Out of Line? Archiving Internet Art Off-Line
Symposium:
Session Title:
- New Media Archives- New Intelligent Ambiances
Presentation Title:
- Out of Line? Archiving Internet Art Off-Line
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Panel: New Media Archives- New Intelligent Ambiances
The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, in the Cornell University Library, has engaged in an aggressive program of producing and archiving internet art. In my presentation, I will rehearse challenges faced by the Archive in producing the internet art journal, CTHEORY Multimedia, which published finished pieces of internet art, often requiring the freezing on open data sets for the purposes of publishing and archiving. Compromises made in the production of internet art, for the sake of providing data sets that would be equally available to various browsers helped to shape the archivist’s curatorial philosophy in archiving both CTHEORY Multimedia and other large repository’s of internet art, particularly Computerfinearts.?com and Turbulence.?org. To be discussed with the pros and cons of the curatorial decision to archive large sets of internet art off-line, providing a stable backup and onset data set for otherwise economically unstable hosts of internet art. In considering whether off-line archiving is artistically “out of line,” I will cite the precedent of an off-line net art exhibition that I curated with Teo Spiller in Slovenia, INFOS 2000, in which we circulated internet art on CD-Rom to users and independent media centers whose economic position precluded access to high bandwith internet service. In this case the curatorial decision was a political one, more flexible platforms for greater access. How does these artistic and political paradigms shift in the case of onsite curating and preservation of large collections of internet art?
