose parameters of form and value are not predictable." 
>But I'm not sure that I would strictly contrast that, anymore, with 
>the "desire of preservation" ("to be timeless: unchangeable status 
>quo/monumentalisation / stabilised form and value").  Particularly 
>within the context of planned obselescence and and short shelf lives 
>of recent new media art, I'm wondering whether the event/artwork 
>itself doesn't/shouldn't alter our conceptions of desire so that 
>preservation and event are more interwoven in an ongoing, 
>unpredictable way.

If so, then your combined emphases on storytelling (what Deleuze 
calls "fabulation") becomes all the more important as a crucial 
structural element of the archival process itself (since is also 
something that Mickey pointed us toward via Derrida's Archive Fever). 
This could mean emphasizing the emulation of the events/artworks, 
networks, processes, procedures, and interactions more, say, than the 
reproduction or replication of particular source code, exhibition 
environments, or recording/playing instruments.  Such an emphasis 
would be on the open-endedness of fabulation, a process that grows 
and changes in time, rather than "incontrovertible status of value" 
that drives the work of most museum collections and archives.

Thanks for such stimulating thoughts.

Best,

Tim

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

office: 607-255-4086
e-mail: tcm1 at cornell.edu