Digital Art through the Looking Glass E-Book

Oliver Grau (Hg.)

• Herausgeber: Edition Donau-Universität Krems
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 473

Beschreibung

Digital art challenges archiving, collecting and preserving methods within and outside of gallery, library, archive and museum (GLAM) institutions. By its media, art in the digital sphere is processual, contextual, modular and ephemeral, and its creative process is collaborative. From artists, scholars, technicians and conservators—to preserve this contemporary art is a transdisciplinary task.This book brings together leading international experts from digital art theory and preservation, digital humanities, collection management, conservation and media art histories.In a transdisciplinary approach, theoretic and practice-based research from these stakeholders in art, research, education and exhibition are presented to create an overview of present preservation methods and discuss demands and opportunities for the future. Finally, the need for a new appropriate museum and archive infrastructure is shown to preserve the art of our time.

Leseprobe

Digital Art through the Looking Glass

Oliver Grau, Janina Hoth and Eveline Wandl-Vogt (eds.)

Digital Art through the Looking Glass

New strategies for archiving, collecting and preserving in digital humanities

ISBN: 978-3-903150-51-5

e-ISBN: 978-3-9031 50-52-2

Texts © Contributors, 2019

Images © Contributors/copyright holders named in the captions, 2019

Bibliographic information published by the Austrian National Library: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek list this publication in the Austrian bibliography.

Cover Illustration: J. Posma, J. Nicholson, S. Kenderdine and A. Hardjono, “Knowledge Evolution of Metabolic Disturbances,” in EPICylinder designed by Sarah Kenderdine et al, UNSW. Photo: Sarah Kenderdine.

Graphic Design: Gudrun Mittendrein

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Contents

Introduction

Oliver Grau/Janina Hoth/Eveline Wandl-Vogt

Early New Media Art. The search for originality in technological art and its challenges for preservation

Georg Nees & Harold Cohen: Re: tracing the origins of digital media

Frieder Nake

Shifts in the Photographic Paradigm through Digitality & the Aesthetics of Noise

George Legrady

The Artistic Contribution of Electrographic Practices to the Archaeology of Electronic Art

Beatriz Escribano Belmar/José R. Alcalá Mellado

The “anarchive” Series as a Challenge between Art and Information A singular approach of media art history

Anne-Marie Duguet

Six Decades of Digital Arts & Museums. A new infrastructure

DARIAH Connectivity Roundtable

Howard Besser/Giselle Beiguelman/Wendy Coones/Patricia Falcão, Oliver Grau/Sarah Kenderdine/Marianne Ping-Huang

Artistic, Collective & Curatorial Methods for Digital Archiving

#Best Practices for Conservation of Media Art from an Artist’s Perspective

Raphael Lozano-Hemmer

Museums of Losses for Clouds of Oblivion

Giselle Beiguelman

Between Light and Dark Archiving

Annet Dekker

Historicization in the Archive Digital art and originality

Janina Hoth

Digital Cultural Heritage. Methodologies & research tools

Re-enacting Early Video Art as a Research Tool for Media Art Histories

Laura Leuzzi

A Systems Engineer’s Perspective for the Re-Creation of Media Art. N-Cha(n)-t by David Rokeby

Diego Mellado Martínez

Resisting a Total Loss of Digital Heritage Web 2.0-archiving & bridging thesaurus for media art histories

Oliver Grau

Redesigning Rare Japanese Books in the Digital Age Design of the Narrative Book Collection

Goki Miyakita/Keiko Okawa/Graeme Earl

Curatorial Practices. Commissioning policies & conservation strategies for digital art

Net-based and Networked Challenges for the conservation of digital art

Sabine Himmelsbach

The Future of Museums: How will they evolve due to digital changes and in relation to time-based media

Howard Besser

Algorithmic Signs, Venice 2017 Tracing the history of computer art

Francesca Franco

Preservation of Software-based Art at Tate

Patricia Falcão

The Development of Digital Narratives Fred Adam and the pioneering multimedia interactive creations in MIDE, Cuenca, during the 1990s

José R. Alcalá Mellado/Beatriz Escribano Belmar

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Oliver Grau, Janina Hoth and Eveline Wandl-Vogt

Digital Art & Digital Humanities

Compared to traditional art forms—such as painting or sculpture—digital art has a diverse potential for imaging and visualizing digital cultures; being as it consists of and discusses various (digital) technologies and tools. With digitisation influencing our everyday lives through telecommunication, social media and mobile applications, digital technologies document, organise and shape contemporary societies. By creating with the same technologies, artists investigate our digitised cultures and circumvent the black-boxing thereof. They investigate and mediate the technological influence on socio-cultural development and transformation.

Through transdisciplinary methods at the intersection of art, science and technology, digital art combines artistic creation with innovative research and technological development and thereby bridges art history to digital methods and contemporary socio-cultural phenomena. As such, digital art’s development often goes in accordance with the academic field of digital humanities. Digital artists have contributed to the development of computational analysis through the aesthetic and experimental art-science-technology dispositions of their art form. Their artistic creations are developed in parallel with digital methods and tools in the humanities and sciences, which have been applied in art and academia for over half a century now.

While technology is becoming increasingly important in research, the connections between digital art, digital humanities and (digital) art history are often neglected, or only marginally recognized and digital artworks are rarely investigated as research subject. Media and digital art theory was developed as an independent research field and, in consequence, these connections are often not reflected within a transdisciplinary approach (Paul 2013).

In digital humanities (DH), with the TEI initiative, data mining and visualisation tools, most analytical methods so far have emphasized text encryption and digitisation efforts in fields such as archaeology, art history, linguistics, history and numismatics. Visual born digital objects often remain on the margin of research even though they mark a vast amount of online data. Additionally, they are still not incorporated into the art historical canon or exist only as a niche phenomenon rather than a main contemporary art movement.

