After framings by Annet Dekker on ‘Networks of care’ for conservation of net art’ and Anisa Hawes detailing Rhizome’s web archiving tool Conifer, case studies followed on from the opening Q&A. Each case was discussed for twenty minutes, the first being the Museum of Ordure presented by Geoff Cox and the second being 6 Months Without presented by Nastja Säde Rönkkö.

 

Important points from the framing presentations, which were especially pertinent to the following case studies included:

• Distinctions between conservation, preservation and restoration.
• Fragments of documentation, and the questions of how fragments of documentation come together. Whether such fragments need to come together. The purpose of aligning these fragments – and the desire to present a work in its ‘original’, and if an authentic original can ever exist.
• The network as part of a work, the network’s agency.
• Provenance as linear in art historical frameworks, and how this linear path may or may not be possible for all works and mediums.
• Embedded duration, perceptions of permanence.
• The invisible hands of carers.

Case Study 1: The Museum of Ordure, Geoff Cox

 

Geoff Cox presented a case study on the Museum of Ordure, which he founded in 2001 alongside Stuart Brisley and Adrian Ward. Cox began his presentation by introducing the Museum’s mission:

 

 

 

This mission is explored via the Museum of Ordure’s website, questioning the parameters of ordure and itself reflecting the internet as a repository for rubbish. The website, modelled upon the Tate’s, acts as a space to display both public submissions of works as well as documentation of works initiated by the Museum, curated now from dump.ordure.org.

 

The Museum of Ordure’s Preservation Policy (2004) situates the works represented by the museum alongside its preservation policy:

“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.”

 

In discussing the Museum of Ordure, Cox highlighted several works. Presented as pieces that exist within blurry, complex relations, and as collaborative pieces for which several individuals or institutions may act as nodes. For instance, Stuart Brisley’s 10 days, 1973, an example of dematerialised art practice that resists the commodity of art and its market. This work reflects the resistance of net art and the body as a computational machine.

 

 

 

Also examined was Adrian Ward’s work, Dust, 2004, which was created via the viewing and subsequent corruption of the image – now, perhaps appropriately, only available in part via the way back machine. This creation is a process of detritus, the disappearance and movement of pixels out of order or sight, creating evolving compositions. Just as excrement is voided from the body, so does memory lapse. The act of forgetting is an important part of memory. How do we document incompleteness, and how does an annotated archive reflect this instance?

Screenshot from Geoff Cox Presentation, ISEA 2020, 10.17.2020

Screenshot from Geoff Cox Presentation, ISEA 2020, 10.17.2020

 

In recapping the conceptual and ontological issues facing preservation and its translation into an archive, Cox proposed the final question to the group: can a network of the willing act as agents of unforgetting toward a new reality?

 

Case Study 2, 6 Months Without, Nastja Säde Rönkkö

Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s 6 Months Without, was a performance in which the artist lives disconnected from the internet for six months. The 6 months ‘out of office’ became a correspondence project, documenting a life in London without the reliance of the net.

On her website, the artist summarises, “For six months, I lived entirely without the Internet. Everything, from personal to professional communication, navigating a city, socializing and working happened offline. At the heart of the project was a space at Somerset House Studios, London where I conducted workshops and seminars. People could reach me by letter writing, phone calls or visiting my studio.” – Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s, https://nastjaronkko.com/project/6-months-without/

Screenshot from https://nastjaronkko.com/project/6-months-without/

This performance was produced by Somerset House Studios, Finnish Institute London and Wysing Arts Centre, UK, and supported by The Finnish Cultural Foundation and The Kordelin Foundation. 6 Months Without was featured in the group show 24/7: A Wake-Up Call for our Non-Stop World, which ran from October 2019 – February 2020. https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/247

In this case study presentation, Nastja Säde Rönkkö spoke of her daily experience, the newspapers and the unforeseen amount of correspondence which has become an identifiable product of this performance. Available on the artist’s website, are two video works exploring the

performative experience of 6 Months Without as well as the correspondence, some of which the artist reads through the video narration and was displayed in the subsequent 24/7 exhibition.

Nastja Säde Rönkkö discussed her work from a conceptual point through to the lived performance process and to the point of reflecting back on the performance and the products of the work. This case study firstly set out rules of the performance, which went beyond the notion of simply disconnecting internet devices, but reached to using cash over contactless cards, and when lost avoiding the assistance of google maps. Relying upon a cash economy as a rule further contributed to the artist being off the grid, untraceable.

Screenshot from https://nastjaronkko.com/project/6-months-without/

Screenshot from https://nastjaronkko.com/project/6-months-without/

Screenshot from https://nastjaronkko.com/project/6-months-without/

These conceptual rules and considerations aligned with the activities undertaken by the artists throughout the duration of this performance, such as the books read and the seminars coordinated by the artist. Such seminars included the topics which related to her own performative actions such as investigating the internet as a resource, as a commodity and as a privilege. Three seminars at the Somerset House, where her studio was based for these 6 months, included feminist alternatives for contemporary digital culture, the redefinition of the functioning of technology outside of stringent Western rational logic and knowledge, and the tangible fears and uncertain future of our planet and its inhabitants in light of co-dependence as a vital tool to nurture and thrive.

