Reports from the Edge of Art and the Blockchain #3
By Ruth Catlow
I often hear artists described as society’s research and development team.
This idea was borne out by proceedings at the Tate Exchange’s Lives of Net Art in April, which found that upstart decentralised artforms would transform future collectors into perpetual performers of the artworks in their possession.
In the early aughties uncertainty surrounded the value and legacy of digital artworks, “infinitely reproducible and lacking financial value” (The Telegraph 2000).
“Made brave by the carefully forged financial wave created by Brit Art” Tate Gallery took risks (now-unconceivable) as one of the first international museums to commission Net Art, explained new media art curator Dr Sara Cook.
Artist Heath Bunting facilitated illegal European border crossings (2002–3) and Susan Collins announced the opening of the (fake) Tate Gallery in Space (2002). Uncomfortable Proximity (2000) by Graham Harwood transported Tate’s every third online visitor to a doppelganger website. Here portraits of the “great and good” were hideously deformed with boils and pubic hair, to convey the moral stain of slavery and other colonial atrocities, on which the British cultural project was built.
These artworks are emblematic of the socio-technical innovation of communities of newly connected transnational artists and activists in the late 90s. And they are cultural prototypes for a global society made strange by digital networks.
However, while artworld professionals have codified methods for caring for paintings and sculptures — preserving the legacy and value of groundbreaking born-digital artforms puts demands on the entire cultural infrastructure. How, for instance, asked Karen De Wild, should we preserve Agent Ruby (1999–2002), an “artificially intelligent” artwork by Lynn Hershman Leeson? Where are the boundaries of an artwork that incorporates the conversations it has with audiences? Bespoke methods for owning these networked artforms are necessary.
Cook described how preserving digital artforms in their complex unstable environments requires a dual cultural and technical approach.
Dragan Espenschied, artist, musician and Preservation Director at Rhizome proposes nothing less than a complete shift in paradigm from “collection and storage” to “repertoire and performance”.
In the creation of the Net Art Anthology he has established three clear guidelines to determine “when a performance of a digital artwork can be said to have been preserved.”
- The artifact and environment are present — emulating the hardware and software environments of the day.
- The performance can be reproduced — we can experience the artwork in a way that it would have been when it was originally created.
- The performance is portable across different places.
Due to the work of preservators such as Espenschied, the shocking prescience of many 90s Net Art works is likely to reverberate with future societies as it does in 2019. And from the web to the blockchain, artists and collectors are now better prepared to perform decentralised art forms to far future audiences, across as yet unimagined dimensions.
Ruth Catlow is ICO advisor for Arteïa and writes a regular column Reports from the Edge of Art and the Blockchain. Catlow is co-author of Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain and co-founder and co-director of FurtherfieldLondon’s longest running (de)centre for arts and technology and DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab.