From text encoding to virtualisation methods to interactive storytelling—digital artists contribute to digital culture with arts-based research and novel approaches to digital technologies through artistic processes. In 2009, Tamiko Thiel began her series of augmented reality installations, bringing her virtual reality compositions from web interfaces into reality through the lens of portable devices (smart phones, tablets) (Fig. 1).1 Using a Layar augmented reality app, she portrayed “hidden” historic and thematic layers of public spaces—a tool now applied in museums for interactive explorations by seemingly “bringing objects to life.” This technology became widely popular through the Pokémon GO gaming app in 2016. Yet, this connection between art-science-technology projects, digital technologies and the commercialisation thereof is rarely reflected in research, which could support computational analysis of this contemporary art form and, in a broader sense, digital cultures.

With regard to their influence on the Digital Age and its technologies, we may regard digital art as “the art of our time” in terms of sociopolitical and cultural relevance (Grau 2013a): thematising complex challenges for our life and societies, such as genetic engineering, the rise of post human bodies, climate, the image and media revolution (Hauser 2008; Borries 2011); and with it the explosion of communication, the change towards virtual financial economies, the processes of globalization and surveillance (Vesna 2007; Mitchell 2011). In Pic-me (2014)2, Marc Lee wrote an Instagram app, which users can install on Google earth, to locate randomly chosen Instagram posts via GPS data. By connecting social media accounts with the real-life identities through the location, Lee highlighted surveillance through user data on social media accounts.

Figure 1. Tamiko Thiel, Transformation, 2012. ©Tamiko Thiel

As response to the rising industrial waste generation and resulting environmental issues, Gilberto Esparza created robots, or Plantas Autofotosintéticas (2016),3 which are powered with toxic waste. As hybrid work between art, scientific innovation and anthropocene research, his work challenges common methods of managing air and water pollution.

In 1997, I/O/D’s Web Stalker foreshadowed domain crawling and colink analysis through the artistic and technological development of an alternative web browser (Fig. 2).4 At that time, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape‘s Navigator were the two most commonly used browsers and I/O/D aesthetically explored alternative ways of browsing through the web. Their method of highlighting connections between webpages and hypertexts are now common in computational analysis.

Digital artists today are shaping highly disparate and complex areas, like time-based installation art, telepresence art, genetic and bio art, robotics, net art and space art. They are experimenting with nanotechnology, artificial or A-life art; creating virtual agents and avatars, mixed realities, and database-supported art. Digital art often addresses many senses—visual, aural and beyond. It thereby technically explores and transforms creative process within and outside of art. In a humanist tradition, digital art frequently addresses controversial contemporary discussions, challenges and dangers, and proposes socio-cultural transformations. Thus, it is an art form with a deeply comprehensive potential in the reflection of our information societies regarding the digital revolution. Because it utilizes new technologies, a large number of innovative visual expressions have been developed and artists increasingly operate transculturally as well as transdisciplinary.

Figure 2. I/O/D, Web stalker, 1997. ©I/O/D

As a research subject, however, digital artworks are still rarely investigated (with digital methods) despite the fact that they are most often born-digital works, generate digital data or document user interaction. Unlike digitized artworks, from illuminated books to ancient architecture to modern paintings, they are rarely collected and analysed in digital humanities projects.

Compared to other born-digital cultural heritage, e.g. websites that can be crawled and documented or online events that are screen recorded, digital artworks are even more elusive in their object hood. With digital technologies as intrinsic part of their medium and subject, they require constant updating. Their collection and preservation is a much discussed topic involving several stakeholders from artists to technicians at collecting institutions. In their modularity, one cannot only document the website of an artwork; in their processuality, one cannot fixate the work, or artefactualize it, in one state of being. Additionally, digital artworks often remediate data generated live from social media and other online sources. In other words, these artworks challenge traditional archive, collection and preservation methods and, consequently, museums and other memory institutions both online and offline still struggle with archiving this “art of our time” for future generations.

The aim of this collection is to focus on how we need to redefine preservation methods for digital art by creating a transdisciplinary dialogue between all the involved stakeholders and how we can archive digital artworks by acknowledging their authenticity and mediality. The discussion goes beyond preservation as such and questions how digital artworks can be further re-used for curatorial and dissemination projects, and as research data. How can we utilize digital art databases and collections for research purposes and which infrastructures do we need for these purposes? Authors discuss ideas of collecting in- and outside of traditional memory institutions, within online databases and for purposes of exhibiting, researching and disseminating digital art presently and for long-term preservation. Archiving in theory and in practice-based approaches are juxtaposed to bring together experts from all academic disciplines and memory institutions involved in preserving digital art as digital cultural heritage. We retrace the discourses and disciplines intrinsic for digital art preservation towards a transdisciplinary theory which combines art history, media art theory, conservation, computer studies, media studies and collection studies.

Digital Art & Preservation

To preserve a digital artwork for future generations—or even beyond software updates and changing system requirements—, many factors theoretically, technically and institutionally need to be considered and combined. As interconnected, “living” entities, digital artworks have surpassed the concept of object-oriented art and necessitate a rethinking of preservation strategies. Through their various technological and cocreative components, documenting and disseminating these artworks exceeds the concept of artefactualisation and restoration towards an archival strategy as continuing process. So far, most museum projects and other initiatives have developed intransitive preservation forms, e.g. emulation and web archiving. They successfully document an artwork’s iteration—usually at a stage when it was originally published or exhibited, but negate digital art’s mediality in its intrinsically intertwined technology, design and methodology. For example, while web archiving can document the interface design of an artwork’s homepage and enable users to continue to access and interact with it, this does not automatically archive the entire artwork, let alone its creative process and technology. Preservation material, then, has to adopt more fluid forms with alternations and (re)iterations and update procedures while still being based upon concepts of artistic intention and authenticity. New strategies on archiving, collecting and preserving require a deeper understanding of the mediality of digital art and its components, adaption to its co-creative process and be re-usable as archival data to create multiple narratives about the histories and futures of digital art.

