Abstract
The use of digital information technologies in the humanities, and the various new-media art projects, presents a plethora of opportunities for the archiving of the digitized/digital cultural content, such as online databases and virtual museums. On the other hand, the digital archives are never something permanent, they are vulnerable as regards the maintenance and also the technological development in general, which makes software and hardware obsolete after only a few years. The paper reflects on both issues by considering the case studies of visualizing a literary-history database and of translating new-media art exhibitions from the real gallery space into a virtual museum presentation. The ephemeral character of conceptual art and the artistic approaches to archiving of art are scrutinized in the writings and works of Marcel Duchamp, providing us with relevant models for dealing with maintenance and obsoleteness issues of archiving also in the contemporary new-media art and its presentations. The strategies of recreation and reinterpretation of past art works for contemporary audiences, and their integration into new artistic explorations of artists and students, are suggested as forms of preserving of cultural heritage.
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Such as: diagrammatic representation, image composition, film and video montage and compositing, image-interface, panorama, spatial constellation in general, 3-D scanning and computer generated/manipulated models, interface design.
At the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science; Introduction to Design course and diploma projects. The author of this paper, herself a graphic designer and new-media artist, was the mentor and co-author of the projects.
In conversation with Boris Groys about the set-up of The red pavilion (1993) at the 45th Venice biennial and The toilet (1992) at documenta IX (Groys 1996).
The database is structured according to the following categories: biographical data (place and time of birth and death, education, social class, marital status, children, type of income etc.), literary works (genre, title, time, place, language of first publishing etc.), reception (type, author, time, country, language of reception etc.). The database can be filtered by using a combination of categories.
Vaupotič and Bovcon (2017); http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/womenwriters, accessed 30 September 2020.
The database itself is a work in progress, since the entries are being added by researchers. Therefore, every statistical analysis is limited to the time of its creation.
Receptions between Dutch women writers (and other actors in the literary system) were spatialized in a virtual space resembling a Dutch landscape, the user walks from the house symbolizing the utterer to the house symbolizing the subject of the utterance and while walking, the quotation is displayed on the upper part of the screen. Concept: prof. Narvika Bovcon, prof. Aleš Vaupotič; selection of quotations: dr. Suzan van Dijk; Unity programming, student: Jernej Grosar.
The first was a filigree textual object, a lace-like typography design of a quotation from Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871). The second was created with a physical computer-simulation of cloth as if it were thrown over a 3-D bar chart that represented biographic information about Spanish women writers. The third was a two-sided flat object, on each side there was a diagram of the biographical data on Slovene women writers. The fourth was a 3-D scanned portrait of one author of the visualization, with a wave-like interference added to the shape, while on the back there was a mirroring surface engraved with lines from the poem Mirror by Sylvia Plath (1975).
As we were, too: we found the existing image and production technologies (computer graphic design, 3-D scanning and printing, silver casting), and out of them we made the forms of the sculptures, inscribed with texts.
Students: Anže Mur, Jaka Bernard.
Students: David Penca, Jakob Bambič. Several other student projects presented interesting ideas: one rendered the digital models as digital graphics displayed in an open-air pavilion, thus creating a virtual exhibition of prints. A second project doubled the sculptures with their shadows on the walls, using the light rays and the relations of scale, thus the visitor sometimes saw the shadow first and then looked around the virtual gallery rooms to find the object. Another project was a recursive gallery room that trapped the visitor in its loop.
Duchamp worked on The large glass from 1912 until 1923, when he decided to leave it “definitively uncompleted.” With Man Ray he made the photo Dust breeding of dust settling on the unfinished piece around 1920, when a client hurried him to deliver the work.
The Writings of Marcel Duchamp were published in 1973, edited by Michel Sanouillet, who published Duchamp's writings on the Large glass already in 1958 in Paris in a book with the anagram of the artist's name in the title, Marchand du sel, and Elmer Peterson who translated some of the texts into English.
From the museum's point of view there are four key moments in the life cycle of a new-media artwork in the museum: acquisition, display, storage, and conservation interventions. Already at the moment of the acquisition, conservators identify the components of the artwork that are needed for its preservation and display, they prepare a plan for maintenance, and identify the risks of obsolescence of parts. Both digital and physical components are stored permanently and a record is kept of all the information about display and changes of the artwork over time (done also in a dialogue with the artist when possible), making thus the interventions in the artwork transparent for future interpreters (Falcão 2019, pp. 277–85).
Such as: keeping all the sketches and prototypes, using versioning systems for software, ensuring backup, using open-source tools, making a “bill of materials” and for each element specifying the replaceability, explaining the proper functioning of the project in a video, writing a manual for the setup, preparing a README document with all installing instructions, preparing several flash drives with all the source code, giving the collector the box (in it the video, the flash drives, the manual, the toolkit, and the spare parts) and its copy, speaking to the conservator, agreeing on maintenance, versioning and migration, keeping a web site with all the information on the project, sharing the code in the community (Lozano-Hemmer 2019, pp. 108–115).
The title refers to a Hamlet's retort (I, 5), which was the title of another Dragan's retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana in 2000.
Srečo Dragan collaborated with Nuša Dragan (1943–2011) on several projects between 1968 and 1988, some of them were included in his retrospective exhibitions.
Student: Denis Rajković. http://dragan.fri.uni-lj.si:8888/. Accessed 28 September 2020.
Student: Anja Hrovatič.
OHO (from eye, “oko,” and ear, “uho”) is the most important Yugoslavian-Slovene neo-avant-garde group (1966–71) (Zabel 1994).
ZDSLU is the acronym for the Slovenian Association of Fine Art Societies.
E.g. the interactive installations in the gallery were used by the students of computer sciences and multimedia within a choreography for the camera, whereas the students of cinematography conceptualized the trajectory through the exhibition web site.
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Bovcon, N. Virtual museums: interpreting and recreating digital cultural content. Neohelicon 48, 23–38 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-021-00582-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-021-00582-1