Geoff Cox has a research interest in software studies and contemporary aesthetics. He is Associate Professor and co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, also Visiting Associate Professor at Aarhus University working the research project The Contemporary Condition. He co-runs a yearly workshop/publication in collaboration with transmediale festival in Berlin since 2012, is co-editor of the associated open access online journal APRJA. He is also co-editor of the open-access DATA browser book series published by Open Humanities Press and the co-author of Speaking Code: coding as aesthetic and political expression (MIT Press 2013). See Geoff’s full bio here:

Conceived by Stuart Brisley, Geoff Cox and Adrian Ward, The Museum of Ordure has since 2001 developed a collection reflecting its curator Rosse Yael Sirb’s obsession with ‘dirt: dung: excrement: anything unclean‘.

The relevance of The Museum of Ordure to our research as a preservation challenge is clear from The Museum’s ‘Preservation Policy‘ which explains:

Everything that is represented in the Museum of Ordure is subject to the vagaries of an uncontrolled internal process which slowly deforms and disables all information held in the museum. This is comparable to the decaying processes which affect all artifacts in museums, regardless of all attempts at preservation: the retouching, repainting, cleaning, etc, which are incorporated risks to the purity of artifacts when first acquired by museums. Even ‘successful’ renovations are subject to periodic changes resulting from shifts in conservation policies. Eventually (and in accordance with the fallibility of memory) artifacts are institutionally, progressively, determinedly and inadvertently altered by acts of conservation (sometimes unintentional acts of institutional vandalism) until they cease to be recognisable as the objects first acquired. Of course in both cases – in the virtual environment and in the material world – the processes of generation, decay, and entropy are paramount. Museums are by this definition charged with achieving the impossible.

 

The work is a curatorial project, archive, and auto-destructive artwork, a liminal museum by artists circumventing live and mediated presence and absence, temporally embedded with a durational character much like the performance work of Brisley himself. We’re very pleased that Geoff Cox will present the project at the workshop, which we will then adopt as a case study in the breakout sessions.