The discourse on preserving digital art indicates how archival procedures imply underlying questions of authenticity, artistic intentionality and archive theory, to name only a few concepts (Dekker 2018; Rinehart/Ippolito 2014; Fauconnier 2003), and highlights how digital art has put these concepts into question. Simultaneously, technicians need to solve the issue of technical obsolescence in regard to long term archiving. Digital art preservation necessitates a network of collaborations: between the artists and technicians that developed and constructed the work, the institutional staff responsible for collection and preservation, scholars and conservationists. A theory of digital art preservation is therefore transdisciplinary not only due to the collaborative nature of this art’s production, but in the necessity of combining theoretical writing with practice-based research by all of the professions involved.

The Roundtable—a DARIAH event at the 2017 Re: Trace Conference, held at the Academy of Sciences, Vienna5—introduces the current issues in digital art preservation with special regard to how museums have thus far responded to the challenge and how new infrastructures both off- and online can be established for the future. Renowned scholars pinpointed the main research questions today in regard to digital art theory and preservation strategies in museums and other memory institutions.

Both the histories and futures of digital art in museums are debated with a presentation on curatorial strategies by Francesca Franco, who describes the concept for exhibiting computer art from the 1970s. Alcalá/Escribano demonstrate the institutional history of the MIDE collection with a case study on an artwork’s versioning. They argue for the integral relationship between the general, industrial development of digital technologies and early “primitive” media art projects both in terms of their production and preservation. These research-based projects are juxtaposed with practice-based preservation methods from Diego Mellado and Patricia Falcão. From a technician’s point of view, Mellado proposes a new documentation method as demo artwork descriptions, which can be reinterpreted without relying on specific software or hardware. Combining documentation and preservation strategies, Mellado codeveloped a method which aims at documenting an artwork’s functionality and aesthetics to enable the preservation and exhibition of an artwork after the technology has become outdated. Having supported many artists on the creation and re-installment of their works, Mellado writes from a practice-based research perspective to conserve media art in its originality as aesthetic while allowing for technological changes. Patricia Falcão introduces strategies in the time-based media preservation projects at Tate. As conservator in a well-established institution for contemporary art, she describes main challenges and best practices for collecting and preserving artworks in this infrastructure.

Digital Art & Archive Theory

Online storage methods enable us to gather more data than ever before. By 2020, our digital universe will grow by a factor of 300, from 130 exabytes in 2005 to 40,000 exabytes and will double every two years, driven largely by the increase in machine-generated digital images and their metadata.6 The internet is often described as an archive, or archival in the metaphorical definition of the term, due to the (seemingly) easy access for every user to data—from images and videos, sound and music to articles, journals and books.

This has also caused a renewed interest in archive theory and archival practices online and offline. With digital technologies and online data storage, a new archival dynamic has emerged due to the processuality of these technologies in combination with their seeming “archive-ability.” In media studies and media archaeology, the necessity for more dynamic archive infrastructures which question the search for origin inherent in traditional archives have been addressed for digital data (Ernst 2003; Zielinski 2014). At the same time, theorists analysed the essential memory functionality in computer hardware (Chun 2008). With input from other disciplines, e.g. gender and queer studies, the debate on the archive as power dynamic was debated for digital data, where the inherent categorization in databases and the appearing objectivity of data analysis is investigated (Wyatt 2008).

In the early 2000s, many scholars celebrated the ability to not only store large amounts of data/knowledge, but to distribute them globally and democratically to anyone interested and with Web access (Galloway 2011). In digital humanities, databases are one of the most important research tools for collecting and re-using data. However, the largest servers today belong to governments and the industry, e.g. social media platforms, online distributors, and are therefore “dark archives” largely inaccessible.7 While web technologies function by storing hypertexts and interconnected data, this function is always temporary or cannot be accessed by users without sufficient knowledge and tools. Therefore, the internet as archive relates to the metaphorical meaning rather than the functionality (and usability) of an archive.

For digital art, its accessibility and preservation for future generations remain to be an open question. Do we embrace the ephemerality of digital technologies or do we acknowledge the mediality of Web technology as based on memory techniques, when debating its documentation and archiving? While conservation in museums and other institutions affects financing, technological expertise and collaborations, online archiving was established as an open, easily usable and accessible method to document artworks within a database environment, similar to other digital cultural heritage projects.

Artists engage contemporary digital technologies, leading to the production of artworks that are necessarily processual, ephemeral, interactive, multimedia-based, and context-dependent (Paul 2016). Following academic standards, the preservation of a digital artwork demands the ‘recording’ of these various aspects, including specific appearances, production processes, exhibitions, distribution, institutional contexts, observer response, publications, and research (Grau 2003a). Since the beginning of the Third Millennium, there has certainly been evident promotion of digital art conferences, lexicons, and platforms for the purpose of documenting MediaArtHistories. But even with such progress, as a post-industrial information society in the digital sphere, we continue to be threatened with a significant loss of this critical art form, both in art archives and databases, and for the accessibility of future scholarship and the general public. As recently expressed in an international declaration8, signed as of 2019 by more than 500 scholars and leading artists from over 40 countries, there is an urgent need to create a stable international platform of interoperable archives.

