2024 - # 14 Doing Documentation

Eds.: Annet Dekker & Gabriella Giannachi, Editorial staff: Franz Anton Cramer, Annet Dekker, Gabriella Giannachi, Barbara Büscher, René Damm

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12

Against Dissociation. Documentation as the Object of Care
Wielocha, Aga (2024) , S. 1-9
Often durational, process or/and concept-based, transient and participatory, contemporary art understood as a paradigm of artistic practice calls for new approaches to the institutional collecting and all related practices including conservation. The intangible agents of contemporary artwork often exist as, and thus might be transmitted only through various kinds of documents. The resulting documentation does not only contain information about artwork’s provenance, history, meanings and character but it hosts an important part of the artwork itself. As decisions about the future presentations and hence interpretations of artworks are made based on documentation, the latter not only shapes but also determines the future of contemporary artworks.
Integrating Change Through Documentation of Experience for Immersive Media
arden, sasha (2024) , S. 1-8
Immersive media (IM) is a class of technologies that aim to create an immersive environment for viewers, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR or XR), and 360° or panoramic projection installations. The preservation of immersive media is a growing field of research and practice, whether for historical reference of these technologies, or for re-exhibition of artistic/creative works. IM benefits from existing strategies developed for preservation of complex digital and physical media such as software-based art and installation artworks, but the unique characteristics of IM lead to unique preservation needs. Exploring how these needs may be met through expanded documentation and cataloging practices prompts reflection on how such changes could set larger institutional shifts into motion.
What Do Videogames Want? Preserving, Playing and not Playing Digital Games and Gameplay (Introduction)
Newman, James (2024) , S. 1-4
Videogames are, without doubt, disappearing and the continued – and accelerating – loss of this material denies future generations access to their cultural heritage and robs the next generation of developers historical reference material to draw on. As Henry Lowood [2009] pointed out more than a decade ago, we need to take action “before it’s too late”. The video-paper offers an overview and critique of existing approaches and revisits some of the methodological and conceptual presuppositions that underpin game preservation and even the academic discipline of game studies as a whole. Returning to first principles, the paper asks “What Do Videogames Want?”.
A Plant’s View. Documenting Presence in Olafur Eliasson’s “Your uncertain archive”
Eriksson, Olivia (2024) , S. 1-12
This article examines how presence and participation in contemporary installation art is reconfigured in online documentation. Considering documentation as an essential component of the art experience, it discusses its ramifications from an artistic as well as an institutional perspective. Using internationally renowned installation artist Olafur Eliasson as example, the article focuses on the documentation of his large-scale installation works in the ongoing art project “Your Uncertain Archive” (https://olafureliasson.net/uncertain). This online archive gathers Eliasson’s artistic output in one (virtual) place, using various techniques to capture and expand on the original on-site art experience. Special attention is devoted to the video documentation of the recent exhibition Life (Fondation Beyeler, 2021), which uses subjective shots, masking and optical filters in order to make the claims of the exhibition more accessible to online audiences.
Documenting for Present Use. The Interplay of Documentation and Human Expertise in the Exhibition of Interactive Digital Installations
Juste, Carlijn (2024) , S. 1-14
This article is interested in the documentation necessary for exhibiting interactive, digital installations, how it is created and how it influences the way an artwork is deployed in an exhibition. Digital artworks can be extremely difficult to install. They require specific knowledge, variable materials and technological equipment. Moreover, digital artworks can be ephemeral and subject to change. Documenting digital art is not only important for preserving and restoring works for the future but also for installing digital artworks in the present. Documentation functions as a set of guidelines for limiting errors and misinterpretations. Therefore, documentation impacts the actualisation of each artwork by indicating which elements are needed and how they should be connected. By providing instructions regarding how to install an artwork, documentation also allows the artist or the collecting institution to exercise authority over an artwork.
Doing Documentation. Editorial
Dekker, Annet; Giannachi, Gabriella (2024) , S. 1-4
