Page 195 - The Black Box Book

Over the last six decades, networked art practices have evolved in re-
sponse to and in anticipation of changing material conditions of communi-
cations systems, infrastructures, and technologies. Whether pre-internet
correspondence art, or born-digital software-based, or net art, the material
and, at times, ideological dimensions of networked art challenge existing
approaches, methods, and protocols of not only the production of con-
temporary art but also its conservation, which this text seeks to address.
Often tactically amorphous, integrated, and inseparable from conditions
and questions of (im)materiality (see Lillemose, 2006), networked art
resists conservation efforts to trace its edges and boundaries. There-
fore, how and should we develop conservation efforts to offer access to
the ‘original’ work in context without undermining its unruly materiality
and institutional critique, particularly after the digital? Whether these
efforts are called ‘conservation’ by museum curators, or ‘preservation’
by librarians and archivists, they share the same intent: making the work
accessible. In the words of Peggy Phelan this “ labour […] to ‘preserve’
[performance] is also a labour that fundamentally alters [it]” (Phelan,
1993, p. 148). This labour further compounds the challenge of identifying
the edge or boundary of the networked artwork to draw a line around it
for its conservation. As apt as Phelan’s observation is related to the im-
mediacy of performance, its applicability endures with increasing urgency
in terms of the performative hypermediacy of networked art practice.
Due to, rather than despite, this tension, we seek to trace the edges
and boundaries of preserving both pre-internet and born-digital networked N E T W O R K E D A R T :
art practices. Focusing upon artworks that draw on distribution networks WHAT, WHERE, AND HOW?
(such as the postal system and the internet) as their primary medium of
production, we aim to unpack existing digital preservation efforts con- We take recent works of art as a point of departure to survey a range of issues,
cerning online and offline exchanges. Our findings emerge from investi- challenges, and opportunities regarding networked art practice after digital pres-
gating possible approaches to 6 Months Without (Nastja Säde Rönkkö, ervation. Where and how does networked art happen, and how is that defined?
2018–2019) and the Museum of Ordure (Stuart Brisley, Geoff Cox, Many of these artworks exhibit hybridity, performativity, ephemerality, dissolu-
Adrian Ward and Maya Balgioglu, 2001–onwards) as case studies. In tion, proliferation, and even auto-destruction. These “work-defining” properties
so doing, we also tackle the present and future implications of using as Pip Laurenson calls them (Laurenson, 2006) make networked art challenging
web archiving tools [such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to define and preserve. However, we can also observe ways in which networked
(1996–onwards)] as a preservation strategy and how they might impact art itself can be accumulative or built on repositories, even creating archives of
artistic and curatorial agency and authorship. ongoing interaction and participation as the focus of the work itself. The appro-
priative and generative nature of networked art critiques notions of originality,
uniqueness, and materiality after digital reproduction. Networked art can even
behave, somewhat ironically perhaps, as a form of digital preservation and act
of media archaeology. In other words, preserving networked art can become
a form of production of new work. Archivist Sarah Haylett has investigated this
in the context of artworks which, through conservation and exhibition, generate
their own archives (Haylett, 2022). The challenge is bringing existing approach-
es, methods, and protocols into alignment: the preservation of networked art
will require libraries, archives, and art museums to share knowledge, and skills
around preventive conservation, recordkeeping, and archiving.
Networked art’s cardinal principle of peer-to-peer distribution as its pri-
mary means of co-production and circumvention beyond institutional curatorial
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