Therefore, for digital art, database projects have been developed that went beyond traditional art historical archival methods, e.g. scientific-based (Archive of Digital Art, the Variable Media Questionnaire), collaborative (Artelectronicmedia.com), institutional (V2, Rhizome Artbase, Media Art Festival Archives) and commercial (Sedition, Niio). Most archives document textual and visual data: biographical, bibliographical, indexical, descriptive and often develop tools for recording and re-using archive material. First and foremost, artists selfarchive their work on their own homepages. The methods on how to collect and organize vary depending on what to collect (by specific genre, geographic area, technology etc.), conservation type (emulation, rewriting) and documentation (metadata system, data sheets). Many databases today are co-creatively designed and shared, but they can also be (semi-)curated by an editorial team. However, databases are rarely interoperational and often a lack a long-term preservation and sustainability plan. The goal of archiving this contemporary art form for more than a few years is still an open question which needs to be debated between artists, scholars and conservators.

In this book, the transdisciplinary investigation includes an epistemological inquiry on the questions of what we can know and what we want to know about and from digital artworks. Since one major aspect of archiving is the historicization of digital art, we must question how we can narrate artistic, technological and institutional histories for contemporary art in a relation to specific archival methodologies. Once artworks are preserved and thereby embedded into an archival system, they become knowledge carriers for events and experiences in the past as much as individual collection objects. As such archival objects and historical sources, they are central for writing MediaArtHistories.

In this collection, we therefore begin by introducing central works of “historical media art” and the methods of collecting and archiving. Frieder Nake and George Legrady introduce their own pioneering work along with other examples from early media art and its technologies. By comparing the works of artist Harold Cohen and programmer Georg Nees, both pioneers for Computer, or Algorithmic Art, Nake questions the correlation between artistic and technological knowledge. Legrady describes the continuous influence of technical developments in photography and digital imaging for his artworks. Escribano/Alcála retrace the copy machine as a tool for early media art production in the United States and Europe, discussing how MediaArtHistories can be written by following technical procedures as origins of artistic inspiration and progress. The diversity and complexity of these histories challenged new archival projects to document the new art forms as early as the 1980s.

Anne-Marie Duguet chaired one of the very first preservation projects focused on digital art in the mid-1990s—before the publication of Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever.” The research results preceded his archival definitions by investigating the complex question of how to archive an artwork made up of not only many entities, software and hardware, but that incorporates—as a network of ideas—imagery, texts as well as human and technical input. She and her team worked very closely together with the artists to find singular preservation strategies that were approved by the artists. As a consequence, each project was developed and discussed over a long period of time (around six years) and she analyzes central themes of work ethics in regard to archiving non-object art.

The artistic perspective is often still underestimated or negated in this discourse, both due to omission or lack of knowledge by the artist and/or by the host institution. With digital artworks, and digital technologies in general, the need for a continued update is often not considered in a longterm preservation strategy. Artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer describes from his own experience how memory institutions such as art museums as well as artists can avoid technological issues and discusses how a reiteration of an artwork is in line with artistic intention and authenticity. Since the impossibility of archiving digital art has been proclaimed by artists in the past as a characteristic of its ephemerality—following a radical interpretation of Derrida’s archive theory—, artists very often did not take action in the documentation and conservation of their work. However, one must differentiate between the concept of archival power as a method of control, the idea of art as originality and the modularity of digital art entities are essential disparate characteristics.

With net.artworks as case studies, Giselle Beiguelman highlights the difficulty for archival strategies to document the artwork, or a version of the artwork, in a way that can be considered adequate, replicating and functional. Beiguelman discusses the interconnection of frontend/ backend and user interaction, how these are essential elements of an artwork and whether they can be documented. She thereby expands archival strategies by separating the outer appearance and frontend functionality from an artwork’s origin and concept. The question is reformulated as: Which elements should be considered as essential for an artwork?

Digital artworks redefine traditional art historical concepts of authenticity, object-hood and originality, and as a consequence, also interrupt the archival system towards renewed ideas for documenting and disseminating data for the future. In fact, many digital artists debate archive theory within the framework of digital technologies in their works. Annet Dekker discusses these artworks as counter-practices of the industrialised archiving system online, with companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook as some of the largest archives for digital data. Her article goes beyond the boundaries of light and dark archiving by examining how artists develop alternative ways of online archiving as a collective, networked method. Janina Hoth deliberates the opportunity of online archives for a co-creative knowledge generating system for digital art. By examining the production process of digital art in juxtaposition to the archival infrastructure of online databases, she argues for a restructured archival system, which accommodates the new and innovative creative process inherent to digital art. She further suggests that, by stepping away from the concept of an artefact, archival documents become not only original sources, but also an open process themselves.

As we progress with the question of what needs to be archived in regards to digital art preservation, and which methods are available to us, the question also shifts towards re-usability of (open) data. The documents become not only a source for seeing and experiencing older artworks, but a source of inspiration, research and education as well.

Laura Leuzzi demonstrates how archival methods can also be an artistic experiment for a continued development of media art performances. In addition to a documentation of the “original” works, artists such as Marina Abramović would re-enact their performances with new technologies, often acknowledging the former versions by incorporating them into the new performance. The continued works become embodied and interactive knowledge carriers, where not only the technology changes, but the artist’s body is also parallel in their artwork(s).

Finally, the projects MediaArtResearch Thesaurus (Grau) and the Narrative Book Collection present methods of dissemination for both research and education. Examining the works as digital data which can be processed, compared and analysed, archiving goes beyond saving documents for collection and exhibition purposes towards their continuing reusability online. The MediaArtResearch Thesaurus project focused on visual comparisons to bridge media art with its art historic predecessors. For the Narrative Book Collection, Miyakita/Okawa/Earl examined the online education platform “FutureLearn” for an interactive knowledge exchange.

