BETWEEN
REAL AND IDEAL: DOCUMENTING MEDIA ART
Caitlin Jones, #3 223 St Marks Ave., Brooklyn,
New York. 11238. USA. E-mail: <caitlin.jones@gmail.com>.
Lizzie Muller, Creativity and Cognition
Studios, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007,
Australia. E-mail:
Abstract
This paper describes a new approach to
documenting media art which seeks to place in dialogue the artist’s intentions
and the audience’s experience. It explicitly highlights the productive tension
between the ideal, conceptual existence of the work, and its actual
manifestation through different iterations and exhibitions in the real world.
The paper describes how the approach was developed collaboratively during the
production of a documentary collection for the artwork Giver of Names, by David Rokeby. It outlines the key features of
the approach including artist’s interview, audience interviews and data
structure.
Introduction
Art historians, conservators and curators all
look to documentation to support their research and their ability to preserve
artworks, maintain collections, and mount exhibitions. Media artworks rarely exist as static,
discrete and unique objects, but rather as collections of components, hardware
and software, which together create time and process based experiences. Such works
may change radically depending on the contextual conditions of their staging.
Even the material components of such works are subject to rapid change due to
technological obsolescence. Documentation is, therefore, increasingly important
in media art, as it provides a continuing source of knowledge as to how a
particular work manifests over time.
Traditional models of documentation are not
well adapted to such works. Recent attempts to develop new models for
documenting media art offer flexible paradigms which focus on the processes of
creation and exhibition, rather than on static objects [1, 2]. However, there
is still an important gap around the documentation of the audience’s experience
of the work, and ways to integrate experiential documentation with other
information [2]. In late 2007 we were awarded research residencies at the
Daniel Langlois Foundation Centre for Research & Documentation to explore
ways of documenting media art. The result was a case-study documentary
collection for the artwork Giver of Names
(19912004), by David Rokeby. Through the creation of this case-study we
have developed a promising new approach which draws together the artist’s
intentions for the work and the audience’s experience. The approach creates a
dialogue between the ideal, conceptual existence
of the work and its actual manifestation through different iterations and
exhibitions in the real world.
David
Rokeby’s Giver of Names David
Rokeby is an artist who has written extensively about his work, particularly on
his iterative production methods and the importance of audience experience. He
is highly reflective and articulate about his process and intent. Giver of Names is an interactive piece
which requires considerable participation from the audience in order to be
activated. It has a long exhibition history and has evolved through many
iterations. Significantly, however, Rokeby suggests that the work has reached
its “sweet spot,” [3] where few changes are envisaged in the future. This
creates an excellent opportunity to
review the work’s history and create a record of its existence at this moment
in time. The documentary collection for Giver
of Names, which is the basis of this article, can be accessed on the
website of the Daniel Langlois Foundation [3].
Between
Real and Ideal
At the beginning of this collaborative project
we reflected on the relationship between our two different research
perspectives. Jones’ approach, based on the tools of the Variable Media
Network, focused on the artist's intentions as a means to illuminate
conservation considerations. The key principle of this approach is to record
information about the essence (or “kernel”) of an artwork, independent of the
media in which it manifests. It privileges the relationship between the
conceptual aspects of the work (the ideas behind the artist’s intentions) and
technical aspects of the work (encompassing the decisions the artist has made
in regards to the physical components, software, installation and environmental
factors of the work). Muller’s approach focused on the experiential aspects of
the work, based on how the artwork "occurs" for audience members in
the real world. Her research emphasizes the argument that media artworks
(particularly interactive installations) exist primarily in human experience,
rather than as discrete objects. The strategy of this approach is to create a
lively portrait of the art work as it actually occurs through in-depth
interviews with real audience members. The background, rationales and
methodologies of these two approaches are detailed in [4] and [5].
As we began to gather documentation we were
faced with an apparent conflict between our perspectives; whilst Jones’
approach sought to identify an “ideal” form for the work through an exploration
of a work's medium-independent qualities, Muller’s approach emphasized the
“real” experiences, which were often very far from the expected or desired
description given by the artist. The gap between artist’s intentions and
audience experience is not a new realization in terms of art theory. The
poststructuralist critical revolution of the last century has established the
authorial position as only one privileged, but not definitive, perspective on
the interpretation of an artwork. However, this gap remains a problem for
documentary and preservation strategies in ephemeral art where, in the absence
of a clear, discrete and material art-object, the artist’s intentions have, in
many cases, provided the touchstone for how a work will be preserved, restaged
and described in the future. We
recognized a productive tension forming between our approaches and between the
“real” and “ideal” versions of the artwork that motivated them. Both approaches
challenge the authority of the other in a useful way, and each offers the other
complimentary information— creating a richer, deeper and more complex overall
picture. The Variable Media Network approach is designed to capture detailed
information about the artist’s intentions and the degree of variability of
technical components of the work. This notion of the ideal version of the work
usually grows from the artist’s experience through numerous installations or
‘versions’ of a work. By looking for consistencies and difference in these
versions, this approach gives conservators a clearer picture of what elements
of a work are important, in the eyes of the artist, to preserve over time. It
therefore constructs an idea of the work that may not have ever existed in an
exhibition context. The experiential approach, on the other hand, captures real
world experiences that provide a rich and detailed picture of the work as it
existed, but does not provide essential technical information about how and why
it was achieved.
