Small acts of resistance: teaching young and emerging artists sustainable preservation strategies for contemporary creative practice

1. Excerpt from a letter written by Ruth McLennan to Uriel Orlow, from ‘Artists and Archives: A Correspondence’, in J Vaknin, K Stuckey and V Lane (eds), All This Stuff: Archiving the Artist, Libri Publishing, Faringdon, 2013, p. 85.

2. From my PhD Exegesis: ‘I propose that artists may benefit from consciously incorporating preservation strategies into our own art practices in a way that is immediately useful to us (useful in creating new work, in connecting with other artists and engaging an audience), and has value in the future to potential stakeholders. Furthermore, I also propose that artist education in preservation of variable media is of value to our field of practice – in order to empower artists to choose suitable strategies and systems if they are made available.’ Lisa Cianci, The Blackaeonium Project: Workspace/Keeping-place – An Archival Continuum of Creative Practice’, PhD Exegesis, RMIT University, 2012, available at <https://exegesis.blackaeonium.net>, accessed 20 March 2017.

3. Jon Ippolito, ‘Accommodating the Unpredictable: The Variable Media Questionnaire’, in A Depocas, J Ippolito and C Jones (eds), Permanence Through Change – The Variable Media Approach, pp. 47–54, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Montreal, 2003.

4. Not to be confused with the published book by S Crawshaw, J Jackson with V Havel (Foreword), Small Acts of Resistance, Union Square Press, New York, 2010.

5. The Context and Culture unit was taught until 2017 and has been superseded by a new unit, ‘Sustainable Professional Practice’, which is currently being taught in semester 2 of 2017, covering similar content.

6. This is an entity–relationship model related to retrieval and access of bibliographic and creative content. IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, The Hague, 2009, available at <https://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records>, accessed 5 March 2017.

7. An online keeping place could be a social media site or online system that allows for upload and documentation of visual content such as Facebook, available at <https://facebook.com>; Twitter, available at <https://twitter.com>; Instagram, available at <https://instagram.com>; or a WordPress site, available at <https://wordpress.com>. All accessed 22 March 2017.

8. Eric Ketelaar, ‘Cultivating Archives: Meanings and Identities’, Archival Science, vol. 12, 2012, p. 27.

9. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol. 3, Symbols, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998.

10. ‘Wild archives’ refers to the term ‘archives in the wild’ used in Jeremy Leighton John with Ian Rowlands, Peter Williams and Katrina Dean, ‘Digital Lives: Personal Digital Archives for the 21st Century >> An Initial Synthesis’, Digital Lives Research Paper, 22 February 2010, Version 0.2, UK, p. vii, available at <http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/files/digital-lives-synthesis02-1.pdf>, accessed 21 March 2017.

11. Ross Harley, ‘FCJ-100 Cultural Modulation and the Zero Originality Clause of Remix Culture in Australian Contemporary Art’, The Fibreculture Journal, issue 15, 2009: remix, available at <http://fifteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-100-cultural-modulation-and-the-zero-originality-clause-of-remix-culture-in-australian-contemporary-ar/>, accessed 21 March 2017. The word ‘remix’ requires definition here because of the prevalence of popular culture music remix. Remix in creative practice and digital media arts in particular continues to be a popular topic of discussion for academics in arts and humanities, for example: Eduardo Navas, ‘Remix Defined’, 2011, available at <https://remixtheory.net/?page_id=3>, accessed 21 March 2017; Mark Amerika (ed.), Creative Evolution: Natural Selection and the Urge to Remix, Living Books About Life, 2011, available at <https://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Creative_Evolution>, accessed 21 March 2017. In the context of my subheading – ‘Remix as an act of creation and preservation’, remix refers to the creative practice of re-using or re-purposing existing content to create new work. It falls into the category of cultural practice that Navas describes as ‘a form of discourse’, ‘intertextuality’ and ‘Regenerative Remix’.

12. The concept of the ‘slow hunch’ comes from Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Riverhead Books, New York, 2011.

13. Eduardo Navas lists this as a requirement of the remix.

14. Undaddy Mainframe is part of The Lessons, a series of short video works where ‘archival history is folded into new constellations, producing virtual proximities between disparate temporal moments’. Soda_Jerk, Undaddy Mainframe, video art, 2014, available at <http://www.sodajerk.com.au/video_work.php?v=20140724231348>, accessed 21 March 2017.

15. VNS Matrix are a pioneering ‘cyberfeminist media art’ collective of four female artists: Virginia Barratt, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Josephine Starrs. VNS Matrix website, c.2017, available at <https://vnsmatrix.net>, accessed 21 March 2017.

16. It is interesting to note that permission to use Scorsese’s film was obtained before creating the installation work. Further information about Through a Looking Glass by Douglas Gordon can be found at the Guggenheim Museum website, available at <https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/5432>, accessed 21 March 2017.

