Page 198 - The Black Box Book

CONSERVATION CHALLENGES
OF N E T W OR K E D A R T,

BEFORE AND AFTER THE INTERNET

Conservation challenges exist in the curatorial reproduction of networked
art practice before and after the Internet. Consequently, as Zach Blas
comments, “untangling the relation or the collapsing of ‘Internet’ and
‘network’ whereas the Internet can be understood as being comprised of
networks, but the network is not Internet” (Blas, 2016, n.p.) is essential.
For example, Robert Adrian’s The World in 24 Hours (1982) “connected
artists in 16 cities on three continents for 24 hours between 12:00 noon
on September 27 to 12:00 noon on September 28, 1982 (Central Europe-
an Time) as part of the Ars Electronica 1982” (Grundmann, 1984, p. 86).
Critic and theorist Josephine Bosma has researched the work’s possible
re-enactment strategies, even “ involving a new generation of artists and
various alternative network practices” (Bosma, 2017, n.p.). Presenting
this research within the context of digital art preservation discussion
at SHA2017 (Still Hacking Anyway – a hacker camp in the Netherlands),
Bosma discussed the project as a way of addressing the susceptibility
of computer network art to become lost. The analogue materiality of
The World in 24 Hours accentuates this susceptibility, as does its hybrid
platform-as-artwork ontology, whereby the work is intended to serve as
an interface for artistic telecommunication on a global scale, ten years
prior to the widespread adoption of web browsers.
The World in 24 Hours is an artwork that happens between ex-
change and transmission, creating a network-as-artwork and vice versa.
Bosma considers how to resituate the work’s analogue communications
technologies, such as Slow Scan TV, in the contemporary digital, post
Web 2.0 media environment as central questions and issues to address in
any future re-enactment. This focus reminds us of the restricted access
to telecommunications media in the 1980s and the scale of ambition
involved in mounting The World in 24 Hours as a networked planetary
event. Bosma‘s research seems to be as much about re-enacting the
technical capacity of the I. P. Sharp Associates Network (1982) (Figure 3)
as it is about re-enacting the platform on which and through which
The World in 24 Hours works, at least as much as it is about re-enacting
the artistic exchanges that happen through the network because they
are so deeply connected.

Figure 2: Brout, É & Maxime, M. (2014).
Nakamoto (The Proof). [Passport Scan]. Retrieved
from https://www.eb-mm.net/en/projects/nakamoto-
-the-proof.
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