Page 203 - The Black Box Book

As is often the case with networked art practices, the context of Figure 4: Morehshin Allahyari, King Uthal from
the work and its outcomes are indivisible. Recovering a decentralised an- the series Material Speculation: ISIS, 3D printed resin and
electronic components, image courtesy of the artist, 2015.
alogue network apparatus in a contemporary world of distributed digital
transmission amounts to a purposeful or even wilful refusal of practicality,
expediency, and convenience. In light of the political nature of the digital
in the post-Snowden era, Bosma addresses the possibility of refusing or
circumventing modern social media platforms. She discusses the possibil-
ity of looking at outmoded technology such as ham radio, etc., in an effort
to retain autonomy from the surveillance capitalism of the control society.
How the analogue materiality and hybrid ontology of The World in
24 Hours challenges conservation efforts is not unusual. Other networked
artworks go further still in engaging material and ideological strategies
to deliberately obstruct conservation, such as Heath Bunting’s Own, Be
Owned Or Remain Invisible also known as _readme (1998–onwards).
Bunting’s work is a canonical work of early net.art and, as such, was in-
cluded in the exhibition Electronic Superhighway (2016) at Whitechapel
Gallery.

“After copying a randomly selected magazine article onto his
Web page, Bunting modified the article so that each word of writ-
ten text becomes a hyperlink to itself. For example, the word 'is'
links to www.is.com, 'on' inks to www.on.com, 'together' links to
www.together.com, and so on. The selection of links is not meaning-
ful—some words have been bought as Internet addresses while other
words remain inaccessible. As a Web page _readme is nothing but
links to other places; it is an aestheticization of protocol as such.”
(Galloway, 2004, p. 225).

Of the many accounts of the work, we prefer this description by
Alexander Galloway, who goes onto remark that Bunting’s _readme
“focused on a total dissolution of the art object into the network” (Galloway,
2004, p. 225). This dissolution emphasizes the permeability of the digital
object within its network context, in contrast to the opaque physicality
of the analogue object.

WHEN PRESERVATION BE-

COMES PRODUCTION: APPROACH-
ES, METHODS, AND PROTOCOLS
OF NETWORKED ART PRACTICES

We are interested in speculating about how the material conditions of
digital preservation reflect and influence the contemporary production of
networked art practice. By this, we mean moving beyond the established
narrative of attempting to digitally rescue and restore fragments of mod-
ernist, avant-garde destruction and decay. Far from deliberately resisting
collection and conservation, we consider a tendency in contemporary
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