Abstract
This article speculates about the new kinds of historical information that performance scholars may be able to preserve as a result of recent innovations in web archiving. Using The Live Art Collection of the UK Web Archive as its case study, the article draws on influences from oral history, new media theory and the digital humanities. Beginning with an assertion that the Web has a tendency to aggregate existing media forms into one archival location, the article makes the case that online writing is key to web archiving's potential to document new kinds of knowledge about performance and live art. Subsequently it points to limitations in the current archival structures of the collection and concludes that further innovation is required in order to maximize the scholarly potential of the material contained within it. Interviews with the team who manage and curate the collection are used throughout to support assertions about the collections intended use and functions.
Introduction
On Saturday 6 April 2013, new regulation on legal deposit materials (non-print works) was passed that could radically alter the impact of web archiving in the humanities (The British Library Citation2010). This decree gave The British Library permission to archive a copy of any website published in the United Kingdom. It was conceived in response to the fear that information was appearing and then rapidly vanishing from the Internet, leaving what Helen Hockx-Yu Head of Web Archiving at The British Library called ‘a significant gap in our knowledge of the historical web and potentially in social history’ (Hockx-Yu 2001).
The impact of web archiving presents challenges to research in all academic disciplines but has the potential to be exceptionally controversial for scholars and practitioners who are concerned with documenting performance. Expectations about the ontological bias of performance against reproduction (Phelan Citation1993) stand to make web distribution unpalatable to artists who prioritize ephemerality. Yet against the backdrop of an increasingly mediated society, this article will suggest that performance's tightly bound relationship with text and memory makes web archiving highly suited to documenting performance, because of its ability to capture first-person accounts of the live event. Moreover, it will point to existing discourse that suggests online archives have the potential to create collections that are more historically diverse than many existing archives but, at present, these possibilities are not being fully realized. This process will ultimately point to a tendency in digital arts and humanities to impose outdated archival practices on advancing technologies. Taking one existing example of web archiving practice, The Live Art Collection of the UK Web Archive, as its case study, this article speculates about the uses of web archiving for the next generation of performance scholars, asking what new kinds of information it might filter into art historical discourse.
This article is interdisciplinary in its approach, in order to reflect the mix of expertise in digital humanities, performance scholarship and new media theory that is required to contextualize The Live Art Collection. Defined by a desire for a historically contingent approach to archiving, it contextualizes web archiving against established documentary practices such as oral history.
Owing to the emergent nature of web archiving practice, this paper may end by proposing more questions about web archiving methods than it is ultimately able to answer. This is an inevitable pitfall of writing about a developing technology. It is hoped that by mapping the issues raised by the practice of web archivization, this article may invite performance practitioners, archivists and scholars to consider how these practices can be used to create richer histories of the sector for future generations.
On 21 March 2013 I interviewed Lois Keiden Director of The Live Art Development Agency, and Eva del Rey and Stephen Cleary, both Curators of Drama and Literature Recordings at The British Library, about The Live Art Collection. As the managers of the archive they are the individuals with the deepest insight into its uses and potential limitations. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes and commentary expressed by these individuals are taken from this interview.
What is being archived in The Live Art Collection?
The British Library instigated the first sections of the UK Web Archive in 2004. Its interface, which can be accessed online,Footnote1 presents a taxonomy of links organized under headings such as ‘medicine & health’, ‘education & research’ and ‘arts & humanities’. Users click through to pages that present multiple copies of individual websites captured once every six months. The archive is driven by a Collection Development Policy, which specifies that the websites must:
reflect the diversity of lives, interests and activities throughout the United Kingdom;
contain research value or are of research interest;
feature political, cultural social and economic events of national interest; and
demonstrate innovative use of the Web (The British Library Citation2010).