While our approaches were never mutually
exclusive of each other, explicitly recognizing the tension between real and ideal
provided us with a strategy to solve problems within our individual approaches
and develop what we believe to be a useful holistic approach to the
documentation of media artworks. In our combined approach we have sought to
draw together both ideal and real accounts of the work—without erasing or
smoothing over their differences. Rather, in this collection we have tried to
preserve and exploit the tension in several ways: first in our methods of
creating documentation, including our interview with the artist and our
interviews with the audience; second in our approach to structuring and
ordering data within the repository; and third in the creation of “access
points,” which link together information describing aspects of the ideal
version of the work with records of its actual
manifestation.
Our
Process
Artist Interview
We developed a combined method for conducting
an artist interview that drew together our two research perspectives. The
medium-independent questions of the Variable Media Questionnaire framed the
conceptual and technical aspects of the work. These were placed, by Muller,
within an experiential context using tools from human-centred interaction,
including “Personas and Scenarios,” a technique which involves telling the
“story” of an artwork from the perspective of an imaginary audience member [6].
This created a valuable dialogue between “real and ideal.” Framing the discussion
in experiential terms enhanced our understanding of why, in certain
circumstances, Rokeby had made particular decisions, and this frame allowed us
to create links between different versions of the work and to account for
changes that have occurred over time. Additionally, by interviewing Rokeby
during an installation period, we were able to probe his choices about the
technical aspects of the work at the precise moment when variable decisions
were being made. This timing further elicited rich and specific details about his experiential goals and assumptions.
Our hybrid method allowed us to generate an interview that has clear links to
both the audience interviews and the conceptual and technical background
information that we have gathered. As such, the artist’s interview can act as a
lynchpin for the collection without claiming to provide a definitive account of
the work.
Audience Interviews
Using techniques adapted from humancentered
design, ethnography and oral history, Muller interviewed a total of 28 people,
including general visitors, invited participants and museum guards [3, 5]. Each
of the interviews presents a unique experience of the work, and together they
represent a cross section of ages, occupations and self-identified levels of
experience with art. The interviews were based on two methods: semistructured
interview and video-cued recall (in which the participant simultaneously
describes their experience of an artwork, whilst watching a video of their
encounter). Both methods aim to record rich descriptions of the way in which
each experience unfolds through time, as well as capturing information about
the participants’ motivation, thoughts and opinions about the work [5].
Data Structure
Traditional arrangement in archival studies
follows a principle of “respect des fonds” meaning that the original order in
which the records were kept is a key element in maintaining the integrity of a
collection of documents. In the case of a created collection, however, rules of
arrangement of documentation and standardization are less prescribed. Jones has
outlined a number of current data structures proposed in the field of media art
preservation and documentation [4]. The aim of our structure is not to create a
hierarchy of information, but to allow for a drilling down of information from
the general to the specific and back. This reflects traditional archival
arrangement and is in keeping with standards for media art documentation, such
as Richard Rinehart's Media Art Notation System [7] and V2's Capturing Unstable
Media Conceptual Model [1].
Access Points
While it is not our intent to provide an
analysis of the material in the collection, we hope the arrangement and
description of the elements articulates the relationship between audience
experience, artists’ intentions, the conceptual and technical/installed aspects
of the work and other contextual factors. We have provided multiple access
points into the information through a series of access points that will help
users of the collection make connections between different forms of material
within the documentation.
Conclusion
and Significance
Maintaining the tension between the ideal
notion and the real manifestation of Giver
of Names in the case study produced a productive way to reconcile the way
in which ephemeral artworks exist in the world and the way they are represented
in archival contexts. The result is a collection of documentation that provides
multiple perspectives of the work, as well as multiple layers of information,
held together with—but not superseded by—the idea of a unified ideal. Rather
than creating an authoritative collection of documentation, which establishes a
fixed identity for the work, our approach seeks to capture its mutability and
contingency through the dialogue between its experiential, conceptual and
technical aspects. This strategy, we believe, enables us to create a more, not
less, “complete” account of the work. By allowing future researchers to
understand more deeply the occurrence of the work in a particular place and
time, we believe that our approach offers them a field of possibilities
relating to the work, enabling them to act confidently, in their own time and
place, in respect to their own conservation work, research, restaging or exhibition projects.
References and Notes
R. Fromme. and S. Faulconnier, “Capturing
Unstable Media Arts: A Formal Model for Describing and Preserving Aspects of
Electronic Art”, in U. Frohne, J.
Guiton, and M Schieren, eds. Present
Continuous Past(s) : Media art : Strategies of Presentation, Mediation and
Dissemination. (Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2004).
A. Depocas, J. Ippolito and C. Jones, eds., Permanence Through Change: the Variable
Media Approach (Montreal: Daniel Langlois
Foundation, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2003).
C. Jones and L Muller, Documentary Collection: Giver
of Names, by David Rokeby (Montreal: Daniel Langlois Foundation, 2008).
C. Jones, State
of the Art of Documentation
(Montreal: Daniel Langlois Foundation, 2008).
L. Muller Towards
an Oral History of New Media Art (Montreal:
Daniel Langlois Foundation, 2008).
S. Bodker, “Scenarios in User-Centred Design—
Setting the Stage for Reflection and Action,” Interacting With Computers 13 (2000) pp. 61-75.
R. Rinehart “The Media Art Notation System:
Documenting and Preserving Digital/Media Art,”
Leonardo 40, No. 2, (2007) pp. 181-187.
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Copied from UMaine Folger Library Database on 03.07.17
Chicago Style Citation
Jones, Caitlin, and Lizzie Muller. "Between Real and
Ideal: Documenting Media Art." Leonardo 41, no. 4 (August 2008):
418-419. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed March
07, 2017).
