[-empyre-] Archiving New Media Art: Ephemerality, and/or Sustainability. philosophical approach

[FILE_Arquivo]

Dear all

Thank you very much to Tim Murray and Renate Ferro for the invitation to 
participate in Empyre soft skinned board of discussion. I also want to 
congratulate Vanina Hoffman and Renato Dal Farra, people that I've met 
in Taxonomedia Seminar in Buenos Aires, and the respective works on 
Taxonomedia Website and the Langlois Foundation I've appreciated for a 
long time.


It's interesting for me to hear here all the experiences on different 
levels of the digital media arts archive spaces. It contributes a lot to 
our developments of FILE Archive ambiance (http://www.file.org.br). By 
the way, I've researched the FILE Archive for a few years and nowadays 
I'm working on it.


As far as the artworks I'm studying in FILE Archive are concerned, the 
/ephemeral/ is turning into a condensed and heavy cloud of bits. 
Personally, /ephemerality/ it is positive, it's a potentiality that we 
need to respect and it's not something that we need to worry about. With 
all the difficulties that a Latin American archives go through in their 
structure, equipments and financial things, in FILE Festival history (11 
years) the conservation ways conducted to an organic and non linear way 
of work, totally referenced by the /ephemerality/. This heavy cloud of 
bits starts to auto organized itself, oriented by FILE local exhibitions 
and by the concepts in how to show electronic and digital art, task that 
we must face every year of FILE Festival.


/Sustainability/, in this version of festival/archive ambiance, is 
totally connected to C/omplexity/. This generative perspective of 
archives is suggesting to the artworks, artists and researches to go 
deeply in their archive intentions (or events, in a technological term), 
beyond the common tools of index, search and access. This made way to 
organize this amount of information; it's facing the instabilities, 
errors and /ephemeralilties/ as inherent part of the complex 
electronic/digital art archive ambiances. Therefore, from a 
/sustainability/ perspective, it's working to allow the sampler, the 
replicas and the lectures of the potentialities, a way to conserve the 
artwork and their parts itself.


This is a philosophical point of view, which we are trying to put in 
practice, working hard on interface design and in the database structure.


It's a pleasure enjoy Empyre and meet you all!

All the Best,

--
Gabriela Previdello
FILE Archive Coordination
filearquiv...@gmail.com
skypename: gabrielaprevidello
55|11|9896 6644
www.file.org.br

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Re: [-empyre-] Archiving New Media Art: Ephemerality, and/or Sustainability. philosophical approach

[Jon Ippolito]

Hi Gabriela,

On Sep 30, 2010, at 8:53 AM, FILE_Arquivo wrote:
 This made way to organize this amount of information; it’s facing the 
 instabilities, errors and ephemeralilties as inherent part of the complex 
 electronic/digital art archive ambiancesThis is a philosophical point of 
 view, which we are trying to put in practice, working hard on interface 
 design and in the database structure.
Intriguing. Can you give us any more of a glimpse--via a prototype or just 
textual description--of how this ephemerality-friendly interface and database 
might work?

jon
__
Forging the Future:
New tools for variable media preservation
http://forging-the-future.net/
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Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Denise Bandeira]

Hello!

All Empyre's members and Gabriela Previdello






Congratulations to Tim Murray and Renate Ferro for powered the Empyre soft skinned board of discussion and for make the invitation to some institutions like FILE to discuss these topic.



 


It’s interesting for me to read these emails about the experiences in archives because I’m a researcher on digital art at 
Brazil and beginnig to make a survey about the complex coexistence of large, often privately-financed and politically influential to production of art digital. 



best regards!


Denise Bandeira 




Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:53:05 -0300, FILE_Arquivo escreveu:




Dear all

Thank you very much to Tim Murray and Renate Ferro for the invitation to participate in Empyre soft skinned board of discussion.  I also want to congratulate Vanina Hoffman and Renato Dal Farra, people that I’ve met in Taxonomedia Seminar in Buenos Aires, and the respective works on Taxonomedia Website and the Langlois Foundation I’ve appreciated for a long time.

