The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
CHArt 27th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
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Monika Kin Gagnon
Communicating the Intermedia Archive: The Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Collection
With the advent of media digitization, previously inaccessible conventional and media archives now proliferate in all their ubiquity, now available to researchers, but also more publicly through social media such as YouTube and Vimeo, as well as through online archival sites including UbuWeb, and scholarly consortiums such as the Online Archive of California. This presentation will take as its case example, the online archive of Korean American conceptual artist, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose archival collection is currently housed at the Berkeley Art Museum archive, University of California, and was part of an initial prototyping of conceptual art archives online by the Online Archive of California (Lewallen, Rinehart).
This investigation is situated within the current surge of scholarly interest in archives and media archives in relation to digitization (Chun, Prelinger, Rinehart, Van Dijck,), which has created a propitious framework to explore the ontologies of the archive and alternative modes of communicating and disseminating conventional and media-based archives. Digital and online archives introduce complex issues concerning the very nature of archives as their ontology of authenticity and originality comes under challenge, and volumes of digital data exponentially increase their very content (Van Dijck). Epistemological questions concerning archival access, circulation of documents, and copyright ownership also emerge, as do challenges concerning their storage (Hand). As Richard Rinehart has remarked, Cha’s archive proposes unique challenges, as her conceptual approach to intermedia art-making requires contextualization and inter-relations between objects to be productively drawn. The tensions between archival protocols and conventions (classification and naming, for instance), and non-specialized viewer access, precipitously and productively encounter each other in the online archive. Drawing on specific examples from Cha’s conceptual work and her online archive, this paper will explore the various advantages and consequences of online archives and what this offers for developing creative approaches to effectively communicating archives.