Page 205 - The Black Box Book

networked practice to operate as a form of digital preservation or media
archaeology, where artists shift to curatorial roles where in turn they
excavate networked media processes.
Evidence of such works was present in Rhizome’s The Art Happens
Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics show, such as Morehshin Allahyari’s re-
production of 3D-printed replicas of artifacts destroyed by ISIS in her
work Material Speculation: ISIS (2015-2016) (Figure 4) or Olia Lialina
and Dragan Espenschied’s One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (2010–ongo-
ing) (Figure 5), which preserves and appropriates Geocities websites
as “assisted readymades”.
Curators have long been implicated in the preservation of art
through their own productive practices, insofar as exhibition-making
offers a significant contribution to the preservation of the art it displays.
The art history of networked art continues to rely on survey exhibitions.
The history of new media art exhibitions, including The Art Formerly
Known as New Media (Dietz & Cook, 2005), Open Systems (de Salvo,
2005), Electronic Superhighway (Whitechapel, 2016), The Art Happens
Here (Connor et al, 2018), has been influential in excavating and repre-
senting artworks at risk of disappearance. Aside from exhibitions, however,
there are several different ways networked art practices are conserved
and made accessible, whether or not they are preserved. These include
Patricia Norvell’s interviews with conceptual artists (Norvell, 2001) and
Charlotte Frost’s work on preserving Mailinglist culture (Frost, 2019).
These explorations involve uncovering networks used by artists and then
thinking through how that material documents the artist’s intent, if not
the work of art itself. Art conservation draws on different models in this
respect, such as Renee van de Vall’s thinking on the artist’s biography and
the materiality of the work (van de Vall et al., 2011), Brian Castriota’s writ-
ing about the identity of an artwork (Castriota, 2019), Glenn Wharton
on the artist’s intention (Wharton, 2006), and Hannah Hölling’s idea of
Figure 5: Espenschied, D. & Lialina, O.
(2013–ongoing). I have a web site from One Terabyte of “relative durations of impermanence” (Hölling, 2016) in thinking about
Kilobyte Age Photo Op. [Restoration of GeoCities web the artist’s intent as being relative to a particular period of time.
page, Screenshot, 2013, Netscape 4.51 on Windows There are a variety of models and themes at play within the do-
2000]. Retrieved from https://anthology.rhizome.org/
one-terabyte-of-kilobyte-age. main of online preservation. These include thinking about instantiation,
the moment when the work comes into being on the web, and digital
curation as a machinic process which can be enacted by technical tools
and applications, which the Digital Preservation Coalition has been ex-
ploring (Digital Preservation Handbook, n. d.). Annet Dekker‘s concept of
‘networks of care’ is central to this thinking (Dekker, 2020). Dekker‘s ac-
complishment is in incorporating unusual conservation strategies into
a framework of practice.
The practice of networked art conservation has been aided con-
siderably by the invaluable work of Rhizome, not only in developing pres-
ervation approaches such as Net Art Anthology but also in their parallel
engagement with archiving the live web – initially through Webrecorder.io
(2015–2020), renamed in June 2020 as Conifer (2020–onwards). While
Conifer adds a new dimension of capturing user-driven interactions
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