Page 207 - The Black Box Book

Case Study: 6 Months Without
An interest in applying an expanded definition of networked art prac-
tice informed our selection of Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s 6 Months Without
(2018-2019) as a first case study for research.
In her performance, the artist disconnected from the Internet for six
months, during which time she lived entirely offline. All aspects of her life,
including personal and professional communication, navigating London,
socialising, connecting with people and working all took place without
the Internet. From her space at Somerset House Studios, Rönkkö led sem-
inars and workshops, while people could reach her by letter, phone calls
or visiting the studio. In that sense, the work became a correspondence
project, producing documentation of life without relying on the Internet.
From 1 October 2018 until 31 March 2019, the work was a multi-
faceted performance of everyday life, minus the online dimension. It was
captured as a documentary film, email and postal correspondence, au-
dio recordings of the artist’s reading the letters, workshops with guests
with webpages rather than only a static snapshot of the page itself, sharing offline time, and all the physical evidence of navigating the world
the 'Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (1996–onwards) continues to during six months without the internet (Figure 6).
be an invaluable resource for curators seeking to research and restage 6 Months Without was part of the group show 24/7: A Wake-Up
online networked artworks whereby archival preservation offers different Figure 6: Rönkkö, N.S.
approaches, methods, and protocols . Where recordkeeping generates Out of Office Autoreply from
documentation, archiving organises those records, then preservation also 6 Months Without (2018–2019)
[Screenshot].
involves making them accessible. These various models of documentation
practice include Joanna Phillips’ work on recording differences between
an artwork’s score and multiple iterations as time-based art (Phillips, 2015),
or providing access to a variety of records exemplified by born-digital
artworks such as the Net Art Anthology. Preventive conservation is also
relevant (Besser, 2014), which includes keeping track of infrastructure and
environmental problems on a micro and macro scale, and “post-custodi-
al archival methodology” (Ham, 1981), through which archivists “ensure
the integrity of, preserve, and provide access to archival materials without
taking physical custody over them” (Bliss, 2019).
This methodology can be facilitated through Open Archival Informa-
tion Systems – archives in which networks of people and systems work
together to preserve information and keep it accessible (Wikipedia: OAIS,
n.d.). Whether involved in commissioning work or assisting in its restaging,
curators play a role in conservation efforts as part of a network of care.
The importance, however, is to understand which element of the work
or its context is best preserved according to which model, for example,
which part benefits from being scored or being migrated, and which parts
need better documentation or new records created.
In the second half of this chapter, we will look more closely at two
case studies, Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s 6 Months Without (2018–2019)
and the Museum of Ordure (2001–onwards) founded by Stuart Brisley,
Geoff Cox, and Adrian Ward and involving Maya Balgioglu and curator
Rosse Yael Sirb and report back on the challenges these networked art
projects present from a variety of perspectives.
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