Links to 6 Months Without seminars:

https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/without-you-im-nothing-trilogy

https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/without-you-im-nothing-middle-age-we-should-know-better

https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/without-you-im-nothing-end-survival-guide-post-apocalyptic-child

 

Discussion of Case Study 2, 6 Months Without, Nastja Säde Rönkkö 

 

Forming two breakout groups for the case study discussions, the group discussing Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s 6 Months Without discussed the work, its products and documentation and in turn posed many further questions.

 

In having the artist present, discussions about participatory action, such as the attendance of seminars, provided further insight into aspects and networks within the project. Alongside the artist being present, Sarah Cook as curator of the Somerset 24/7 exhibition was able to discuss the inclusion of the 6 Months Without performance, as well as its expanded boundaries from performance to exhibition, and interestingly exhibition evaluation, reviews, and audience images and interaction with the work. This interaction brought up questions about performance interaction and exhibition interaction, and the reach of that engagement, be it through the exchange of physical letters or social media documentation of exhibition presence. How a performance investigating a life without the web, has itself resulted in digital records and web residue, videos, automated emails, interviews and a larger audience reach – which perhaps is yet to be fully realised or collated, was also discussed.

 

In linking the Museum of Ordure and 6 Months Without, the role of forgetting and the decision of omittance, the absence of documentation or degradation of materials and its influence over value was discussed. Again as both case studies included other factors, actors, agents, non-human entities which were involved in submitting files or letters, we questioned if we can think about these others as part of a (potential) network of care around the work or performance. This poses questions of control, as the more diffused the network of preservation, the harder to control the ownership of it as a discrete object. We questioned what would happen if the kind of fragmentation and obsolescence that are a ‘natural’ part of the internet structure  were reflected in the preservation of net art or performance and what would then be lost or gained?

 

This breakout opened with the question of how to define the boundary edges of an artwork. The group determined that a ‘start’ date may correlate to the artist’s initial conception of the performance, expanding on to activities such as research, contextual notes, discussion, correspondence and funding applications. The ‘end’ date was more difficult to determine, and we questioned if participatory works can ever have a hard end date in part due to an audience’s continued engagement with a work, which can often not be anticipated or contained. This edge of a performance was also discussed in relation to the engagement of researchers, exhibition, re-performance / re-activism.

 

Exhibition was discussed as a way to restore a work to the canon of art history, and a tactic of restoration and preservation. Conservators acting as producers and managers of controlled change over the life of an artwork. In seeing conservation as an iterative process, a form for production and re-production, the conservator is again positioned as active caretakers within the network of care and life of the artwork. The network and set of relations, especially technology which allows for relations to be observed or recorded were discussed in part as part of the work as well as acting agents and authors of work.

 

Following the boundaries of a work, we discussed how an artist’s anticipation of a performance work and in turn its documentation may influence its later preservation. In discussing what considerations must be made for the produced works, materials, documentation and contexts of a work, it was noted that with an increased amount of produced works comes an increased need for considerations of preservation. For instance, 6 Months Without produced a great deal of work, including photographs, films, letters, diaries, seminars, as well as its contextual materials including exhibition materials and artist interviews. As the produced materials are in varied mediums and conditions, so preservation would need to consider each. Conceptual notions and experiences, such as the artist’s experience of deprivation, was questioned in relation to its translation in an archive.

 

These considerations of documentation and preservation intersect with our investigations of networks of care. Within these networks of care, where do the responsibilities of funding, documentation support or preservation fall? How are these responsibilities assigned? Are the networks of care we speak about always a retrospective consideration? How can we consider and organise networks of care to be included within or considered throughout the duration of a work or performance? How can we map networks and agency within works, documenting relationships and encoding networks as data? How do we work with or obtain the resources necessary to include this network throughout a project’s duration? The discussion around resources and funding, which largely fall upon the artist, was met with calls for further funding and resources which may allow a work to make considerations for documentation and preservation, particularly early on in the work’s life.

 

In exploring the edges of a work and its network of care, the discussion turned to considerations of documenting a performance score. Much like determining the boundary of a work, we questioned what information makes up the score and whether it is necessary to record for future research, re-performance / re-activism? How can this documentation reflect the information needed to understand an artist’s intention and context, and the why and how to recreate a piece?  Where does the curatorial ‘why’ fall into documentation and the archive?

 

We left the discussion still digesting Annet’s first question: What does it take to recognise, or to create, a network of care: who, what is involved, what are (potential) criteria, and how to ensure accountability over time?