thanks to a colleague of mine at the museum (whom I actually mentioned in my talk) I was made aware of your comments here. I’m glad that you shared these thoughts in your blog, and the interesting as well as the obviously disappointing aspects are part of the problem. Let me say upfront that this was not meant to be a lecture on preservation issues, although I have worked extensively in this field, but Tom Levin’s introduction asked for a kind of response to that. I have tried to give some answers besides raising questions but maybe I didn’t communicate them well enough. Here is some important aspects in terms of archiving and migration:

a) migrating from one carrier to another is a neverending process, unfortunately without ever coming to a final solution, i.e. a lasting carrier. At least that is the lesson of the last 40 years. So it is important to think about the media art work in terms of information that gets reperformed again and again in different configurations. The research, academic as well as curatorial, would need to keep track of the effects this has on the perception and experience of a work. (if you are interested in issues related to video art, see http://www.40yearsvideoart.de where you can access some information on a related symposium)

b) platforms like Media Art Net are not archival since they don’t preserve the works themselves. They are informational (whether successful or not is another issue) in that they try to inform about relations, contexts, histories. The use of these platforms is not academic but rather driven by very specific needs, searches, interests. This is a lesson to learn for curators and academics. We still think very much in terms of providing a context via a lecture or text.

c) the amount of information we are dealing with is one problem, another is the amount that we are producing ourselves. And we can see a clear shift to the production side (see WayMarker.com). So we are asked to actively contribute. This leads then to a shift away from the jobs of sorting, filtering, digesting and editing information. Maybe we are still bookmarking web sites but we do not actually process that information any more. We are storing it for future use – without actually ever going back (I’m obviously exaggerating but that is an implicit structure).

I’m happy to discuss some more of these issues if you wish. Please feel free to send me an email at rfrieling@sfmoma.org.

And thanks for your extensive feedbacks (even if not always positive).

thanks to a colleague of mine at the museum (whom I actually mentioned in my talk) I was made aware of your comments here. I’m glad that you shared these thoughts in your blog, and the interesting as well as the obviously disappointing aspects are part of the problem. Let me say upfront that this was not meant to be a lecture on preservation issues, although I have worked extensively in this field, but Tom Levin’s introduction asked for a kind of response to that. I have tried to give some answers besides raising questions but maybe I didn’t communicate them well enough. Here is some important aspects in terms of archiving and migration:

a) migrating from one carrier to another is a neverending process, unfortunately without ever coming to a final solution, i.e. a lasting carrier. At least that is the lesson of the last 40 years. So it is important to think about the media art work in terms of information that gets reperformed again and again in different configurations. The research, academic as well as curatorial, would need to keep track of the effects this has on the perception and experience of a work. (if you are interested in issues related to video art, see http://www.40yearsvideoart.de where you can access some information on a related symposium)

b) platforms like Media Art Net are not archival since they don’t preserve the works themselves. They are informational (whether successful or not is another issue) in that they try to inform about relations, contexts, histories. The use of these platforms is not academic but rather driven by very specific needs, searches, interests. This is a lesson to learn for curators and academics. We still think very much in terms of providing a context via a lecture or text.

c) the amount of information we are dealing with is one problem, another is the amount that we are producing ourselves. And we can see a clear shift to the production side (see WayMarker.com). So we are asked to actively contribute. This leads then to a shift away from the jobs of sorting, filtering, digesting and editing information. Maybe we are still bookmarking web sites but we do not actually process that information any more. We are storing it for future use – without actually ever going back (I’m obviously exaggerating but that is an implicit structure).

I’m happy to discuss some more of these issues if you wish. Please feel free to send me an email at rfrieling@sfmoma.org.

And thanks for your extensive feedbacks (even if not always positive).

Student:

I was going to ask you what you thought of the talk, but obviously you had a much more charitable response than I did! I thought it was one of the worst talks I’ve ever been to at Princeton.

I wanted to know what exactly he is doing about the digital art “platform problem”. The generalizations about the problems of managing a collection I’ve heard many times before, and they’re not in any way particular to the art world–any established business ends up having platform problems with data.

What I wanted to know was what he as a curator was proposing as a solution or at least a compromise, and he never gave us an answer! And that is the one thing, besides art interpretation, he is (or should be) really qualified to talk about.

Me:

I did find it a bit disorganized, and there were certainly parts that left me confused – but I didn’t go to hear about the art stuff – or the curator stuff I was confused about the website he kept mentioning – I’m not sure how that answers the digital preservation problem.

I had a chat with my husband last night about this all and I don’t think there is an answer – how do we know what tools there will be in 100 years from now? How can we know what people will want us to collect or how they’ll be able to access it? I like talks that make me think – if there are answers that’s great – but if not – at least it gets people thinking about what possible answers there are …

You were not the only one that was displeased – the person next to me was playing tetris and someone in front of me was checking her netflix account

Student:

Part of what I found so disappointing was his attitude that he could just “raise questions” in the areas of digital arts presentation, collection, preservation, etc. but not have to offer any answers, even possible ones. That’s an early 90′s style of “must leave everything open ended because offering any answers does violence to the total world of possibilities out there” scholarship which was annoying when it was in vogue, but is now really out of date.

