Object and Identity in a Digital Age
CHArt 25th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Object and Identity in a Digital Age
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Wayne Clements, Chelsea College of Art and Design
Art and Software Entropy
At a recent conference there was discussion of the preservation of new media art. One of the panellists, an esteemed curator of new media at an important national museum in Scandinavia, spoke about conservation and the need to preserve old computers and programs and the difficulties of achieving this. Nevertheless, he believed the fundamental project was viable. Someone proposed that an obstacle to preservation was the artist’s carelessness, and this view was shared by several of the panellists. I replied that much Internet artwork uses events and content from remote websites over which the artist and the artwork have no control. This artwork is inherently unstable and temporary. It is intended to be so, and this is part of its unique quality. It cannot be preserved. (This is true, whatever hope might be placed in the success of documentation.) The museum curator replied I had decided, ‘to choose to break cultural laws’. It seemed that I had little reason to complain – which I was not: I intended merely to point out that not everything is bound for the museum. There is the imbrication of curatorship and surveillance: the former with its documentation, display, and preservation; the latter, with its observation, monitoring, and evidential processes. These have something shared, and this is a programme of the creation and maintenance of forms of order. This order, in the case of curatorship, is not merely the continuance of the integrity of physical structures. It is also the creation and imposition of cultural order. The point perhaps that the museum curator had implied. However, the gun that is pointed at your own head may occasionally be turned on those that point it at you. In so doing, it is credible that curatorship should embrace the fugitive and the unstable. A counter-order, if you like. For software to engage with what is happening now, it needs to be maintained, more urgently perhaps than it needs to be preserved. Databases require updating, page searches need to be checked: when you make a machine, you create a machine minder.(This paper will explore the preservation of software based art, in contrast, particularly, to that of older computers or machinery dating from the days of mainframe computing).
This paper is based on: Clements, W. (2008) Surveillance and The Art of Software Maintenance: Remarks on logo_wiki, in ‘Observatori 2008. After the Future’. Valencia, Observatori.com.Wayne Clements is a visual artist and a writer. His artworks have been shown in many festivals and exhibitions of electronic art. un_wiki received the Award of Distinction, Net Vision, Prix Ars Electronica (2006), and appeared in Connecting Worlds, ICC Gallery Tokyo (2006), in a specially commissioned Japanese language version. His artworks have been exhibited recently in Madrid, Barcelona, and Athens; notably also in Valencia where logo_wiki was part of the curated presentation antisocial notworking.
He completed a practice-based Ph.D. in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design (2005) which investigated the relationship between art and computers. Wayne now works at Chelsea as a Research Fellow. His website is www.in-vacua.com.