Dear Yasminers following this week’s discussion thread,

In all these fascinating posts and links, I am particularly drawn to Johannes Goebel’s perspective on “time based art” and the problem they pose for art museums and archives requiring conversion rather than being objects.

Referring back to Bronac Ferran’s edited book Visualise (2013), details of the Visualise Programme being accessible accessed at www.visualisecambridge.org and at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw8gpfmp6ps my particular interest is in what remains of a show of time based art after the event outside of its description in a books such as this with its attendant still images.

It seems to me that artists are providing solutions in advance as part of their own documentation of their work and making those public as for instance in William Latham’s work posted on you tube and the materials and links provided in Liliane Lijn’s facebook web page as I comment upon in the Caldaria review.

Beyond that, in short, it seems to me that the best solution might be to film these works as they are experienced during exhibition for the record. Moreover, what with publications about the works themselves and the artists’ intentions and the on-line opportunities if a slightly more detached approach was taken to the issue permanence and instead the emphasis shifted to seeing such art as part of an evolving tradition, cultural artefacts, most of which will be ephemeral as Johannes Goebel’s so well puts it, this appears a reasonable way to look at things considering the problems at hand.

I’d like to add a few comments to perhaps extend the discussion with that agenda in mind and considering that Visualise has a special relevance to current discussion in the Leonardo community interested in cross-sector collaboration.

Bronac’s book speaks directly to new arts policy shifts, particularly it seems to the long term generalized impact of The Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration, Final Report, 2003, published by the British Government which made a policy conclusion that the government and industry should promote university business interaction (see www.lambertreview.org.uk). In this context, it is important to stress that Visualise was by no means an isolated or unique happening in terms of public engagement with a city through the arts. For instance, in “Creation, Location, Creation” in (Un)Common Ground: Creative Encounters across Sectors and Disciplines” (2007, pp. 96-103), edited by Cathy Brickwood, Bronac Ferran, David Garcia and Tim Putnam, Ferran describes a predating experiment in Bristol between The Watershed Media Centre and Hewlett-Packard that is very much in line with the Cambridge project. There she emphasizes the irony of how through it had been often thought that media culture would undermine community, in fact in publically funded arts

projects connecting academia and business, the opposite is occurring. And as Charles Leadbetter, an authority on creativity and innovation also notes in that edited collection, the 21st Century is one of mass participation as so well exemplified with the sound boxes and sound walks created by Duncan Speakman which constitute the final artists’ essay in Visualise.

On the problem of how one curates immateriality, also in (Un)common Ground, Beryl Graham’s “Edits From a Crumb Discussion List Theme,” Charlie Gere comments on how canonical art history cannot incorporate new media art because the departments, the galleries and the museums are “structured according to the techno-cultural conditions of the times in which they first emerged in the late 18th and early 19th century.” (p. 216). This issue of how to archive an event such as Visualise is elemental. Instead of a new media art history record, what we have for the record is Ferran’s edited collection with its excellent and highly telescopic discussions about what transpired in Cambridge during 2012. As a text on a media art event, it not only archives enough data and insight to give us a very solid idea of what Visualise was about and why but also refers us to on-line web information pertaining to the show. It occurs to me that case studies of such exhibitions and what remains at the end of the day in that particular institution might be worth looking in addition to the suggestions made in previously in this discussion list.

In such highly enabled participatory times, I find it interesting to recall that Gere prefaced the above insight with the fundamentally important point raised by Jacques Derrida as follows: “the technical structure of the [. . . ] archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. This archivization produces as much as it records the event” and “what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way” (p. 216). These problems of ruptures in art history and a lack of documentation raises a central issue which needs to be met in the future and it seems this discussion is moving in that direction and with the hindsight of the considerable experience that has fortunately come to our collective light through this discussion thread.

The problem identified by Graham and others is that the 17th Century discursive and institutional practices which still inform mainstream art history excluding new media art, or whatever term one wants to use (if indeed any collective term is needed outside of “time based art”) are unable to accommodate new media art for this is all about change and evolution, explicitly so. As a photograph by way of illustration can give us little appreciation for the kind of work William Latham does as shown at Visualise, the you tube film he has posted is critical. The work he does today with form synth rules and protein structures at Imperial College expands core ideas he was working on while a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing in the 1960’s when he was creating spiral balsa wood sculptures. But the new work requires new exhibition platforms and records. So in brief, the elemental problem is how to record, archive and make

accessible this type of art or for that matter that of Liliane Lijn, Jamie Allen’s nine screen audio visual installation and Eduardo Kav’s work also show there.

My question to this discussion is this: Does not Bronac Ferran’s edited text, as the Visualise project’s legacy in the most condensed and integrated available form, call out for a new form of book, perhaps some form of e-book in which each image is linked to a multi-media archive in which we can experience the multi-dimensional nature of the art albeit without the interactivity – that could be additionally provided by film. That is the essential problem that keeps coming to my mind. In essence, as the technological form of traditional textual representation is bound to the old art history, time based arts might well require a whole new order of publication platform and that form could compromise a new form of archive and open access museumification.

Finally, I note a relevant paper being presented this week at the conference on Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics in Istanbul by Simone Mandl and Petra Gemeinboeck titled “The resonance of the Document: Productive Archival Methodologies in the Experimental Arts” in the program available at http://ocradst.org/cloudmolecularaesthetics/program/ and of-course there is Simone Osthoff’s excellent Archive Fever.