Page 220 - The Black Box Book

more relevance to the nature of the project. Navigating Adrian Ward’s im-
age decomposition pieces through archived pages on the Internet Archive
Wayback Machine back and forward through time seems an apposite
and empathetic form of historical engagement with the work. Doing
so might also help address the issue raised by another participant,
Gina Cortopassi, of translating “the conceptual dimension of a work”
to its archive even when an “experience of deprivation or corruption”.
The experience of accessing past and present iterations of ordure.org,
travelling through the archived time-based future of an image’s decompo-
sition, might be even more relevant to the work than a viewer’s recollection
of experiencing those contingent and fragmentary pages through the live
web alone. More so still when now navigating ordure.org, dump.ordure.org
and museum-ordure.org on the live web and through its archive across
different browser tabs. Conservator Lisa Mansfield questioned, howev-
er, the authenticity of an instantiation as captured through the Internet
Archive Wayback Machine created from “hybrids of different snapshot
fragments not all from the same time”. Capturing a situated viewing of
the historical site through Webrecorder or Conifer would have addressed
that better should the technology have been available at the time.
Yet again, achieving an authentic instantiation of “www.ordure.org” would
be at odds with the Museum of Ordure’s Preservation Policy, which dis-
closes the actuality of its impossibility and maintain a critical stance and
distance toward the construction of history itself.
The discussion of 6 Months Without opened with a consideration
of the boundaries of the work of art. The group agreed that a start date
may be indicated by the artist first conceiving the performance and
expanding to activities such as research, notes, conversations, discussions
and even funding applications. However, establishing the end date was
more challenging and led to questioning whether participatory works could
ever have a definitive end date, if engagement with the work continues.
On the question of what-is-to-be-preserved regarding 6 Months Without,
archivist Annet Dekker asked whether we should also conserve the pres-
ence of Rönkkö’s films on YouTube in addition to the video itself. Is there
an irony in streaming video work made from being offline on probably the
world’s most popular online streaming platform? This consideration speaks
to the expanded nature of performance and its edges and boundaries
in relation to engagement by audience, researchers, exhibition, activism,
or possible restaging of the work. Discussions around participatory ac-
tion in 6 Months Without, such as seminars and workshops, expanded
the concept of networks within the work and provided further insight.
Rönkkö and Sarah Cook, as a curator of the Somerset House 24/7 ex-
hibition, discussed the work’s inclusion in the show as a performance,
thus shifting the boundaries of the work from performance to exhibition.
What is more, this shift also included the exhibition evaluation, reviews,
audience images and interaction with the work. This brought about
questions about performance interaction and exhibition interaction and
their respective engagement, through exchange of physical letters or
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social media documentation of exhibition presence. In that sense,
the discussion of 6 Months Without led to thoughtful observations
and further problematised the tension between a performance piece,
which interrogates living offline, having created digital records, such
as videos, automated emails and other web residue. In that sense,
the discussions about what-is-to-be-preserved focused on defining
the boundaries of the work and considered its migration from the an-
alogue to the digital. In a parallel manner, in shifting the boundaries of
the work from performance to exhibition, the discussion considered
exhibition as a tactic of restoration and preservation in the canon of
history of art. Restaging a work or selecting it for an exhibition often
increases its value and repositions it historically. What is more, a con-
servator acting as a producer and a manager over the lifespan of a work
frames their work as discursive and positions them as an active care-
taker within the network of care.
In considering 6 Months Without alongside the Museum
of Ordure, the conversation focused on the role of forgetting
as an essential part of memory and the ways in which the omittance,
decay or resistance to documentation influences the value of the work.
Both case study artworks were realised in a wide network of actants,
agents and conditions, both human and non-human, on and offline.
These expanded webs of interaction, constituting a huge aspect of
the networked nature of the works, were also considered as part of
a potential network of care, following Annet Dekker. A dispersed and
decentralised network of preservation, however, would have implications
over the ownership of the work in question. The discussion reflected on
how qualities such as fragmentation and obsolescence were present
in the preservation of performance or net art and how that determines
the value of the work.
Keeping up with the discussion about the edges of the work,
the conversation considered documenting a performance score. In de-
termining boundaries, the group wondered what information constitutes
the score and whether it needs to be recorded for future re-perfor-
mance, activism or research. More importantly, how does this, as a form
of documentation, reflect and communicate the conceptual dimensions
of the work and the artist’s intention? What pieces of documentation
are necessary to capture the artistic context from which the work
emerged and will translate that essence in future restaging? Drawing
parallels with the Museum of Ordure, it is worth highlighting that both
artworks like to resist or neglect their dependence on the Internet.
If 6 Months Without generates a huge amount of physical artefacts
and is perhaps an unorthodox choice for a case study on networked
art practice, its study aptly addresses our increased dependence on
networked technologies and offers a valuable consideration of complex
artworks, presenting challenges to preservation. Capturing the value of
the Museum of Ordure and particularly the artists’ intent in the work is
difficult while planning a preservation strategy which is arguably going to
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