Digital Art & Collection Strategies

On the Archive of Digital Art (ADA, digitalartarchive.at), over 1,500 institutions are documented as digital art event venues with conferences and summits, exhibitions and performances as well as higher education organizations with graduate programs and teaching platforms. Only a small amount of these institutions have an official program or strategy for collecting digital art. With museums, archives and libraries continuing as the core collecting memory institutions of our societies, as they are publicly funded, they can with certainty claim that digital art has not fully arrived as a main contemporary art form in the main art collecting institutions. Due to the lack of institutional support and rapid changes in storage and presentation media, works that originated ten years ago can often no longer be recovered technically for exhibition or preservation purposes. As debated since the 1990s, museums rarely include digital art in their collections in an encompassing strategy, which can preserve digital art as part of media art histories in regards to both content and technology. Those that do struggle to sustain financial backing, expertise, and technology for the preservation of artworks through strategies such as migration, emulation, and reinterpretation (MacDonald 2009; Ippolito/Rinehart 2014). Hence, in the 2010s, we are facing the loss of an art form in all of its varieties and as part of digital heritage from the early times of our post-industrial digital societies.

Digital art has also changed the venues and media for exhibition and dissemination. Rather than museums and galleries, around 200 festivals and biennials worldwide can be considered as the most important venues for digital art. They have shaped the histories of digital art insofar as their foci on future-oriented technology, and its main discourses and issues supported digital art’s position at the intersection of art, science and technology (Waelder 2010). As temporary events, they collect their own histories—Transmediale, Microwave and ISEA all having their own online archives—, but are rarely involved with the collection of digital art. At the same time, digital art has not significantly entered the walls of museums.

Which infrastructures online and offline are necessary to collect digital art within public funding methods? Today there are more than 50,000 museums worldwide. Japan and Germany, for example, have more than 5,000 each, among them hundreds dedicated to art only. At the same time, in many other countries, a museum infrastructure is still developing and this challenges established research strategies within museums. With all the diversity and history of the museum in its role as preserving and disseminating cultural heritage, the responsibility of collecting borndigital objects is still an open question.9

Digital technologies and cultures have made their own impact in these debates with digitisation methods and their position in “saving” endangered cultural heritage objects as well as enabling new research methods for collection items. In the digital age, new tools to present, to explore, collect and access cultural artefacts; to connect, research, manage and visualize data were established. Which status should be given in museums worldwide to digital-born arts and cultures? Which have their own history of more than five decades?

Howard Besser re-narrates the historic development of museums in the US towards digitisation and using digital tools. Looking at several key technological developments inside and outside of museums from the 1970s onwards, the difficult relationship between museums as traditional knowledge institutions and the progressive new technologies is retraced. Sabine Himmelsbach introduces the collection methods at the Haus der elektronischen Künste in Basel—one of the few government supported institutions in Europe with an active collection strategy for digital art. She describes central issues in applied preservation methods at museums and other institutions and thereby offers a comparative view.

Together, the texts in this collection provide a survey of key perspectives and debates in digital art preservation and the histories/ futures of archive and conservation methods. Bridging theory and practice, Digital Art through the Looking Glass points to new perspectives on how to un/sustain digital art online and offline, and how to analyse it with DH methods. Within Digital Humanities, digital art becomes palpable in its transdisciplinary position in creative tool development, as a critical medium for digital culture and as a research subject. In order to acknowledge these potentials, we need to apply preservation methods, find best practices for documentation and conservation and be able to re-use them for future scholarship.

This book results from the 2017 Re: Trace conference, the seventh edition of the conference series On the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology and a cooperation with DARIAH-ERIC. The third day of the conference focused on “Digital Arts, Archives and Museums.” As one main outcome, we discussed the need to bring together all of the involved stakeholders and, hence, it became the main theme of this book. The editors would like to thank all the conference participants and panel members who gave vital input for our research and, of course, the authors for sharing their insights and expertise.

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Vesna, Victoria. 2007. Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of information overflow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Waelder, Pau. 2016. Keep it alive or let it die: new media art, curating and the art market.http://www.pauwaelder.com/keep-it-alive-or-let-it-die-new-media-art-curating-and-the-art-market. [Last checked April 27, 2017]

Wyatt, Sally. 2008. “Technological determinism is dead; Long live technological determinism.” In E Hackett, O Amsterdamska, M Lynch & J Wajcman (eds.), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 165-180.

Zielinski, Siegfried and Hans Belting, Eckhard Fürlus, Claudia Giannetti (eds.). 2014. AnArchive(s)—A Minimal Encyclopaedia on Archaeology and Variantology of the Arts and Media. Köln: Walther König.

1 https://www.digitalartarchive.at/database/artists/general/artist/thiel.html.

2 http://marclee.io/en/pic-me-fly-to-the-locations-where-users-send-posts.

3 http://plantasnomadas.com.

4 http://bak.spc.org/iod.

5 https://vimeo.com/253584186.

6 IDC Digital Universe: http://www.emc.com/leadership/digitaluniverse/iview/index.htm

7 See the Digital Preservation Glossary for a technical definition of the term “dark archive“: https://www.lib.umich.edu/preservation-and-conservation/digital-preservation/digital-preservation-glossary.

8 International Liverpool Declaration “Media Art needs global networked organisation and support”: http://www.mediaarthistory.org/declaration.

9 European Charter for Access to Research Infrastructures: https://ec.europa.eu/research/infrastructures/pdf/2016 charterforaccessto-ris.pdf.

