[-empyre-] Ludion, Taxonomedia and more

[Vanina Hofman]

Timothy, Claudia and all,

I will try to be shorter this time!

Documentation plays an essential role in analysing and contextualising  
an artwork, enabling a better conservation. In the case of electronic  
and digital-based arts, documentation can be considered a particularly  
significant process, considering that correct documentation makes  
feasible to maintain those artworks alive. Consequently, this allows  
their future exhibition, once the artists are not holding the piece  
anymore or they are not available to maintain it.

Documentation in this sense is used as the instrument that enables the  
preservation, conservation and archiving of a physical object, which  
includes the source code of electronic artworks.

However, the documentation has many others potential uses. Undeniably,  
it cannot replace the experience of an artwork but it can be the only  
way to spread the ideas that carries. Most of us have studied art from  
projects that we have never seen. Nevertheless, they constitute the  
pillars of our thoughts and knowledge. The interactive character that  
most of media arts express could make us think that its situation is  
far different. But, it is just a case of artworks that have to be  
treated in a way that accounts for their specific characteristics and  
underlying structure.

For whom is important the artwork itself and for whom its  
documentation (a memory, a platform, a departing point for research)?

For Taxonomedia the documentation was always a challenging aspect of  
the media arts conservation that one has to confront. We were aware  
that the high budgets required in conservation projects were rendering  
their implementation feasibility impossible and thus out of our scope.  
On the other hand the extensive production of interesting artworks  
based on technological means in countries like ours deserve a wider  
visibility. Information archiving can fill the gap between artwork  
production and the possibilities of artwork exhibition. Moreover,  
these online spaces are significant because when considering the non  
linear way that technology becomes obsolete it is unlikely that these  
artworks can be uncovered in the future. Thus, the multiple archives  
conceived with different criteria may provide some kind of  
rediscovering of artworks at some moment.

This is closely connected with Claudia?s phrase:

Because in the context of globalization (or "glocalization" if
you prefer), Latin American critique of "techno-poetics-politics" is still
in construction.

To construct this critique, we need to have access to our productions.  
The case of the art is not unique, but it is paradigmatic in this  
sense. The blog became important for us as an instrument to deal with  
one aspect of the media arts heritage: the information.

My best regards!
Vanina