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The Fabrication of Art and Beyond: Making and Inventing in Digital Culture |
Annet Dekker (London and Rotterdam)
Embracing authenticity in net art
In this presentation I will analyse how the characteristics of net art call for a reconsideration of authenticity and reproduction. Net art is built and distributed through a complex, intricate, and interrelated system of networks that presents an assemblage of art, technology, politics, and social relations. The notion of authenticity seems to counter this artform. However, in this presentation I focus on how net artists are advancing the question of the relevance of authenticity. While recognising the disadvantages and controversies around its importance, I argue that the notion of authenticity is still useful.
I argue for a broadening of authenticity by connecting it to 'alliances'. With the term 'authentic alliances' I emphasise the importance of seeing seemingly different and incommensurate parts as a whole. Although the most common used identifiers for authenticity (what the work consist of, who is the author and when is it made) do not necessarily give an indication of authenticity in net art, it is in the alliances inside and between these concepts that authenticity can be identified. This emphasises the layered nature of these artworks, and that different elements should not be identified as singular entities, but as influencing each other.
The concept of alliances requires a reconsideration of Nelson Goodman's distinction in his book Languages of Art. An Approach to a General Theory of Symbols (1976) between autographic and allographic, and Walter Benjamin's concept of the aura, as discussed in his article 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1936). Whereas according to Goodman, code (as notation) is allographic because it is executed, in its specific use, code is also autographic. Moreover, for artworks that deal with iteration, versioning and repetition, the binary division between original and copy makes little sense. Such artworks are instances in a line of other artworks. It is through the network that meaning and value are derived. Thus, reproduction can still have aura and originality is identified through copying. Again, authenticity cannot be found in singularity, nor should it be used to enforce a binary opposition, but it can be identified in the ongoing dialogue between the open-ended work and its multiple producers.
Traditional categories of author, human and machine agencies, the singularity of the object and the functionality of date explode in net art, but at the same time they open new ways of looking at authenticity, prioritising questions about ownership, authorship and copyright.
Biography:
Dr. Annet Dekker received her PhD on the conservation of net art in 2014 from Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London. Currently she is researcher Digital Preservation at TATE, London, Research Fellow at London South Bank University & The Photographers' Gallery, London, and tutor at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. She publishes widely on issues of digital art and preservation in international peer reviewed journals, books and magazines, and edited several publications, among others, Speculative Scenarios, or what will happen to digital art in the (near) future (Eindhoven/Rotterdam: Baltan/The New Institute, 2013); Research: Archiving the Digital (Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform, 2011); Archive 2020. Sustainable Archiving of Born Digital Cultural Content (Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform, 2010); and Walled Garden (Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform, 2009). Previously she worked as Web curator for SKOR (Foundation for Art and Public Domain, 2010-2012), was programme manager at Virtueel Platform (2008-2010), and head of exhibitions, education and artists-in-residence at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (1999-2008).