Early New Media Art. The search for originality in technological art and its challenges for preservation

Georg Nees & Harold Cohen: Re: tracing the origins of digital media

Frieder Nake

Algorithmic Artist

University of the Arts Bremen & University of Bremen [email protected]

Keywords

Algorithmic art, Harold Cohen, Georg Nees, generative art, semiotic machine, AARON, origins of digital media

Figure 1. Georg Nees (1926-2016) (first algorithmic art show 1965 in Stuttgart)

Figure 2. Harold Cohen (1928-2016) (first algorithmic art show 1972 in Los Angeles)

One day in 1964, Georg Nees, son of the city of Nuremberg, and as a mathematician working for the Siemens Company in Erlangen (Germany), watched the new Zuse Graphomat Z64 automatic drawing machine as it generated a first short straight line segment and, after a change of direction, continued to do the next, and again, and more of them. Though somewhat fast in its movements, the machine was still slow enough so that Nees could closely observe how it switched direction and continued it for some distance, before it again altered direction for another seemingly straight line segment. And so it went, repeating the same simple operation eight times before closing the funny little figure that meanwhile had emerged. The line segments appeared on paper in black ink as graphic entities, building groups and neighbourhoods forming shapes. An entire array of such creatures (Fig. 5).

Decades later, recalling for the visitor from his memory the scene with the Graphomat, Nees says: “I was standing in awe, overwhelmed by what the machine made me become a witness of. Here was something,” he added, “that would not disappear again.”

Some other day four years later, in 1968, Harold Cohen, young and already a successful British artist, just arrived as a visiting professor to the Fine Arts Department at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), felt a bit frustrated by Jef Raskin's attempts to teach him programming. Raskin (1943-2005), then a graduate student of music at UCSD, holding several previous degrees, and up to later becoming an important figure in the design of the Apple Macintosh, was concentrating on the fundamentals of programming as he was introducing the forty-year-old artist into the art of computer programming.1

Raskin was fifteen years younger than the British artist, but obviously understood very well what his job should be: He required from Cohen some degree of patience when he chose flow-charts as the basic objects to make his student become familiar with. In flow-charts, we may describe a program independent of the intricacies of a concrete programming language. This helps the novice to better understand principles of programming. But Cohen, after a while of growing impatience, said, enough of this, I finally want to get my hands on code. In reaction, Raskin left him and, after a while, returned with a fat handbook for the FORTRAN programming language, dumped it on the table, “here it is”, and left Cohen behind, now alone with the handbook. The artist started reading and exercising, and did not stop doing this before the middle of the night.

Decades later, recalling the scene with Raskin for his visitor, he says: “I was baffled but overwhelmed by the code elements that opened up in front of my eyes.”

Nobody will ever know precisely how the two situations happened in actual fact. But who would care to know them better, perhaps from cameras installed at the Erlangen and San Diego locations, including microphones to record what the two actors did, what happened to them and how they reacted. Both stories are nice stories that Nees and Cohen tried to remember when they told them to the author. He did not change much of what he was told, or even nothing. But who knows, and several media transmissions are responsible for what you, dear reader, are now reading about two incidents that have happened in 1964 and 1968, in Germany and in the USA.

So much for a first meeting of our two heroes. Before I am going to say more about each one of the two, I want to inject a short note about digital media. It is intended as a kind of bracket for what the mathematician and the artist are doing in their very different manners at the two poles of a contradictory spectrum, far apart geographically as well as intellectually. The two men are contributing to, and pushing forward, a field in the history of fine art that is often, unfortunately, called "computer art." Much better, and more precisely, it should be called by names like "algorithmic art" or "generative art."2

Both these terms reveal the important fact that the artist in generative or algorithmic art is working from a radically novel perspective. He or she are thinking their work, they build it in their head before they describe, in an appropriate way, to the machine what they want it to do. “Think the work, don’t make it!” is their revolutionary approach. It entails a dramatic consequence: When you think the work, you never think a single work. You immediately realize that the thinking of works is a thinking of possible realizations, of schemata, methods and techniques to generate works, much more than a thinking of generating an individual work. The creation of an individual work is materials to be combined, melted, attached, mixed, piled up, connected, applied, etc. The generation of an entire family of works, however, amounts to transforming signs into materials that the signs stand for. Therefore, it is a thinking of infinities, of literally infinite sets of works. The individual work becomes an instance only of an infinite class of works. The class is described by certain (visual) features that are parameterized. The set of parameters and their ranges of variation determine the variation and changes from one instance to the next.

As a corollary to this, the work of algorithmic art is constituted as a class of works. Each single realization is an indicator only of the class it belongs to. The work of algorithmic art, when viewed in a more traditional way, is reduced to a state of "standing-for." The masterpiece disappears. The permanently changing appearance of the works transforms them into dynamic processes more than into fixed, static works.

Such statements in their style of factuality may not yet convince the reader, or they may appear trivial to her or him. Both reactions are okay. For they depend on how much or how little we have accepted that our time's fabric is determined more by the dynamics of change than the statics of permanence. Peter Lunenfeld has written about similar observations as the aesthetics of unfinish3.

Georg Nees is the mathematician who moves into fine art; Harold Cohen is the artist who moves into computing. Both gain their exceptional creative capacities and their historic positions by emigration into unknown lands. They gain by giving up, and they re-gain what they give up. As individuals, they stand for new sorts of media. They stand for media that require two capacities melting into one in the same person: algorithmics and aesthetics.

Media, digital

Both our stories are about computers. But computers appear in opposing roles. Nees is an expert in program development; Cohen is an expert in painting. When Nees approaches the computer, he knows perfectly well how to do this; but he may be hesitant about what he should ask from the computer. When Cohen approaches the computer, he knows perfectly well what he wants it to do; but he may still be uncertain about how to get it to do just that.

Figure 3. View of Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA London, 1968.

Figure 4. Catalogue Cybernetic Serendipity, special issue studio international, 1968.

Nees is observing a drawing automaton. He has before instructed a computer to output a punched paper tape such that the automaton, when controlled by the paper tape's codes, generates a drawing of ink on paper that is the result of Nees' thinking. This last sentence, I assume, may read a bit complex. It means that Nees has developed a program that, in the end, draws. He is concerned with computer output that he is going to evaluate from an aesthetic perspective.

