Dear Yasminers following this weeks discussion thread,

In all these fascinating posts and links, I am particularly drawn to Johannes Goebels perspective
on time based art and the problem they pose for art museums and archives requiring
conversion rather than being objects.
Referring back to Bronac Ferrans edited book Visualise (2013), details of the Visualise Programme
being accessible accessed at www.visualisecambridge.org and at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw8gpfmp6ps my particular interest is in what remains of a show
of time based art after the event outside of its description in a books such as this with its
attendant still images.
It seems to me that artists are providing solutions in advance as part of their own
documentation of their work and making those public as for instance in William Lathams work
posted on you tube and the materials and links provided in Liliane Lijns facebook web page as I
comment upon in the Caldaria review.
Beyond that, in short, it seems to me that the best solution might be to film these works as they
are experienced during exhibition for the record. Moreover, what with publications about the
works themselves and the artists intentions and the on-line opportunities if a slightly more
detached approach was taken to the issue permanence and instead the emphasis shifted to
seeing such art as part of an evolving tradition, cultural artefacts, most of which will be
ephemeral as Johannes Goebels so well puts it, this appears a reasonable way to look at things
considering the problems at hand.
Id like to add a few comments to perhaps extend the discussion with that agenda in mind and
considering that Visualise has a special relevance to current discussion in the Leonardo
community interested in cross-sector collaboration.
Bronacs book speaks directly to new arts policy shifts, particularly it seems to the long term
generalized impact of The Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration, Final Report,
2003, published by the British Government which made a policy conclusion that the
government and industry should promote university business interaction (see
www.lambertreview.org.uk). In this context, it is important to stress that Visualise was by no
means an isolated or unique happening in terms of public engagement with a city through the
arts. For instance, in Creation, Location, Creation in (Un)Common Ground: Creative
Encounters across Sectors and Disciplines (2007, pp. 96-103), edited by Cathy Brickwood,
Bronac Ferran, David Garcia and Tim Putnam, Ferran describes a predating experiment in
Bristol between The Watershed Media Centre and Hewlett-Packard that is very much in line
with the Cambridge project. There she emphasizes the irony of how through it had been often
thought that media culture would undermine community, in fact in publically funded arts
projects connecting academia and business, the opposite is occurring. And as Charles
Leadbetter, an authority on creativity and innovation also notes in that edited collection, the
21
st
Century is one of mass participation as so well exemplified with the sound boxes and sound
walks created by Duncan Speakman which constitute the final artists essay in Visualise.
On the problem of how one curates immateriality, also in (Un)common Ground, Beryl Grahams
Edits From a Crumb Discussion List Theme, Charlie Gere comments on how canonical art
history cannot incorporate new media art because the departments, the galleries and the
museums are structured according to the techno-cultural conditions of the times in which they
first emerged in the late 18
th
and early 19
th
century. (p. 216). This issue of how to archive an
event such as Visualise is elemental. Instead of a new media art history record, what we have
for the record is Ferrans edited collection with its excellent and highly telescopic discussions
about what transpired in Cambridge during 2012. As a text on a media art event, it not only
archives enough data and insight to give us a very solid idea of what Visualise was about and
why but also refers us to on-line web information pertaining to the show. It occurs to me that
case studies of such exhibitions and what remains at the end of the day in that particular
institution might be worth looking in addition to the suggestions made in previously in this
discussion list.
In such highly enabled participatory times, I find it interesting to recall that Gere prefaced the
above insight with the fundamentally important point raised by Jacques Derrida as follows: the
technical structure of the [. . . ] archive also determines the structure of the archivable content
even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. This archivization
produces as much as it records the event and what is no longer archived in the same way is
no longer lived in the same way (p. 216). These problems of ruptures in art history and a lack
of documentation raises a central issue which needs to be met in the future and it seems this
discussion is moving in that direction and with the hindsight of the considerable experience
that has fortunately come to our collective light through this discussion thread.
The problem identified by Graham and others is that the 17
th
Century discursive and
institutional practices which still inform mainstream art history excluding new media art, or
whatever term one wants to use (if indeed any collective term is needed outside of time based
art) are unable to accommodate new media art for this is all about change and evolution,
explicitly so. As a photograph by way of illustration can give us little appreciation for the kind of
work William Latham does as shown at Visualise, the you tube film he has posted is critical. The
work he does today with form synth rules and protein structures at Imperial College expands
core ideas he was working on while a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing in the 1960s
when he was creating spiral balsa wood sculptures. But the new work requires new exhibition
platforms and records. So in brief, the elemental problem is how to record, archive and make
accessible this type of art or for that matter that of Liliane Lijn, Jamie Allens nine screen audio
visual installation and Eduardo Kavs work also show there.
My question to this discussion is this: Does not Bronac Ferrans edited text, as the Visualise
projects legacy in the most condensed and integrated available form, call out for a new form of
book, perhaps some form of e-book in which each image is linked to a multi-media archive in
which we can experience the multi-dimensional nature of the art albeit without the interactivity
that could be additionally provided by film. That is the essential problem that keeps coming to
my mind. In essence, as the technological form of traditional textual representation is bound to
the old art history, time based arts might well require a whole new order of publication
platform and that form could compromise a new form of archive and open access
museumification.
Finally, I note a relevant paper being presented this week at the conference on Cloud and
Molecular Aesthetics in Istanbul by Simone Mandl and Petra Gemeinboeck titled The
resonance of the Document: Productive Archival Methodologies in the Experimental Arts in
the program available at http://ocradst.org/cloudmolecularaesthetics/program/ and of-course
there is Simone Osthoffs excellent Archive Fever.