Aware that live art has a strong online presence reflected in artists’ and festivals’ websites as well as critical writing blogs, Lois Keiden Director of The Live Art Development Agency sensed an imperative to capture documents relating to performance practice as they emerged on the Web, even before The Live Art Collection was instigated in 2008. The agency's ongoing relationship with Stephen Cleary, Lead Curator of Drama and Literature Recordings at The British Library, created an opportunity for a curated collection dedicated specifically to the kind of web documents that Keiden felt compelled to preserve. Keiden suggests that as a ‘mapping exercise’, archiving artists’ and organizations’ websites has been highly successful in reflecting the scale and presence of live art in Britain.
The collection covers established Arts Council-funded institutions such as Battersea Arts Centre alongside younger producers like Forest Fringe. Significantly it also includes the website of the now defunct New Territories International Festival of Live Art, which was the major live art hub in the United Kingdom for 30 years. The festival no longer has its own independent web presence, and as such the UK Web Archive is the only interface through which its old site can be accessed. Also preserved in The Live Art Collection are the blogs and websites of a number of artists such as Tim Etchells and Chris Goode, who have both received significant recognition for their writing about performance.
New potentials: what is unique about The Live Art Collection?
To begin evaluating the significance of The Live Art Collection it will be necessary to clarify exactly what kind of material is held there and how this content might compare with material deposited via other archival forms such as paper documents or photographs. For the team who run it, the role of The Live Art Collection is to act as an adjunct to more conventional forms of performance documentation. For Stephen Cleary, websites in The Live Art Collection represent ‘material that is ancillary to performance’ which forms a useful addition to video documentation held at The British Library. They allow viewers to watch footage in the video archive and then consult the web archives for additional information. During our interview, Lois Keiden was keen to stress that she feels there is a difference between performance documentation and documents that are related to performance. Her perception is that material in The Live Art Collection belongs in the latter category, functioning as ‘an archive of archives’, an aggregate of material that has existing informational structures.
In the introduction to Web Archiving, Julien Masanès attempts to define the properties of the web and in turn of web archives. Notably, he describes the web as containing ‘any combination of images, sounds and textual content’ (Masanès Citation2009, 17). The Web is an amalgamation of different informational forms that is able to reconfigure and reuse data from various digital sources. It therefore follows suit that The Live Art Collection carries a variety of media outcomes related to individual performances. As an example, contains a screen grab from artist Paul Granjon's archived site taken from The Live Art Collection in September 2010. It demonstrates how photographic, video and textual documentations of his live performance ‘Z Lab Presents’ are able to sit side by side within one archival interface. The viewer can watch, read and navigate several media forms on one single page, a property that is less present in paper-based non-digital archival forms.
Philip Auslander has suggested that critical readings of new documentation techniques ought to be historically contingent and mindful of connections between media. As a repost to Peggy Phelan's claims about the singularity of the live encounter, he applies Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's concept of remediation to describe ‘the representation of one medium in another’ (Bolter and Grusin as quoted in Auslander Citation1999, 7) that tends to take place as technology develops. For Bolter and Grusin, ‘the desire for immediacy leads digital media to borrow avidly from each other’ (as quoted in Bolter and Grusin, Citation1999) – a trait that can particularly be observed on the Internet where televisual forms meet text and online interaction. Remediation is also in evidence in The Live Art Collection as artists employ multiple methods to translate their live work for an online audience. In , an archival copy of artist Aaron Williamson's website displays text and images related to his work ‘Lives of the Saints’.Footnote2 In the top left-hand corner of the page there is a QuickTime clip of a performance to camera. This is posted alongside photographic digital stills and texts that are all used to describe the same performative moment. The viewer can read Williamson's comment that he ‘took a pile of onions that, surprisingly, could not induce me to tears until I tied them right onto my eyes and face’ while they simultaneously watch him execute the action in real time and as a digital still.