It’s interesting for me to hear here all the experiences on different levels of the digital media arts archive spaces. It contributes a lot to our developments of FILE Archive ambiance (http://www.file.org.br). By the way, I’ve researched the FILE Archive for a few years and nowadays I’m working on it. 

As far as the artworks I’m studying in FILE Archive are concerned, the ephemeral is turning into a condensed and heavy cloud of bits. Personally, ephemerality it is positive, it’s a potentiality that we need to respect and it’s not something that we need to worry about. With all the difficulties that a Latin American archives go through in their structure, equipments and financial things, in FILE Festival history (11 years) the conservation ways conducted to an organic and non linear  way of work, totally referenced by the ephemerality. This heavy cloud of bits starts to auto organized itself, oriented by FILE local exhibitions and by the concepts in how to show electronic and digital art, task that we must face every year of FILE Festival.

Sustainability, in this version of festival/archive ambiance, is totally connected to Complexity. This generative perspective of archives is suggesting to the artworks, artists and researches to go deeply in their archive intentions (or events, in a technological term), beyond the common tools of index, search and access. This made way to organize this amount of information; it’s facing the instabilities, errors and ephemeralilties as inherent part of the complex electronic/digital art archive ambiances. Therefore, from a sustainability perspective, it’s working to allow the sampler, the replicas and the lectures of the potentialities, a way to conserve the artwork and their parts itself.



This is a philosophical point of view, which we are trying to put in practice, working hard on interface design and in the database structure.

It’s a pleasure enjoy Empyre and meet you all!

All the Best,

-- Gabriela PrevidelloFILE Archive Coordinationfilearquiv...@gmail.comskypename: gabrielaprevidello55|11|9896 6644www.file.org.br

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[-empyre-] The archive

[Cynthia Beth Rubin]

Yann - Thanks for your great post.  I am not going to be the translator (sorry 
- someone with more time will come along). We are all making choices on both 
the larger scale (how to create data bases, and what formats) and on the 
individual level, and yes, in doing so we create a new work.  Where is the line 
between documentation and interpretation?  Perhaps, just as in any history, 
there is room for several interpretations.  

Jumping in with my own experience, I would argue that artists should take 
responsibility for documentation. We have access to original files that 
viewers, and even curators, may not have, and that means that we can be 
creative with how 

At the risk of opening myself up to criticism, I am going to confess to faking 
much of the linear video which currently serves as the documentation of the 
interactive work  Layered Histories: the Wandering Bible of Marseilles. My 
collaborator Bob Gluck and I, as the artists, struggled with documentation.  
The video that you see on the website http://cbrubin.net/layered_histories is 
a combination of:

1. Real: a photograph of an installation in the Jewish Museum in Prague

2, Mostly Fake: still image of the real installation in the Jewish Museum in 
Prague, with faked projection for a clearer image (hint - the reflection on the 
floor does not move).  The inserted video is of course the same video that is 
projected, but we imagined a combination of video shorts and length of time on 
the screen, both of which vary with every use.

3. Real but Deceptive: the video of the user with the interface (tablet/book) 
was shot nowhere near the installation.  We shot it in good light, with the 
user sitting at a low coffee table so that I could shoot from above without a 
ladder.  It was not attached to the computer (but the user had tried with the 
computer so she knew what she was faking).

4. Totally Real (except for the sound): Video of actual users in the actual 
installation.

5. Mostly Fake Sound: all of the sound was recombined later because I shot the 
video using a camera with poor sound quality.  The clips are the real clips, 
but not necessarily in the order in which a user would hear them, or the length 
of the clip, as these vary with users.

Even with all of these different ways of showing the work, during the 
installation for an upcoming show I found that the curators had no prior 
concept of the way that the piece functions (they asked why I showed up with a 
computer, and if I could share a monitor with a video artist).

As Patrick says, in a few years this will all be different.  But for now I go 
with artists faking parts of the documentation to tell the best story.  Believe 
me, no curator would accept the piece for exhibitions based just on real 
video (poor color, poor sound).  And for now, that is a primary consideration.  
Of course, what we document now will be the historical document of the future. 
. . 

Cynthia

Cynthia Beth Rubin
http://CBRubin.net
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