Every graduate student here in every department that I know of has been trained to believe that the most important part of a talk is the speaker’s expert opinion and conclusion, however tentative, because it’s also the hardest part to come up with after assessing a multitude of facts. Although I did find his examples interesting since I don’t know much about digital art, I couldn’t help feeling like none of us would be permitted to give a talk like his in public: it would be considered works-in-progress for presentation at a sub-departmental seminar, certainly not suitable for an invited lecture. (With the caveat: for emeritus professors, nobel laureates, and billionaires, anything goes…)

The people in front of me seemed to be playing some kind of two player game and passing a laptop back and forth. I was fidgeting because I was really cold in that lecture hall!

Me:

That all makes perfect sense! I don’t think he should be able to come in and ask us questions with no answers – it would have been nice to hear some answers to get linked to some answers ….

Student:

PS:

The one “answer” he gave us was his big website database, which I guess is his answer to the presentation and accountability problems: making access to these works more widely available to the public in some form, and making it easier for people (funding organizations) to understand that his museum must care for a vast number of art-ifacts of which only a few are physically on display at any given time. I’m guessing that “number of virtual visitors” on a website could also help augment the “number of local visitors” criterion when staff come up for evaluation.

But then he told us about the issue with people googling in and then leaving, and again, he offered no solution. Even that section could have used more elaboration: were people leaving because they had found what they were looking for? because they hadn’t found what they were looking for? did he have any plans to poll his user base to find out? was he planning to change the layout of his pages to encourage page-to-page browsing in some way rather than browsing from the homepage?

I looked at his site and found it rather difficult to browse (reminded me of the library off-site storage problem: how do you let patrons browse the shelves?). You either have to follow their links for what’s related or go back to the main page for another glimpse at something random. It seemed like showing a thumbnail on each page to another art piece chosen at random might be reasonable, and fairly close to the modern art museum-going experience where you’re usually within sight of some other piece that is totally unrelated.

http://www.mediaartnet.org/mediaartnet/

Student:

I was going to ask you what you thought of the talk, but obviously you had a much more charitable response than I did! I thought it was one of the worst talks I’ve ever been to at Princeton.

I wanted to know what exactly he is doing about the digital art “platform problem”. The generalizations about the problems of managing a collection I’ve heard many times before, and they’re not in any way particular to the art world–any established business ends up having platform problems with data.

What I wanted to know was what he as a curator was proposing as a solution or at least a compromise, and he never gave us an answer! And that is the one thing, besides art interpretation, he is (or should be) really qualified to talk about.

Me:

I did find it a bit disorganized, and there were certainly parts that left me confused – but I didn’t go to hear about the art stuff – or the curator stuff I was confused about the website he kept mentioning – I’m not sure how that answers the digital preservation problem.

I had a chat with my husband last night about this all and I don’t think there is an answer – how do we know what tools there will be in 100 years from now? How can we know what people will want us to collect or how they’ll be able to access it? I like talks that make me think – if there are answers that’s great – but if not – at least it gets people thinking about what possible answers there are …

You were not the only one that was displeased – the person next to me was playing tetris and someone in front of me was checking her netflix account

Student:

Part of what I found so disappointing was his attitude that he could just “raise questions” in the areas of digital arts presentation, collection, preservation, etc. but not have to offer any answers, even possible ones. That’s an early 90′s style of “must leave everything open ended because offering any answers does violence to the total world of possibilities out there” scholarship which was annoying when it was in vogue, but is now really out of date.

Every graduate student here in every department that I know of has been trained to believe that the most important part of a talk is the speaker’s expert opinion and conclusion, however tentative, because it’s also the hardest part to come up with after assessing a multitude of facts. Although I did find his examples interesting since I don’t know much about digital art, I couldn’t help feeling like none of us would be permitted to give a talk like his in public: it would be considered works-in-progress for presentation at a sub-departmental seminar, certainly not suitable for an invited lecture. (With the caveat: for emeritus professors, nobel laureates, and billionaires, anything goes…)

The people in front of me seemed to be playing some kind of two player game and passing a laptop back and forth. I was fidgeting because I was really cold in that lecture hall!

Me:

That all makes perfect sense! I don’t think he should be able to come in and ask us questions with no answers – it would have been nice to hear some answers to get linked to some answers ….

Student:

PS:

The one “answer” he gave us was his big website database, which I guess is his answer to the presentation and accountability problems: making access to these works more widely available to the public in some form, and making it easier for people (funding organizations) to understand that his museum must care for a vast number of art-ifacts of which only a few are physically on display at any given time. I’m guessing that “number of virtual visitors” on a website could also help augment the “number of local visitors” criterion when staff come up for evaluation.

But then he told us about the issue with people googling in and then leaving, and again, he offered no solution. Even that section could have used more elaboration: were people leaving because they had found what they were looking for? because they hadn’t found what they were looking for? did he have any plans to poll his user base to find out? was he planning to change the layout of his pages to encourage page-to-page browsing in some way rather than browsing from the homepage?

I looked at his site and found it rather difficult to browse (reminded me of the library off-site storage problem: how do you let patrons browse the shelves?). You either have to follow their links for what’s related or go back to the main page for another glimpse at something random. It seemed like showing a thumbnail on each page to another art piece chosen at random might be reasonable, and fairly close to the modern art museum-going experience where you’re usually within sight of some other piece that is totally unrelated.

http://www.mediaartnet.org/mediaartnet/