While the ability of the Internet to aggregate other media might initially suggest the prospect of making other archival interfaces obsolete, the likely application of web archiving according to Masanès is one of ‘co-evolution’ (Masanès Citation2009) alongside other forms. Recalling Stephen Cleary's assertion that The Live Art Collection is an archival adjunct to other forms of documentation, we might understand the collection's role as one of enhancement, an additional layer to the process of performance scholarship that gives an overview of a performance via different media forms. Yet Masanès also draws attention to the fact that the web does not just recycle previous forms of media, but it also ‘invents new ones’ (Citation2009, 17). Highlighting blogs as a case in point, he suggests that the interactive properties of the Web such as posting comments and easily editing content mark a departure from old media. In the following section we will turn our attention to ways that the immediacy and interactive properties of the Web characterize some of the most significant archival potential contained within The Live Art Collection of the UK Web Archive.
Online writing
It is worthy of note that live art is the only artistic genre with its own dedicated special collection in the UK Web Archive. In the first instance this may simply be the product of a fortuitous relationship between the two organizations that manage it. However, it is also possible to make the case that performance is especially suited to online documentation because the written accounts that appear on artists’ websites and blogs serve to extend the tradition of documenting live work through the first-person testimony that often appears in performance scholarship.
In Histories and Practices of Live Art, Deirdre Heddon writes of the ‘impossibility’ of mapping the past 50 years of live artists work due its general resistance to traditional forms of documentation. She says that ‘personal reminiscences, as intangible as the work itself, become substitutes’ (Heddon Citation2012, 5). The struggle she encountered to create a singular perspective on the history of live practices has led her to pursue a collaborative approach where she gathers the subjective experiences of artists and other contributors. She quotes a passage by artist André Stitt recollecting a surprise encounter with a performance by Joseph Beuys:
I follow the crowd into the building and Mr. Fur Coat proceeds to deliver this really mesmerising talk in a wild and expressive German accent. He is chalking all over blackboards, he is getting really intense, the big crowd are hanging on his every word and action […] Something in my head clicks; I hear it clicking; it's like an electric switch being flicked. I am thinking, This is it, this is what I want to do. (Stitt as quoted in Heddon Citation2012, 5; original emphasis)
shows an archival copy from The Live Art Collection of writer and maker Chris Goode's blog ‘Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire’. In the passage depicted, he recounts a performance at a student theatre in Cambridge where his collaborator Jonny Liron made a memorable interaction with an audience member. The text itself reflects Goode's presence as an orator and entertainer, as if he was talking aloud to a captive audience:
it ended up: with Jonny standing naked at the front of the room, staring into the eyes of a young woman in the audience, and slowly getting an erection. I'm as astonished by her courage as by his (though perhaps only because I've had the privilege of working with, and from, his intrepidity so much in recent months), though all I've spoken to since attest to her apparently complete comfort in the intense and complex and unspoken relations of that moment, such that all their concerns about her and about that part of the performance in general seem to have been quite easily dispersed … Unfortunately, the video recording pegs out immediately after Jonny takes his trousers off – and who can blame it. So the story of Jonny's Fluxus hard-on will have to live in legend. (Goode Citation2009; original emphasis)
Oral history
At this point in its short lifespan, there are limited amounts of evidence available to demonstrate The Live Art Collection being used by researchers to produce knowledge about live art practice. This is doubtless the consequence of the availability of a large volume of the material in original form on the Internet itself. The Live Art Collection will gain in potency as technology develops and the information contained in its pages becomes more obsolete and harder to obtain. It is for this reason that the most favourable approach to examining the archival potential of the collection is to look for points of correlation with older archival forms. I propose that one example is to use oral history as a paradigm for evaluating how The Live Art Collection might be employed in research practice.
Oral history is the process of talking with individuals to access their subjective accounts of an historical period or event. Practitioners advocate its value for retrieving accounts that are excluded from conventional archival documents such as books, which are usually authored by qualified experts with their own politically and socially influenced perspectives on events. Scholars advocating the benefits of oral history have gone so far as to frame it as a platform for ‘working-class men and woman, indigenous peoples or members of cultural minorities’ (Perks and Thomson Citation1998, i) to make their voices heard.