17. Mark Godfrey, ‘Found and Lost: On Tacita Dean’s FLOH’, October, vol. 114, Autumn 2005, p. 93.

18. Dean is an artist who is also concerned with the preservation of analogue film as a medium which she uses in large-scale, installation-based works such as FILM, an ‘episodic homage to the analogue processes of celluloid cinema’, and presents as installation large film projections turned on their sides in a vertical format. Tacita Dean, ‘FILM’, 10 October–24 November 2013, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Exhibition curated by Juliana Engberg, available at <https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/tacita-dean-film/>, accessed 21 March 2017.

19. Allan Sekula, ‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,’ in V. Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1982, p. 86.

20. Jane Birkin, ‘Art, Work, and Archives: Performativity and the Techniques of Production’, Archive Journal, November 2015, available at <http://www.archivejournal.net/essays/art-work-and-archives/>, accessed 21 August 2017.

21. Lyndal Jones, From the Darwin Translations, ‘Conclusion’, PhD by Publication, RMIT University, 2005, available at <http://avocaproject.org/DarwinTranslations/concl.htm>, accessed 21 March 2017.

22. The exhibition ‘Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present’ was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 14 March–31 May 2010. The documentary film of the same title was released in 2012, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, directed by Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre, Music Box Films, 2012.

23. Kris Rutten, An van. Dienderen and Ronald Soetaert, ‘Revisiting the Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art, Critical Arts’, vol. 27, no. 5, 2013, 459–73, p. 460.

24. Linda Candy, Practice Based Research: A Guide, Creativity & Cognition Studios, University of Technology, Sydney, CCS Report: 2006-V1.0 November 2006, available at <https://www.creativityandcognition.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/PBR-Guide-1.1-2006.pdf>, accessed 21 August 2017.

25. Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, Re-collection: Art, New Media and Social Memory, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London [Kindle version], 2014, accessed 21 March 2017.

26. Cory Arcangel, ‘Super Mario Clouds’, 2002, available at <https://www.coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/2002-001-super-mario-clouds>, accessed 21 March 2017.

27. The Joseph Beuys re-performance was part of a series of re-performances of Abramović’s own work and the work of other performance artists. She obtained permission to re-perform from the artists themselves, or, in the case of Beuys’ performance, from his widow. Marina Abramović, Seven Easy Pieces, Guggenheim Museum, 2005, available at <http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/abramovic/>, accessed 21 March 2017.

28. Rinehart and Ippolito, Chapter 1, ‘Reinterpretation’, Kindle e-book location 109.

29. WordPress is an open-source website and blogging system that can be downloaded and installed on one’s own web domain, or can be hosted by WordPress as a free or premium version. WordPress is used because it is free and open source, has an established development community, and has enough functionality and scope for customisation for students to meet a range of needs. WordPress.com (free hosted site) and Wordpress.org, 2017, available at <https://wordpress.org>, accessed 21 March 2017.

30. WordPress Posts can be tagged and categorised but the Pages function of the site currently does not allow for tags and categories.

31. As Anthony Giddens states: ‘trust in abstract systems is not psychologically rewarding in the way in which trust in persons is’. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1990, p. 113.

32. One might also list the style and customisations of the WordPress site as a third part of the backup. There are plugins that will back up the entire site and create ‘snapshots’ but this is not a free service, and it would require WordPress to ‘restore’ the content. These kinds of plugins are useful as immediate disaster-recovery strategies rather than long-term preservation strategies.

33. Martine Neddam, ‘Zen and the Art of Database Maintenance’, in Archive2020: Sustainable Archiving of Born-digital Cultural Content, Virtueel Platform, Rotterdam, May 2010, pp. 10–19, available at <https://virtueelplatform.nl/english/news/archive-2020-sustainable-archiving-of-born-digital-cultural-content/>, accessed 28 August 2017.

34. Dragon Espenschied, ‘Rhizome Releases First Public Version of Webrecorder: A New Perspective in Web Archiving’, 2016, available at <https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/aug/09/rhizome-releases-first-public-version-of-webrecorder/>, accessed 21 March 2017.

35. ‘The WARC (Web ARChive) format ‘specifies a method for combining multiple digital resources into an aggregate archival file together with related information’. Library of Congress, ‘WARC, Web ARChive File Format’, 2016, available at <http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000236.shtml>, accessed 21 March 2017.

36. Stelarc uses technology in his artwork to create prosthetic and robotic devices to augment his body. He questions the nature of what it means to be human. What is post-human? What is cyborg? Stelarc, ‘Stelarc: Projects’, available at <http://stelarc.org/?catID=20247>, accessed 21 March 2017. Second Life is a virtual persistent environment created by Linden Lab that enables people to create personalised avatars who interact with each other and the virtual world. Users can purchase virtual space in Second Life to set up a residence or business, and can purchase a range of products from other users. Linden Dollars is the currency in Second Life and these can be purchased with real currency to be used in the virtual space. Users can develop complex interactive environments and invite others to join and participate in events and activities. Linden Lab, Second Life, 2017, <http://secondlife.com>, accessed 12 March 2017.

