Museums of Losses for Clouds of Oblivion

Abstract

This paper describes the overdose situation of documentary production fostered by social networks and its impact on the traditional forms of storage and the contemporary memory culture. It situates the specificity of net art in its connection to dynamic and systemic environments of flow, over which there is no control, implying new conservation parameters and investigates the particular aesthetics. It problematizes the political in-stances that have turned the Internet into a surveillance environment, denying access to older sites and affecting the preservation of online art. In the end, it presents how we are working with Museum of Contempo-rary Art of the University of Sao Paulo (MAC-USP), in the development of a methodology to deal with net art pieces in the museological universe. The discussion is based on the case of The Book after the Book website (1999), which required a series of updates and reprogramming of codes in the process of migration to the museum collection. Based on this experi-ence, we suggest a reflection about net art museums as museums of the unfinished, unrepaired and unrecovered. This strategy may allow dealing with irreversible losses, without counting on the following process of dis-appearance of the artworks.