Documentation is a burgeoning field that has been explored by researchers in a range of disciplines and practices, including performance, theatre, film, music, opera, digital and new media arts, archival and museum studies, conservation, curation, and human computer interaction. Methods have varied significantly across these fields, though the increased popularity of performative and digital practices has tended to bring disciplinary approaches closer together. More and more commonly do artists, researchers, and cultural organisations document not only the reception or user experiences of an artwork, but also its creation (even retrospectively) and iterative development over time, offering detail about a given artwork’s context, convergence, and even deterioration. Here, we chose to bring together a series of researchers from different disciplines spanning music, conservation, curation, film, festivals, video games, digital art, and installation art to map the very latest trends in their respective fields which they chose to discuss through a series of case studies focussing on specific museums, artworks, festivals and conservation practices.
A Matter of Sources
Akkermann, Miriam (2024) , S. 1-7
Electroacoustic music and computer music come along with a vast variety of sources ranging from traditional score to complex digital performance set-ups. Approaches of documentation and archiving yet have not only to deal with the challenge of the rapid technological developments that cause the urge of updates in order to provide access to the content, the constant need of transfer also raises basic historical questions such as e.g. what to consider and thus save as historical testimonies of a musical works and its performances and how to include this instability of the sources within the embedded information. In my contribution, I will reflect on the mutual influence of technological challenges, the state of source material, approaches to documenting and archiving, and what this can mean for establishing new performances of these musical works. Hereby, I am especially interested in a structural reflection on the relationships between these processes and the resulting sources, as well as the question what this can mean for the (future and past) appearance of a musical work.
Documents of a Multi-screen Installation and Archival Films. Péter Forgács’ “Looming Fire”
Yen, Wang-Yun (2024) , S. 1-14
This essay is initially motivated by the need to describe my research process on Péter Forgács’s Looming Fire, a multi-screen installation exhibited at Eye Filmmuseum in 2013. The artwork, based on Eye’s colonial film collection, seems a difficult object in moving image studies: audiovisual components inaccessible to the public, exhibition setup dissimilar from the neutralized movie theater, as well as the scarcity of detailed written reviews. The aim of the essay is thus to inquire what remains after this film-related exhibition: How to conceive an alternative analytical approach when films or videos are no longer autonomous, but part and parcel of an installation in the museum? Moreover, what insight can we gain on found footage filmmaking from a project at the same time artistic and museal?
Tracing the Cultural Value of Photographic Documentation in, and beyond, the Museum
Dekker, Annet; Sluis, Katrina; Tedone, Gaia (2024) , S. 1-12
In order to trace the shifting cultural value(s) of photographic documentation, in this paper we present selected outcomes of a series of workshops hosted by The Photographers’ Gallery, London (TPG),which developed around the question: How can institutions engage with this expanded field of visual documentation, and what are the implications for art history and cultural memory? In the paper we consider the ways in which documentation is diffused, operationalized and valorized by different agents in contemporary visual culture.
Historicising Media Arts. The Role of Documentation and Records of Festivals
Palankasova, Bilyana; Cook, Sarah (2024) , S. 1-10
In this text, we consider the documentation of festivals of media arts and the relationship between an expanded sense of documentation and the writing of art histories against traditional institutional contexts and discourses. The essay starts by drawing the context in which festivals of media arts are considered historically, their activities, and how they relationship to media arts informs their position in relation to institutional discourses. Secondly, the text maps out the kinds of records of festivals that exist, considering private and public and internal and external documents which serve as artefacts of exhibitions and programmes. Thirdly, it considers how we might value and historicise media arts prior to their entry into institutional space.
Inhaltsverzeichnis Ausgabe 14
ohne Autor (2024) , S. 0-0
Looking for Elizabeth Pavlik. Documenting Entropy
Tane, Maria (2024) , S. 1-8
Reviewing Tarrah Krajnak’s exhibition at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, I observe how for Krajnak, distorting Ansel Adams’ photography is an act of appreciation as much as it is an act of questioning the process of archiving and preserving his art. Rather than trying to preserve the intentions or essence of the art, Krajnak’s series challenges the very idea of an essential, immutable spirit that belongs to an artwork, opting instead to document how interacting with art dissolves the possibility of its fixed condition and involves an act of co-making. Moreover, as I will show, by bringing her videos into circulation on social media such as Instagram her work enhances the performativity of documentation through the audience’s (potential) engagement, but it also destabilizes documentation as a window into the past and hints toward how preservation has instability built into it.

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