37. Gerhardt Richter, ‘Gerhardt Richter’, 2016, available at <https://www.gerhard-richter.com>, accessed 18 March 2017.

38. Duchamp adopted this phrase, as did many of the Dadaists from Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, EH Carr, Mikhail Bakunin, The Macmillan Press, London, 1975, p. 435; Marcel Duchamp, Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds), The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp: Marchand du Sel, Thames & Hudson, London, 1975, p. 139.

39. Ilya Kabokov, ‘The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away’ (c.1977), in Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery & The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006, pp. 32–7.

40. ibid., p. 36.

41. Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, OCTOBER, vol. 110, Fall 2004, p. 5.

42. Much of this content has potential and actual use in my creative practice and I want to have ready access to it.

43. Yann Le Guennec, Le Catalogue, 2003, available at <https://www.yannleguennec.com/archives/index.php?cat=13>, accessed 21 March 2017.

44. Although one wonders whether other copies of the original images exist elsewhere.

45. Anders Weberg, ‘Ambiancé – First Short TRAILER – 7 Hours 20 Minutes in one take – by Anders Weberg’, Anders Weberg on Vimeo, available at <https://vimeo.com/160627722#language>, accessed 21 March 2017.

46. Quoted from a conversation in ‘Facebook Comments’ between Lisa Cianci and Anders Weberg (not open to public view), Facebook, 6 March 2017.

47. Sue Breakell, ‘Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive’, Tate Papers, no. 9, Spring 2008, available at <http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/09/perspectives-negotiating-the-archive>, accessed 16 January 2017.

48. The SenseLab is a ‘laboratory for thought in motion’. Based in Montreal, the SenseLab is ‘an international network of artists and academics, writers and makers, from a wide diversity of fields, working together at the crossroads of philosophy, art, and activism’. SenseLab, 2017, available at <https://senselab.ca/wp2/>, accessed 12 March 2017.

49. Brian Massumi, ‘Working Principles of the Anarchive’, in The Go-To How to Book of Anarchiving, 2016, SenseLab, Montreal, pp. 6–7.

50. ibid., p. 5.

51. The Freud Museum is situated in the London house that Sigmund Freud and his family lived in after fleeing Austria in 1938. Freud Museum website, available at <https://www.freud.org.uk>, accessed 21 March 2017.

52. Sophie Calle is well known for exploring themes of intimacy and privacy in her work. She has created many conceptual artworks that have involved unorthodox practices such as following strangers and documenting their activities, asking her mother to hire a private detective to follow Calle herself and document her activities, changing places with a stripper for a day, watching people while they sleep in her bed, and emailing a breakup letter from her boyfriend to 100 other women to ask for their responses. Arndt Fine Art, ‘Sophie Calle’, c.2015, available at <https://www.arndtfineart.com/website/artist_937?idx=c>, accessed 21 March 2017.

53. Susan Hiller, ‘Working Through Objects’, in Merewether (ed.), p. 43.

54. Sue Breakell, ‘Archival Practices and the Practice of Archives in the Visual Arts’, Archives and Records, vol. 36, no. 1, p. 3, 2015, available at <https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2015.1018151>, accessed 21 August 2017.

55. Okwui Enwezor (Curator), Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, Exhibition, International Center of Photography, 18 January–5 April 2008, New York, Catalogue published 2008, International Center of Photography, New York and Steidl, Germany.

56. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Artistic Director), dOCUMENTA (13): The Guidebook, 2012, documenta & Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany.

57. Christian Boltanski, The Store House, 1988, Museum of Modern Art, ‘Christian Boltanski: The Storehouse, 1998’, available at <https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80857?locale=en>, accessed 21 March 2017.

58. Christian Boltanski, Archives du Coeur – The Heart Archive, 2005–, Teshima Island, Japan and other international locations.

59. ‘Christian Boltanski’, Archives & Creative Practice, Birmingham City University Art & Design Archives, available at <http://www.archivesandcreativepractice.com/christian-boltanski/>, accessed 3 February 2017.

60. Christian Boltanski, No Man’s Land, Park Avenue Armory, New York, 2010.

61. Park Avenue Armory, ‘Park Avenue Armory’, New York, 2017, available at <http://www.armoryonpark.org>, accessed 21 March 2017.

62. Visitors were also able to record their heartbeats at the exhibition as a contribution to the ongoing Archives du Coeur project.

63. Kathy Michelle Carbone, ‘Artists and Records: Moving History and Memory’, Archives and Records, vol. 38, no. 1, 2017, p. 102, available at <https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2016.1260446>, accessed 21 August 2017.

64. The Atlas Group, ‘The Atlas Group Archive’, c.2007, available at <http://www.theatlasgroup.org>, accessed 21 March 2017.

65. Fazal Sheikh, ‘Fazal Sheikh’, c.2010, available at <https://www.fazalsheikh.org/index.php>, accessed 21 March 2017.

66. Rinehart and Ippolito, Chapter 2, ‘New Media and Social Memory’, Kindle e-book location 213.

67. Vaknin, Stuckey and Lane, p. 85.