Displaying Immateriality: Selected Books On Conservation, Care and Exhibition of Digital Art
The emergence of new forms of art on and offline raises the need to rethink and rework traditional modes of art preservation and exhibition. Contemporary artists, curators and thinkers do not hesitate to provide us with numerous tools for reading and reflection. How do we construct our network culture? What paths does the virtual offer us? We have selected some texts that provide brilliant perspectives for the construction of new networks of meanings and new forms of artistic conception and perception.
Omar Kholeif: Art in the Age of Anxiety
Omar Kholeif, Art in the Age of Anxiety, The Mit Press, Mörel Books and Sharjah Art Foundation, 2021
What does it mean to make art in the Age of Anxiety? Omar Kholeif curated the exhibition and the homonymous catalog Art in the Age of Anxiety. The exhibition, born at the rising of the pandemic emergency, brought together a global group of contemporary artists to explore the ways everyday devices, technologies and digital networks have altered our collective consciousness. Kholeif borrows the poem The Age of Anxiety, by W.H. Auden (1947), to highlight a powerful and frighteningly consistent analogy and with the contemporary condition: isolation and the proliferation of technology and information become the cornerstone of a reflection on the ways of creating and sharing at the post-digital age.
Omar Kholeif’s book proves to be much more than a classic exhibition catalog, and offers with masterful care a variety of insights into art and its evolving relationship to technology. What if our everyday devices and their attendant networks have affected our collective and individual consciousness? What art does the Age of Anxiety deserve, what art does it need? Omar Kholeif tells us in the words and images of: Hoor Al Qasimi, Anonymous, Saira Ansari, Cory Arcangel, Jeremy Bailey, Douglas Coupland, Simon Denny, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Aruba Khalid, Omar Kholeif, Norman M. Klein, W. J. T. Mitchell, Todd Reisz, Danko Stjepanovic, Marc Tuters, Cory Arcangel, Douglas Coupland, Simon Denny, Danko Stjepanovic, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Cory Arcangel, Jeremy Bailey, Wafaa Bilal, James Bridle, Antoine Catala, Douglas Coupland, Thomson & Craighead, Simon Denny, Aleksandra Domanović, Constant Dullaart, Electronic Disturbance Theater, Cao Fei, Oliver Laric, Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Rafael Lozanno-Hemmer, Eva and Franco Mattes, Josha Nathanson, Katja Novitskova, Trevor Paglen, Jon Rafman, Tabor Robak, Pamela Rosenkranz, Aura Satz, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Jenna Sutela, United Visual Artists (UVA), Siebren Veersteeg, Andrew Norman Wilson, Guan Xiao and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. Welcome to a new age of anxiety, but also a new age of art.
Annet Dekker: Collecting and Conserving Net Art
Annet Dekker is an independent researcher and curator whose work focuses on the evolutions and reciprocal interactions of art and network cultures. In his book Collecting and Conserving Net Art, Dekker explores the peculiarities of net art in relation to museum studies. How does the emergence of net art highlight both the gaps and possibilities of art conservation, curatorship and exhibition? By arguing that networked systems bring into play the power relations of the traditional art palimpsest, Dekker highlights the mutability and transience of hardware and software. Art conservation in its virtuality is subject to the rapid obsolescence of technological supports. In this regard, Dekker sees in net art and in particular in software-based art a fertile field of study for the critical analysis of the choices of artistic conservation. Dekker’s book is without a doubt addressed to an audience of experts, and its precision and accuracy prove to be a valuable tool for reflection for art professionals.
Domenico Quaranta: In Your Computer and Sopravvivenza Programmata
Domenico Quaranta, In Your Computer, LINK Editions, Brescia 2011
In addition to being a brilliantly prolific author, curator, and publisher, Domenico Quaranta writes books and essays. His research clearly draws the evolution of digital art, the one made in the Net and for the Net, from Software art to videogames. His book entitled In Your Computer. Or, how I learned to love the art that comes to you through your computer screen and why you should learn to love it as well includes a collection of texts written between 2005 and 2010. His selection of essays, articles, and interviews with artists traces the history of Internet art, critical research around creative and self-generative processes, and methods of exhibiting and preserving works online. In your Computer… features many interventions of artists such as Eva and Franco Mattes, Casey Reas, UBERMORGEN.COM, Oliver Laric, Cory Arcangel, Tale of Tales, Jon Ippolito, and Gazira Babeli.
Quaranta’s book offers a heterogeneous mixtape of artistic interventions that even more today — about twenty years after their birth — have a nostalgic flavor. Nevertheless, the book respects its promise and teaches its reader how the gaze on the works evolves together with the works themselves, and how one can love art that is made and proudly shown through a computer screen. Quaranta’s research has most recently led to the editing of SOPRAVVIVENZA PROGRAMMATA. Etiche e pratiche di conservazione, dall’arte cinetica alla Net Art («PROGRAMMED SURVIVAL. Ethics and practices of conservation, from kinetic art to Net Art”, in collaboration with Valentino Catricalà (2020, in Italian). The book provides the cues for an even more topical and profound reflection on the preservation, and therefore survival, of digital art. In this sense, Programmed Survival faces the obsolescence and potential inadequacy of traditional methods of care. In the introduction of In Your Computer Quaranta asks « Why should you look at the world in a different way? ». The answer becomes now more than ever an imperative, and the art that flourishes on the Internet needs the rise of a new look and new care.
Joasia Krysa: Curating Immateriality
Joasia Krysa’s Curating Immateriality: the work of the curator in the age of network systems is the third volume of “AutonomediaOs DATA browser” series. Krysa, as an editor, curator and researcher analyzes the different parts of the debate around curating in the internet age. In Krysa’s reading, the emergence of the net has triggered an evolution in the process of artistic production and distribution, shifting the attention to the process dimension of the network and no longer oriented towards the artistic object. One of the central ideas proposed by the author concerns the question of the immateriality of cognitive and creative work. It is this very immateriality that is called into question with the advent of the Internet as a virtual cultural space. Immateriality becomes the starting point for the definition of the concept of a distributed curatorial practice.
Krysa’s publication is based on a systemic philosophical approach, in other words the action of curating is inserted in the context of interconnected and networked systems. Can we think of networks and algorithms as a future tool of art curating? Curating Immateriality proposes theoretical reflections and concrete examples of the application of the binomial software-curating, through the interventions of philosophers, artists, curators and other cultural agents. The book features articles by Joasia Krysa, Tiziana Terranova, Marina Vishmidt, Grzesiek Sedek, Geoff Cox, Christiane Paul, Eva Grubinger, Jacob, Lillemose, Josephine Berry Slater, 0100101110101101.org & [epidemiC], Alexander R. Galloway & Eugene Thacker, Franziska Nori, low-fi, Trebor Scholz, Beryl Graham, Piotr Krajewski, Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin and Matteo Pasquinelli. Curating Immateriality, published in 2006, represents the avant-garde of its time and a fundamental reference for contemporary matters.
