CHArt Twenty-First Annual Conference

Dew Harrison , Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland.
Digital Archiving as an Art Practice.

Archiving is a cultural activity involving the creation of vast electronic databases, which document and preserve art past and present for our education and heritage. However, this activity does not belong solely in the domain of information specialists, museum curators and librarians. Archiving can also be accepted as a form of art practice, and the 'digital' archive - as a curatorial project, an art-based collaboration, or a piece of Conceptual art. These new media art databases are being approached from a different direction and with a different intent than those of the major art galleries and national institutions. They are not constructed by trained archivists, but constitute 'archive' none-the-less.

Within my own practice I have directed web collaborations into one artwork, which is a form of curation but remains as practice. I have created a large database of online exhibitions, which live on dedicated servers and constitute an archive of online work produced at that time under an overarching theme. I am in the process of archiving the work of 400 or so artists produced in the same week-long media lab conditions over a period of 8 years into an electronic database, which could be understood as a curatorial project. I have created an artwork which could be seen as an archive of Duchamp's work, but isn't. It could be said that an artist's website is an archive of their work, but not their practice, not a piece in its own right. When does the database archive exist as an artwork in itself then?

In this paper I intend to trace the idea of the archive as a form of art practice, from Duchamp to Art & Language, in that it situates investments in text and wordplay, indexing and database, archiving and curation as both content and a medium for a Conceptual practice.

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