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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Sarah de Rijcke, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Databasing the arts. The enactment of art objects in networked infrastructures
Digital representations of art objects increasingly circulate in distributed, networked contexts. As part of a larger project on visual knowing around databases of images on the web, the current paper discusses preliminary results from fieldwork at the Rijksakademie for the visual arts (Amsterdam, the Netherlands). It addresses the production, handling, and dissemination of visual images of art objects in a setting where new, networked technologies blend with existing documentation practices. Conceptually, the paper draws on media theory and visual anthropology (Bolter & Grusin, 2000; Edwards & Hart, 2004; Elkins, 2008; Thurtle & Mitchell, 2003; Pink, 2007), and science and technology studies (Beaulieu, 2001; de Rijcke, 2008; Mol, 2002; van Dijk, 2005). Taken together, these approaches enable an analysis of mediation processes, and of the performative dynamics involved in manipulating and circulating images.
The Rijksakademie for the visual arts describes itself as a platform for art production, as a research centre, and as an international meeting place for artists. It houses a residency for 50 artists from all over the world. During their stay, resident artists document their work (process). After they have left, they continue to update their documentation with information about exhibitions, projects, and publications. In the current paper, we analyze how artists and employees invest themselves in these practices of representation and documentation. We are especially interested in the entanglement of images and art works with the institute’s networked image database. Using recent STS literature on relational ontology (Marres, 2008; Mol, 2002; Stirling, 2008), we argue that these entities are best understood as temporary outcomes of inter-related modes of engagement. In addition, we focus on how the visual documentation relates to the complex experience of making/seeing art objects. When and how are art works recognized as such, do they get documented, databased? What purposes does the database have for different users/producers (i.e. resident artists, employees, visitors, curators, researchers)? How does the networked context in which the images function as digital representations, shape the status of art objects themselves? Is this status fixed or fluid? And how do these documentation practices relate to other electronic settings and networks in which the images might circulate (artist’s website, Flickr, sites galleries, etc.)? Our ethnographic study of interactions with the Rijksakademie database provides insight into the ways in which the images are produced, treated, and valued as things that can be acted upon in mediated, distributed contexts.
Together with Anne Beaulieu, Sarah de Rijcke is currently working on a project called Network Realism. Making Knowledge from Images in Digital Infrastructures. Previous research focused on practices of observation and visualization in neuroscience (University of Groningen, the Netherlands). She was a pre-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in 2007.