Page 218 - The Black Box Book

The Museum of Ordure is also notable as an artwork comprising
a Preservation Policy (2004). The policy outlines its approach and con-
sequence of preserving ordure more than declaring an intention of how it
should itself be kept. The principles underpinning this policy, however, are
relevant to understanding, as von Hantelmann suggests elsewhere regarding
“the experiential turn”, how the work “situate[s] its viewers’, the values,
conventions, ideologies, and meanings inscribed into this situation which
leads to a shift from what the work “says” to what it “does” (von Hantel-
mann, 2014). The Preservation Policy is therefore worth reading in full:
“Everything that is represented in the Museum of Ordure is sub-
ject to the vagaries of an uncontrolled internal process which slowly
deforms and disables all information held in the museum. This is
comparable to the decaying processes which affect all artifacts in
museums, regardless of all attempts at preservation: the retouching,
repainting, cleaning, etc, which are incorporated risks to the purity
of artifacts when first acquired by museums. Even ‘successful’
renovations are subject to periodic changes resulting from shifts in
conservation policies. Eventually (and in accordance with the fallibility
of memory) artifacts are institutionally, progressively, determinedly
and inadvertently altered by acts of conservation (sometimes unin-
tentional acts of institutional vandalism) until they cease to be rec-
ognisable as the objects first acquired. Of course in both cases – in
the virtual environment and in the material world – the processes
of generation, decay, and entropy are paramount. Museums are by
this definition charged with achieving the impossible.” (Preservation
Policy, 2004)
In pointing to the impossibility of preservation, the Museum of
Ordure sets out the scale of challenge of preserving works which sit
in-between the virtual environment and the material world, or in this case,
in cyberspace, “as a site where language and imagery disintegrates just
as in the physical world” (Whitely, 2011, p. 155).
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DISCUSSION: THE CHALLENG-
ES OF PRESERVING 6 MONTHS
WITHOUT AND THE MUSEUM OF ORDURE
Geoff Cox and Nastja Säde Rönkkö agreed to the Museum of Ordure
and 6 Months Without becoming case studies for our research. They
joined our ISEA 2020 workshop (Hunter & Cook, 2020) to share first-hand
insights with participants to develop novel approaches to preservation
issues and concerns. Annet Dekker and Anisa Hawes also made opening
presentations to frame critical questions and developments in the field.
Researchers Bilyana Palankasova, Lozana Rossenova and Erin Walter
played an important role in blogging about the workshop exchanges,
posted on our archive site, www.networkedart.blog (and contributed to
this chapter). With a further twelve artists, curators and conservators
participating, the five-hour online workshop was a networked event in
itself, taking place across seven time zones from São Paulo to Melbourne.
Preliminary questions dealt with defining the boundary around the work
to establish the relationship between the what-is-to-be-preserved and
the how-to-be-preserved. For example, invited researcher and web archivist
Anisa Hawes asked Geoff Cox whether we should consider recapturing
www.ordure.org in whole or in part.
Discussion about what-is-to-be-preserved of the Museum of Or-
dure focused initially on the 110 blank pages in The Collection section of
the website (http://www.ordure.org/collection/), which, although blank,
might be necessary to archive to ensure an accurate representation of
the website in its entirety as it appeared at the moment of capture. Geoff
responded, describing it as “complex negotiation” as pages were unin-
tentionally blank. Therefore, the decision of what and how to preserve
would involve many agencies, echoing Annet Dekker’s concept of a net-
work of care. Seeking cues on how to preserve the Museum of Ordure,
if at all, curator Judit Bodor, wanted to know about the “conception and
development of the Museum” regarding “(co)authorship, control over its
development and the role of the curator and administrators including
Geoff (as a ‘node’)”. Our research blogger, Bilyana Palankasova, asked how
Geoff’s view of “forgetting as an important component of memory” was
incorporated into the Museum’s preservation strategy while the project
was still active, in anticipation of “the waste and API issues caused by
the decaying infrastructure of the website itself”. Geoff suggested that
such detailed consideration might take the website too seriously, however,
given that it has merely fallen into dormancy. He suggested the question
may be more significant to a museum conservator or researcher of net
art than the artists themselves who’ve allowed it to fall into disrepair,
potentially inverting the idea that the artist’s intent is central to decisions
around the preservation of the work.
Geoff expressed that the arbitrary choices of material captured by
the automated crawlers of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine may have
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