Page 222 - The Black Box Book

generate more information. Is it ‘meta’ to try to preserve a project, which
is a commentary on the systems determining value in the first place?
There seems to be resistance on the part of both case studies of artworks
to cross over to the other side, whether it is conceptually embedded in
the work to decay and thus hard to establish its boundary and appropriate
preservation. Moreover, it lends to considerations whether preservation
questions or challenges the work itself by producing digital artefacts,
possibly in conflict with the work’s intentions.
P R E S E R VAT I O N O F N E T-
WORKED ART WORKS AND
PRACTICES… IN THE NETWORK
This chapter has offered a survey of approaches to the conservation
of networked artworks and practices without undermining their unruly
materiality and criticality of institutional process and spaces. Mindful
of jeopardising the underlying principles and dimensions of the prac-
tice itself, we sought nonetheless to trace the edges and boundaries of
the preservation of networked art practices. Ongoing debates about
omissions and distortions in the construction of art histories and their
subsequent influence on the production of future art practice add fur-
ther urgency. Ensuring a reliable understanding of networked art prac-
tices during the last sixty years and contributing toward the evolution of
preservation methods in response also helps us understand, in media
archaeological terms, “ how we ended up in this digital culture and [per-
haps] find alternative ways of thinking about [it].” (Parikka, 2001). Given
our conception of materiality has changed since the digital turn, we can
only expect that artworks in the future will continue to evolve in further
contingent, precarious and hybrid ways.
We identified the problem of networked art practice preservation
as distinct from media art challenges of preservation. We highlighted
the necessity to focus on the performative processes of social, cultural,
and technological exchanges that underpin the work and maintain its
interaction with contemporary cultural ecologies.
Networked art practice comprises exchanges that can be revisited,
reemployed, reconsidered, and resituated due to their integral relevance
to our contemporary social, cultural and political experience. Thus, we see
greater promise in the undertaking of media archaeological excavation
of processes that underpin these works. Here, we see the possibility of
harnessing a source for the generation of new work, that is porous and
susceptible to contemporary discourse.
Of further interest is how artistic engagement with the internet and
other networks reveals a curatorial dimension already present in networked
art practices. While the future of networked art preservation depends
on collaboration between artists, curators, conservators, and archivists
performing their existing roles, we recognise that networked art practice
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is itself an outcome of artists already behaving curatorially – seizing
the means of dissemination as essential to the production of the work.
As such its preservation would thus benefit from collaborations that see
curators encouraged to think and behave artistically.
If these are the considerations that those responsible – artists,
curators, conservators, and archivists – have to consider, then what
about the non-human elements, the artwork and its network? What are
the differences for networked art practice before and after digital preser-
vation? Does it depend on whether the artwork was made before or after
the Internet, or used non-digital or non-electronic means? Our interest is
in digital preservation of networked art rather than digital art’s preserva-
tion – the work doesn’t have to be digital in the first place. As networked
art practices predate the web, then what did offline/online mean before
the Internet? Digital preservation suggests a move from one (unstable)
format to another (more stable or which makes the work accessible).
This move could however exist in the work itself – away from the intan-
gible digital to a more physical manifestation, as in 6 Months Without,
or the opposite, in the Museum of Ordure, towards the abstraction,
digitality, decomposition, and glitch of the digital dump. There are
20 years between the two case study artworks discussed in this
chapter. That gap arguably includes the moment when a threshold of
society’s increasing digital ubiquity was crossed: the point where it became
imperative that the internet never be turned off (Fisher, 2009). We note
that digital preservation on the industrial scale undertaken by museums,
libraries and archives is far from carbon neutral and risks being subject to
the same capitalist and environmentally damaging excesses of hoarding
and storage as other corners of the art world. This tension, and others
raised through this research, indicate where current preservation and
conservation processes – enacted by humans or by machines – may
risk sealing unsustainable impermeable material and historical bounda-
ries around networked art practice, thus depriving its potential to act in
the world and form connections with new nodes in its always-on network.
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