Page 219 - The Black Box Book

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