[-empyre-] Emphemerality/Sustainability

[Mona Jimenez]

Hello to all,

and many thanks to Renate and Tim for inviting me and for the kind introduction; it is a real pleasure to meet all of you across such distances.

I have read with interest the dialogue of the past few weeks and feel somewhat an 'odd duck' as I actually work with the objects, installations, instantiations - whatever we chose to call them - on a pragmatic level through teaching and research. Electrons have always felt very tangible to me, actually, from the first time I picked up a video camera. Since video is constructed in real time on a display, I guess I never thought of it as fixed, but I do think of it as having a definable and traceable structure. I enjoy investigating, respecting, and moving forward structures and related processes if it makes sense within the tangle of of aesthetics, ideas, materiality and historicity that a work and artist embody. I'm one who believe artworks have life spans, and it's important to know whether they should die (and remain only as documentation) or be transformed.

I like getting to the specifics of artworks. In my teaching (a class called Handling Complex Media in MIAP <http://www.nyu.edu/tisch/preservation/program/curriculum.shtml>) we look at those troublesome CDROMs that Tim collects - what I consider the evidence of multimedia production before the web became our primary way of experiencing "interactive" works - and maintain an "Old Video Lab" to do so. And we examine installations and the students research and write reports, usually working with a conservator at a major museum in New York. 

One from 2008 on John F. Simon Jr's CPU (1999) can be found here:
http://www.nyu.edu/tisch/preservation/program/student_work/2008spring/s08_1805_groupfinal_a.pdf
http://www.nyu.edu/tisch/preservation/program/student_work/index-public.shtml

While we dig into the issues, of course we can't follow through on actual conservation actions -- no time. Though I can't share a link at the moment, last year the students worked on I Want You to Want Me <http://iwantyoutowantme.org/>, John' Maeda's Reactive Books <http://www.maedastudio.com/2004/rbooks2k/index.php?category=type&next=2005/timestable&prev=1998/realm&this=reactive_books>. All of these were collaborations with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Last year, things stepped up a level when we began to work with NYU's Computer Science Department. The discussion got much deeper, especially around how one deals with custom code and when and how certain works can be re-compiled or re-constructed altogether. As this is in the context of MoMA planning a "trusted digital repository" for their artworks.

I do expose the students every year to tools for documentation (as part of conservation or not), such as Jon's Forging the Future Project, and all the great research by the DOCAM Research Alliance <http://www.docam.ca/> and Matters in Media Art <http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/mediamatters/>. I stress the vocabulary across media art, digital libraries, archival practice and conservation for words like emulation and migration, and they have to then apply that as they move into the world attached to one of those professions. Information and exchange cross-discipline around the implementation of these strategies is pretty rare, I find.

The investigations are all very intriguing and fascinating, but also always a bit troubling, as my heart lies with the work under people's beds, in drawers, hard drives, the cloud, that do not have what we call in the business "stewardship", and have not been collected. I struggle to give people practical advice on maintaining the files coming out of their computers or tapeless cameras, especially when they live in Accra, Ghana, where Internet penetration is at 4% and the electrical grid is extremely unstable. What gets collected and saved is very arbitrary yet has come about through many, many hours of passionate labor, whether it is Ubu Web or the work of a conservator or an individual artist.

So documentation and metadata for me, and what is adequate or desirable to collect to maintain a work or process in an archival or larger cultural context, is very perplexing but continues to engage and surprise me -- through the practice of taking apart the artworks in a largely manual way. Conservation is a long way from understanding classes of digital and networked works.

all best, Mona

Mona Jimenez
Associate Arts Professor/Associate Director
Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program
New York University
212-992-8458
http://www.nyu.edu/tisch/preservation/