[-empyre-] story-time and the archive

[Norie Neumark]

Hi Tim,
I'm just thinking about ephemeral works again, and wondering what you  
think about how they disturb or heat up archive fever?
norie
On 24/11/2007, at 12:55 AM, timothy murray wrote:

>> 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
>
>
>
>
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