Within The Live Art Collection it will be the accumulation of material rather than the selection of isolated quotes that gives the archive its relevance and potency. The passage used above from Goode's blog could no doubt bear some fruit for researchers investigating the history of this specific event, but would become more powerful when taken in context as part of the larger archival body of The Live Art Collection. During the four-year period when Goode's blog is documented, it covers a mixture of critical reflections on theatre-making and commentary about the political climate that give insight into his principles and processes over an extended period of time. The document is much like a substantial oral history of this period of his life and work. Given that Goode is recognized as a significant experimental theatre-maker by those interested in alternative practice, these lengthy and eclectic passages will no doubt become sort-after material for scholars of his work.
The performative nature of writing on the Web reiterates the relation between content in The Live Art Collection and oral history. Jodi Dean offers a convincing contextualization of blogging within historical practices of performative writing, speech and the social encounter (Dean Citation2010). She evokes Foucault's essay ‘Self Writing’ to express the ‘reciprocity of the gaze’ (Citation2010, 50–51) established by written correspondence, suggesting that the nature of writing itself is to evoke the presence of an audience. Quoting William A. Johnson's book on the social history of reading, she describes how the Romans used ‘bookroll’, a scrolling script or diary, to create a live encounter: ‘The continuous roll was ‘played’ by the reader much in the way that we play a video tape or witness a stage performance’ (Dean Citation2010, 52). She frames these performative encounters with text as the historical predecessors of blogs, claiming that they ‘catch oral communication in linear writing’ (Citation2010, 47). John Hopton (Citation2007) expands the association between web writing and oral history by investigating the use of Internet chat-rooms as oral history case studies, in order to expose marginal accounts of an occasionally controversial sporting practice. He asserts that using the Web as oral history helps to illuminate perspectives on an often controversial sport that have not been included in mainstream sporting archives. He also suggests that ‘in as much as discussions which take place on internet forums are conversations, there are similarities with oral history’ (Hopton Citation2007, 93).
In the case of The Live Art Collection, and particularly sites such as Goode's blog, there is a formal difference between the two-way discourse of a chat-room or an oral history interview and the monologue structure of a blog. Yet as technology becomes increasingly interactive, both in terms of user facilities and the psychological discourses in which it engages us, material in The Live Art Collection is likely to become increasingly conversational and even more suited to the oral history paradigm. Goode's blog is littered with witty and entertaining commentary on contemporary political events. Examples such as the following build to form a striking image of artistic and political culture from the unconventional perspective of a very opinionated and politically motivated theatre-maker. This material is likely to be very useful to scholars documenting the history of alternative theatre practices:
In a statement with which well-meaning but slightly boring theatre-makers everywhere will gladly identify, Mr Bob Diamond suggested that banks should not expect taxpayer bailouts, but should be ‘allowed to fail’ (the very highest aspiration of half the devising companies in the UK, if long experience of the Guardian blog is to be believed – which it obviously fucking isn't). (Goode Citation2009–2014)
Limitations: whose voice?
During my interview with Keiden and Cleary a theme emerged around the capacity of the Web to give a voice to more marginalized artists and writers, an attribute that we have already seen has been commonly associated with oral history (Perks and Thomson Citation1998, i). Keiden, in particular, proposes that self-publishing online has allowed live artists ‘to have a presence that has not been possible for so many years because of the gatekeepers of culture’. Although a recent thirst for celebrity performance interventions has emerged at institutions such as New York's Museum of Modern Art, the complexity of some of live art's politics, practices and aesthetics mean that few practitioners achieve this level of endorsement from large institutions. The Internet offers artists space to legitimate their practice by showcasing it for a public audience on a professional website that they can build for free.
For Keiden, one of the consequences of the accessibility of the Internet as an archival platform is that The Live Art Collection is able to function as a tool for ‘mapping’ the live art sector in the United Kingdom. Capturing the abundance and variety of live art websites in existence allows the agency to advocate for the cultural significance of the work, in a way that might not be possible if it had to depend upon the archives of mainstream publications such as The Stage or Art Monthly. Moving beyond the seminal artists who have defined the evolution of the British Live Art sector, the UK Web Archive allocates space for platforms such as ArtRole, who develop collaborations with artists in the Middle East, and girl jonah, a dance theatre duo who challenge mainstream notions about the body and disability. A blog by Platform narrates alternative perspectives on environmental activism and the arts from an authorial position that is highly critical of mainstream politics and industry. While these companies and artists have probably all participated in mainstream arts activity to some extent, it is rare to see such diverse cultures and perspectives bound into one archival record.
