"Rotary Connection 2" [mp3 removed]
A somewhat sweet e-piano melody vies for supremacy with a somewhat dorky and post-tonal pair of analog synth riffs. A beatbox wanders in and takes about a minute to find the groove.
August 2011
2 former 8-bit artists burned by establishment
Speaking of working with Google to keep Google hacks online, here are two artists announcing the problems they've had in working with the forces of darkness:
Cory Arcangel: Doogle "Canned". This is the exact scenario described by Ben Fino-Radin in his paper [PDF] about net art preservation. An artist's "Google hack" breaks as Google changes its code, in this case Arcangel's search engine that only searched for Doogie Howser: "Google depreciated the second API it ran on – which allowed it to pull live search results for Neil Patrick Harris – so I have decided to retire it from pulling LIVE search links." Props to Arcangel for letting an artwork die rather than sticking tubes and electrodes into it, I guess.
Paul Slocum: The Difficulty of Developing on iPhone 2G/3G without Service. Slocum needs to test an art app on various phones and "Apple won’t let me use the rather expensive little computer that I bought unless I pay for AT&T service that I don’t need." You can read his solutions at the link. My solution would be to keep "art" and "Apple" separate but then I am only steps away from Walden Pond.
More on ArtBase Preservation
The following are some additional responses to Ben Fino-Radin's post and paper [PDF] about the preservation of works in the Rhizome.org ArtBase.
1. Something to consider: A digital work that breaks and has to be remade is a new work. Should it it be re-evaluated at the time it is redone?
2. In the 1950s Giorgio de Chirico remade (forged) his own paintings from the Scuola Metafisica period of the 1910s. These latecomers may or may not be identical, and certainly had the artists' imprimatur, but critics (and the market) will treat them differently than the originals. The artist has changed, the context changes, materials change. Why should a Golan Levin "applet" piece, with four layers of code identified by Fino-Radin as being susceptible to breakage and rewriting, be treated as the "same" piece once it's eventually "reinterpreted" in a museum archive?
3. An institutional database of digital works could be a dynamic entity adding and shedding content or it could be the fetishization of a fixed series of moments. Fino-Radin never questions that his job as a scholar is to implement the latter scheme.
4. Something else to consider: The life of a digital work is not in its centralized preservation but in its widest possible distribution (and ideally, evaluation). It is a very different creature from a painting.
5. Four papers have been written on the preservation of the Rhizome ArtBase from 2002-2011, according to Ben Fino-Radin (including his). Much of this content seems to be speculative suggestions for how to fix work rather than actual success stories. For example, maybe in the future Rhizome could partner with Google so that every time Google changes its code, they will notify Rhizome so that artist "hacks" of Google can be kept from breaking. Sorry, this smells funny. In any case, where does the time and labor come from to implement such schemes? Best to keep writing papers.
6. Institutional archives could be periodically just be cleaned of broken work, freeing up disc space. Natural selection: there are a zillion digital works; the ones that break live in our collective memory but will not be kept on life support.
7. The wording of the post title for Fino-Radin's article, "Keeping It Online," came on the heels of Rhizome receiving some flak for selling an animated GIF at the Armory art fair with the statement that they were "taking [it] offline so the collector can have it locally." Not a very open source sentiment but as far as we know the practice is still going on. It is good to know that the organization is otherwise committed to keeping work online, even if it is reconstituted, zombie artwork.
