Untitled
Symposium:
- ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art
- More presentations from ISEA2011:
Session Title:
- (he)artbreaking to the core: zombie data and the arts of re/de/transcoding
Presentation Title:
- Untitled
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Chair Person: Nina Wenhart
Presenters:
- Rosa Menkman – The Collapse of PAL
- Melissa Barron – Glitch Weavings
- Daniela Kuka – Disorder
- Nina Wenhart – <3break(s)core: an inappropriation
Digital corpses all abound, zombie data that is still there, but cannot be performed anymore. Change is inevitable, if the artwork should survive. Besides the archivists’ efforts to revive the work in its original state, artists have developed their own strategies of embracing the errors and glitches of re/de/transcoding processes.
Codecs, programs, protocols and formats that are not supported anymore have become creative challenges and often initiate subversive practices. Not THAT, but HOW a work is changed and distorted becomes the choice of the artist. In this process, the original and its resurrection enter a dialogue and open up questions that go beyond the surface, a dialectics of original and copy, sameness and change, obsolescence and progress, memory and forgetting, survival and death. And as the original (file) is dead, the original (as a concept) is reborn at the same time.
Artistic strategies of re/de/transcoding and serendipidous errors are positioned as an antithesis to an elitist or naive euphoria of constant technological progress i.e. perfection. Nevertheless, they are not nostalgic but celebrate a handson approach where the code becomes tangible and material, literally.