There is a lengthy and problematic discourse surrounding the capacity of the Internet to act as a platform for marginalized groups. While Keiden is correct in her assertions about the ease with which artists can self-publish online, her comments perhaps overlook the tendency of the Internet to impose hierarchical frameworks on information. As a site for knowledge production, early adaptors often heralded the Internet as a medium defined by an almost anarchic desire to operate outside established systems of discourse, because anyone with access to a computer was able to create and distribute their own data on a blog or other interactive forum. Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, the most seductive and often-quoted metaphor for the Internet, presents a ‘non-hierarchical, non-signifying system without a General and without an organising memory or central automaton’ (Citation1988, 21). Furthermore, they predicted that the Internet as a medium would ‘shatter the linear unity of knowledge’ (Citation1988, 7). When viewed in these terms, the potential of the Web for mapping the sector and harvesting evidence of none-mainstream practice appears to be full of promise. As a carrier of self-published material, the Web is well positioned to aggregate a range of voices that document live art practice. Yet the early potential of the rhizomatic paradigm was short-lived, as obvious gatekeepers evolved to dominate online environments. Search engines that measure the quality and credibility of websites based on the number of clicks and links they receive, prioritize the most popular and consumable sites.
While the Live Art Development Agency or The British Library may not have the same popularity-driven methods of distributing data as Google, both of these institutions have their own internal methods for prioritizing information and structuring their data. They are, of course, cultural gatekeepers in their own right and the selection criteria used to compile The Live Art Collection is dependent on the expertise and cultural authority of the organizations that run it.
During our conversation about The Live Art Collection, Keiden and Cleary described the incremental process that has been used to build The Live Art Collection and the kinds of criteria that were needed to decide which websites were to be permitted into the archive. In the first instance, websites of organizations were targeted. The relatively small scale of Live Art production in the United Kingdom made it easy to select institutions that make a significant contribution to the practice, in a way that may have been more challenging for larger sectors such as theatre or visual art. During the second wave of additions to the archive, the agency harvested websites from individuals whose contributions to practice were deemed significant. Keiden admitted that these choices were harder to make and were driven in part by the Agency's taste and by their desire to promote artists that they support. The third wave, which is forthcoming, will focus on internationalism in the context of UK practice and will again be selected by Keiden and her team.
The Live Art Collection is fully transparent in its marketing material. Clearly it is a curated collection and it is important to note that in highlighting the role of archival selection processes in The Live Art Collection, this article does not seek to criticize its value or suggest that the keepers of the collection are improper custodians. Rather, the article intends to highlight the fact that the response of the humanities to digital innovation is often to apply old archival structures onto new mediums.
New media, old archives
It is well established that archives, residing as they often do within an institution or adjacent to a museum, are sites of knowledge production that are able to influence public perceptions of history. In Archive Fever, Derrida (Citation1996) excavates the etymological origin of the word archive in the Greek language, unearthing the terms arkheion (meaning domicile) and archon (meaning ruler or lord). For Derrida, the archive is a location where traces of the past are deposited in order to articulate a legitimated perspective on history. By necessity, an authority figure, be it an individual archivist or an institution, must patrol the edges of the archive, deciding what is to be included and excluded. Derrida calls this process ‘consignation’, the gathering of information to produce a system of knowledge (Citation1996, 3). Updating the Derradian paradigm, archivist Helen Freshwater expresses concern about the dampening of individual voices seeking expression in the archive: ‘Once removed from the world of recitation-enunciation the voices of the past preserved in the archive will be mediated by the decisions of a series of archivists, experts and academics’ (Citation2003, 734).