Cohen, on the other hand, is eager to learn how to write a program, using a particular programming language for a particular computer. His teacher, however, with the best of intentions, introduces him to general principles. That makes him, the artist, become nervous. For as an artist, he is accustomed to the particular and single specimen as opposed to the general and all members of a specification. Cohen's concern is this: when do I finally get down to writing code so that I can force that machine, the computer, to do precisely what I want it to do?

Computer input is what his thinking is focussed on and he feels intuitively that it may still take quite a while before he gets to where four years earlier Georg Nees already was.4

Georg Nees knows well what one can do with a computer. He plays with it, forcing it to do what he wants it to do and nothing else. He does not know much about how to do art. Harold Cohen knows well what one can do with brushes and paints. He plays with them, forcing them to generate forms and colourings that look the way he wants them to look. He doesn't know much about how to deal with computers.

The first exhibition of drawings claimed to be of artistic interest was displaying works by Georg Nees (in February, 1965, in Stuttgart5). A few weeks only before Cohen left London for San Diego, the large and comprehensive international exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity. The computer and the arts6 had opened at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA; opening on 2 August, 1968, Figs. 3 and 4). Of course, Cohen had visited the show. He was impressed, and when he, shortly after, arrived in California, his mind was full of fresh new possibilities opening up to his artistic thinking. At the ICA, he may have seen Nees' work but it may well be that the kinetic creatures of the show attracted his attention more than the computer-generated drawings on the walls.7 The spectacle8 of a flower bending over towards the visitor as he or she makes certain noises does not only attract kids much more than a static drawing—adults do not react very differently.

The computer during the 1960s and well into the early 1980s is considered to be a machine and this interpretation can hardly be different. It is a machine of the automaton type of machinery. Like the telephone or the conveyor belt and many more: machinery that functions automatically. To a large extent, the automaton can operate without much of explicit control by humans. Only in the early 1980s, with the appearance of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, the tool metaphor takes on prominent status. The machine computer is transformed from an investment good into a consumer good. Without tremendous changes in the way of using the machine, the transformation would not have been possible. The computer now becomes a good to be picked up from an ordinary store or supermarket.

With the breakthrough of the Internet (1994), the "tool" computer, already widespread, but now—by taking on the function of an end-device to access an enormous and rapidly growing mega-machine, the Internet— the computer is gradually seen as a medium.9 With the additional global storm of the smartphone, the people of the world are now almost slavishly and in permanence engaged in trivial forms of communication that pretend to be greatly liberating and providing access to the knowledge of the world. Part of this is, of course, not really wrong. But the medium's impact is of the kind that air plays for land-based, and water plays for sea-based animals: The medium to sustain their lives.

Georg Nees

As he told us his story, when he first observed the machine drawing lines he had thought before and described algorithmically, Georg Nees stood in awe, overwhelmed by what he saw happening. Was he observing how his own thoughts were taking on material form? A short while before, he had picked up from the computer a punched tape that his own program had generated as output. He had taken the tape to the automatic drawing machine, had inserted its front end into the paper tape reader, had pressed the start button and was now watching the machine doing its jerky job. A cold vibration was running down his spine: "This will never disappear again."

At around the same time, late in 1963, I had been in the same situation of observing the machine as it was materializing my own thinking. Excitement shook me. But the moment I saw the calculating machine mutate into a drawing machine, did not affect me as deeply, as I now feel, my friend experienced it. Independent of each other we saw moments of history when a new medium was born.

Figure 5. Georg Nees, Achtecke, 1965. ©Georg Nees

Closed polygons of 8 vertices placed into a regular grid. The random variation of placing the vertices inside a small drawing area demonstrates a wild variety of simple shapes. The white areas are a later additional effect in this rendition. The original drawing only shows the black lines of the polygons on white ground.

Of course, history does not happen in the form of isolated moments. History is much more floating than jumping from one state to the next. Separate moments may make great memories for individuals involved in the happening. But we can safely assume that there have always been other persons who have lived through similar kinds of awesome events, a moment or two before, somewhere in the world. Their action, their reaction, all of them collected together as a joint experience, make up the historic moment, collapsing into the very date that may one later day be identified as the beginning of something new.

There were others in the United States who were lucky enough to do their work in environments where the first drawing machines were put to use (in the USA, they are called "plotters").10 In Germany, the author started developing a basic graphics package for the Graphomat Z64 in 1963.

Our point here is the subtle shift from routine engineering work to artistic creation. None of the early drawing devices was intended and constructed with anything else in mind but outputting results of engineering, or business-type, calculations not only in numerical form, but also (and more appealingly) as drawings of statistical analyses or constructions of machine parts, electric circuits, architectural plans or other engineering designs. The visual-iconic output (instead of the numeric-symbolic output) was almost a side-product only of common engineering work than a drawing whose purpose was the visual appearance of drawing itself and nothing else. To some degree in contrast to engineering, the visual appearance is to the heart of artistic thinking.

Georg Nees' fantastic ur-experience must be understood against such a background. The early existence of computer-aided drawings does not devaluate the shiver and foresight caused in Georg Nees' mind by the appearance of a first artistic drawing here, in the Computing Centre of the Siemens Company, some day in 1964. What he, the mathematician, had been experiencing would soon shake the world of art. To be more modest: a small part of that world. But eventually, it came to deeply influence culture, to revolutionize the world of image production and much of our daily perception and, thus, of aesthetics.

In order to make all that happen, Nees had to write software that generates punched paper-tapes that were to control the movements of the Graphomat's ink pens mounted into a container controlled by the xymovements of the drawing machine. In a way, Nees was watching his "ideas becoming a machine that makes the art." Nees' action was three years before conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (in 1967) would formulate as one of his famous Paragraphs on Conceptual Art exactly this insight about the relation between idea, machine and work: "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." (LeWitt 1967). But here, at the Siemens Computing Centre in 1964, exactly this happened: the drawing machine generated an image that had before existed in form of a human idea. A mathematician had done in his actual practice what an artist would describe in form of words three years hence. The two persons, Georg Nees and Sol LeWitt, did not know anything of each other.