Oral history practitioners often pursue outsider perspectives, yet the process of selecting who is interviewed and who is left unobserved is one that inherently requires archival expertise and the assertion of cultural authority. According to the Popular Memory Group, one of the problems of oral history is that it sometimes ‘actually confirms (and in practice may deepen) social divisions which are also relations of power and of inequality’ (Perks and Thompson Citation1998, 51).
In web archiving discourse, the Internet is often framed as a self-organizing body of information that needs little intervention from a gatekeeper to structure its contents. Masanès proposes that ‘there is no need, in this space, for gate keepers as there are no physical access limitations’ (Citation2009, 19) While librarians dealing with physical objects have an ‘unavoidable intermediary role’, it is suggested that the Web has its own self-organizing principles and existing information structures that simply demand the ‘ambition of neutrality’ from those who those who seek to archive its contents. Yet, as we have seen, the structure of the UK Web Archive is organized around curated collections that depend on the existence of archival expertise. This undoubtedly calls into question the proposed function of The Live Art Collection as a means of ‘mapping’ the sector, given that points on the map are limited by the curatorial preference of its gatekeepers.
The potential of innovation
This analysis of The Live Art Collection of the UK Web Archive has pointed to a tension between developing technologies and the online archiving of performance. A ‘static “document-centric”’ (Hockx-Yu 2001) view of the Web is inappropriate for an archiving practice that seeks to exploit the full capacity of the technologies available. There is scope for this collection and others like it, to take much wider samples of web-based material and cover a greater breadth of artists’ and organizations’ websites. Other initiatives such as The Internet Archive and its search arm the Wayback Machine use crawlers to comb the Web and archive as much information as possible with no curatorial bias. While these expansive methods have their own shortcomings, particularly as Eli Edwards has highlighted around issues of ‘veracity, quality or appropriateness’ (Citation2004, 5), they do appear to have much greater potential to ‘map’ the full scope of artistic production across the Web.
It is difficult at the time of writing to identify exactly how new regulations on legal deposit materials (non-print works) that were introduced in April 2013 will be managed. However, it does seem likely that eliminating the permissions process that the team at The British Library have to use before they can copy sites will dramatically increase the potential for web archiving to aggregate a much fuller range of artistic practice into its interfaces. The implications for artists and their web presence should not be sidelined in this process and no doubt many individuals will wish to oppose the capturing of their online documentation without consent. However, as Sant suggests in his book on the Franklin Furnace Archive, existing copyright ‘does not give its holder absolute control over their work’ (Sant Citation2011, 146; emphasis added). Appropriation has been an important cultural form since the Dada movement and the increasing proliferation of digital technology has only served to exasperate this movement toward constant reuse of images and artistic content (Citation2011, 145–146).
There is no limit, really, to the number of artists’ websites that could be captured and recorded now that the new regulation on legal deposit materials (non-print works) has been passed. In a few years we could potentially be harvesting every piece of online artistic activity, from the most amateur website to the Twitter feed of the director of the national theatre. An important question to answer in the future will be: how much of this information do we want to save?
Conclusion
My intention in writing this article has been to provoke a debate about how useful web archiving might be for documenting performance. The Live Art Collection of the UK Web Archive is an important first step in embracing web archiving in the performing arts. Blogs and websites that are archived within it preserve powerful first-person testimonies and important information about how artists and organizations represent themselves and their practices. However, the curatorial processes currently used limit the extent to which it is able to collate the full ranges of performance-related material that is available online. The debates and discussions that will be influential as technology develops and web archiving becomes more widely integrated with performance research are still evolving.
Notes on contributors
Vanessa Bartlett is a PhD Candidate at The College of Fine Art, University of Western Australia. She was recently Project Co-ordinator at Unfinished Histories, a project recording British Alternative Theatre 1968–1988 through interviews and the digitization of archival material. See also www.vanessabartlett.com.
Notes
1. See webarchive.org.uk
2. Available through the UK Web Archive: http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20090127030101/http://www.aaronwilliamson.co.uk/html/performances_video/Saints.html
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