Harold Cohen

Las Vegas was famous, and perhaps still is, for gambling, nudity and other ways of getting rid of your money. Oddly enough, such places also attract scientific conferences. There may be hidden relations and similarities between such diverse activities of culture. Why not think of science and erotics as two kinds of exhibitionism? In either case, you must be willing to freely present something of yourself: your body, your money, your work.

The 1965 Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC, 30 November – 1 December) took place in Las Vegas. As was frequent practice at that time, industry displayed their most recent developments and relevant books were announced. But this year, an extra show presented earliest works of computer art by A. Michael Noll from Bell Laboratories (drawings of digital origin) and Maughan S. Mason (analog origin). In April of the same year, Noll's drawings had been exhibited at the avant-garde Howard Wise Gallery in New York City11.

The New York and Las Vegas events built a remarkable manifestation of newly emerging experiments in using computers and programs for generating aesthetic objects (to avoid the term "art"). At Howard Wise in New York: the art scene gets a chance to take notice. At the FJCC in Las Vegas: technology and science are becoming aware of this. Two different sites, two different audiences, but the same kind of objects: drawings of artistic quality but constructed by technological processes. The bridge between art and science takes on real form, when just one person is applying mathematical and engineering skills intending to generate aesthetic sensation (cf. Schmidgen 2017: 7).

Hardly anybody was taking much notice of the seemingly sudden break by high technology into the world of art. But the fact that Noll presented his works to an art-oriented audience of high rank at the avant-garde gallery, and a bit later again to the international audience of a large scientific and engineering conference, may be interpreted as a new kind of double event. Do those works constitute a new kind of aesthetic reality? In all likelihood, such questions were probably not discussed at the two events. However, the fact that engineers and mathematicians were making public artistic statements was discussed (at times with arrogant undertones by artists or art critics).

We will see later that, in fact, the works on display in New York City and Las Vegas constituted a new kind of aesthetic reality, a reality that is meanwhile dominating large parts of artistic manifestations.12 At the times of the actual events, they were puzzling, creating a weird kind of discussion and attention, but no real understanding of what was actually happening. Some time had to go by before the public was ready to realize the enormous impact that algorithmic techniques could bring to image generation.

Six years later, the 1971 FJCC returned to Las Vegas. With it came a show entitled "A computer-controlled drawing machine". That's what you may find on records of some of the galleries that have later exhibited Harold Cohen's work. At least one of them claimed, Cohen had a solo show in Las Vegas. Others may have copied this.

Experience has told us that what a commercial gallery writes is not often altogether trustworthy. It is true that the FJCC in 1971 took place in Las Vegas from 16 to 18 November. It is also a fact that the industry there showed their products (AFIPS 1971). The name "Harold Cohen" is not mentioned in the proceedings. However, the computer company Tektronix is listed among the exhibitors. Cohen's first drawing machine was controlled by a Tektronix computer. He presented the hardware as part of his 1972 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In a lecture given on 23 September 1980 (Cohen 1980), he shows slides of the 1972 event. There we see the arrangement of the Tektronix plus drawing machine and he explicitly refers to it. It is not impossible that Cohen had been given a chance, at the 1971 FJCC already, to show and, perhaps, even demonstrate his drawing machine.13

In fact, it would be marvellous if this were the case. For, if it were, we would have a second case of one person turning himself into the bridge between science/technology and art. This case would be different, more advanced and more convincing than the first experiments in the mid-1960s.

For now it would be an established artist of international renown, who built the drawing machine himself and who would soon start into a longlasting process of software development that is unparalleled up to this day. I am referring to Cohen's system AARON that he started to construct in 1973 and continued in ever new steps until the end of his life (2016). A unique career of an artist who occasionally turned himself into an engineer without ever lowering his artistic goals and intentions.

Figure 6. Harold Cohen, Early work by AARON, 1974, hand coloured by H. Cohen. ©Harold Cohen

In Fig. 6, we see a very early drawing done by the system AARON. AARON is based on rules of the type if <condition> then <action>. Here, <condition> stands for a logical expression that can be "true" or "false". If it is true, then the <action> is executed. Otherwise, nothing is done. The early version of AARON contained rules that would allow finding some empty area on the "canvas", and would put the outline of some closed form into such a space. As we can see, such closed forms may be connected to another one, even several of them. Cohen did the colouring himself, after the plotter had done its job in drawing the shapes. Cohen's interest has always been colour. He took the liberty of adding this decisive component to the image (Fig. 6), which then owes its appearance to a collaboration of human and machine.

Harold Cohen had moved to San Diego, CA, from London, UK, in 1968. Under the Californian sun, first hesitatingly, he became interested in computing. As for anybody else in the early times of algorithmic art, this meant to him to learn how to program. Nobody—and certainly not Harold Cohen—wanted to pass on to some programmer the activity of describing to the machine what it was supposed to do. If there are exceptions to this unwritten rule or mode of conduct, the resulting images would most likely suffer in aesthetic quality or some other feature.

Why would this be so? The answer is quite simple. The act of creation was transformed and the final steps of materialization were moved away from the acting artist in quite a dramatic manner. He or she found herself in the programming lab rather than the painting studio. In the programming lab, the emerging work was first to be transformed into its own description. Before any visual aspect of the work became visible, it was necessary to describe in symbolic terms how the machine should generate the work. In a way, we may accept the description as a different form of the work itself. The "program" is, of course, the instrument to generate the work. But in some (perhaps twisted) way it is the work itself.