New Media Museums

Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka, Dagmara Domagała, Cezary Wicher

Introduction

The issue of archiving and preservation of media art is a great challenge that is being constantly raised within the WRO Art Center’s practice. The concept of Active Art Archive brings up the idea of keeping archives as lively and open as possible for constant research and exploration, which also means treating the archived contents as a set of building blocks for further artistic creation. One of the results of such an approach was the creation of the “On the Silver Globe” installation series, based upon archival photograph by Zygmunt Rytka from our collection. This case study of a constantly evolving artwork has also the notion of life and death of media art in its background, creating graveyards for obsolete concepts and reviving zombies from outdated technology. We are rather raising questions than giving answers, however all of them stem from WRO’s experience with experiments in re-imagination and disenchantment of media art archives.

From the very beginning of the WRO Biennale (a festival of media art held in Wrocław, first organized in 1989), the matter that was subject to special care, accompanying the substantive program of the festivals, was its adequate documentation – of particular exhibitions, events, installations, concerts, performances, and lectures. The event, initially described as the Sound Basis Visual Art Festival [PL: Festival Wizualnych Realizacji Okołomuzycznych (WRO)], became a platform for building a documentation-based collection of contemporary art. It also provided a fertile environemnt for the establishment of the WRO Art Center in 2008, an institution operating at the intersection of art, communication, and technology, which became the safekeeper of the legacy and the organizer of the WRO Biennale.

The WRO Archive is not only a space for documentation, preservation, and records, but also a way of thinking about the collection that is strongly correlated with re-contextualization of its contents – the presentation of documentation of events that originated in a specific context, but that has been transferred from their original temporality into another one as a result of recording on a medium. This changes the conditions of presentation, the accompanying artefacts, but also the ontic status of the original artistic gesture – e.g. a performance turns into a video recording, and a video recording becomes a component of an installation.

The archive, however, is not only a set of ready-to-use, properly edited (and thus peculiarly prepared) video materials, but it also contains elements (physical objects) of performative actions or particular events, such as Piotr Wyrzykowski's VHS tape with drops of his blood from his performance “Ucieleśnianie” [Embodying] (1994), or vintage Gameboy consoles that served as musical instruments for the art group Gameboyzz Orchestra Project. Furthermore several historical raw recordings still wait in the archive to be processed. Coming to precise numbers, the inventoried WRO collection currently (as of June 2022) contains 7091 video materials (edited clips), of which 1946 are recorded on VHS tapes, 633 on Betacam, and 14 on U-Matic. For practical reasons, we omit here the extensive (and still under development) collection of photographic documentation – negatives, prints, and digital files, as well as objects and installations, including algorithmic works.

The nature of the remaining components of the archive (over 5000 recordings and documentations in S-VHS, MiniDV, CD, DVD, VCD, SVCD, Audio CD formats) is still to be determined and worked on. To this should be added many materials created after the digital revolution – placed on external discs, servers, hard drives, clouds, which due to the technology in which they were recorded have no material reference – they exist only as files.

Due to the dispersion of materials created in digital technologies, it is difficult to make a precise count of them. This shows an interesting side of the WRO archive that is invisible from the outside, as the archive itself keeps the records of the times in which it was created – a history of technological changes, recording methods, and formats.

The collected video materials have been created since 1989, together with the first WRO Festival, but they are not limited to Wrocław only. Among them, there are documentations made in ZKM in Karlsruhe or during Ars Electronica festivals in Linz. Among the semi-amateur materials, we will also find fully professional documentations, including registrations and televised programs made in collaboration with Polish Television in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. An important part of the collection is also constituted by original video works submitted in the open call for works formula that invariably accompanies the organization of successive editions of the WRO Biennale, as well as works donated or entrusted by artists, mainly in the form of physical carriers (tapes).

From the elaborated documentation emerges a kind of basis for further outcomes, in the form of publications, printed and electronic, installations or exhibitions. WRO Art Center publishes The WIDOK [The View] series dealing with the history of media art; these multimedia publications (texts+videos) based mostly on our materials, in some cases also on video excerpts acquired from other collections during the documentation process. Successive volumes of the WIDOK series have collected articles discussing certain topics, bringing closer and analysing the issues of art, visuality or cultural theory, issues dedicated to particular artists (Nam June Paik, Istvan Kantor) or collecting a number of works around a focal issue (e.g. the history of video installations). The construction of such a corpus of issues is inherently endemic, and the projected narrative makes no claim to universalism, but rather provides space for polyphony, describing phenomena from a particular perspective by authors associated with the Biennale and the WRO Art Center, an institution that has been an extension of the Biennale, and at the same time a base for its organization.

We aim to keep the WRO Archive, which is asource for curating/creating screening programs, the so called thematic paths, as well as exhibition elements, widely open to the public, including professional audiences (curators, art historians, etc.). During the 19^th Media Art Biennale WRO 2021 REVERSO, we have launched a beta version of a new incarnation of the Media Library as an online platform collecting a range of documentation of exhibitions and activities, lectures, and conversations with artists (https://czytelnia.wrocenter.pl/). It is a remote base for those dealing with the issues of the archive, the technological breakthrough that comes with the end of the last century, but also for all looking for references and inspiration for their own creative or research activities. It is also a space designed for media and educational activities, such as the presentation of classical works during classes on media art at universities or art academies.

The term “active archive” in relation to the practice of re-contextualizing historical artefacts and documents probably first appeared in 2012 in the context of the preparation of two comprehensive exhibitions on the history of video installation and interactive installation, curated by Piotr Krajewski and the WRO team.

The exhibitions and related events, prepared in the context of the then nearing 50^th anniversary of media art, were devoted to the beginnings of video art as one of the most important new currents, setting the rhythm of modernist, postmodernist, and then post-media transformations of contemporary culture and art. Both shows gathered original artworks and their contemporary repetitions (dialogically developed by, among others, Paweł Janicki, Bartosz Konieczny, Michał Szota) of the most characteristic historical idioms, forms, and strategies, created with the use of original equipment from the analogue era, as well as contemporary algorithmic techniques. Many of the presented works were homages to the most outstanding artists of the early media art, proposing a kind of transfer of its essence into the present. 

At this point, we would like to refer to the Japanese artist Yae Akaiwa of the exonemo group. During the 2nd International Symposium for Media Art organized by Arts Council Tokyo and the Japan Foundation Asia Center in February 2018, Akaiwa proposed an inspiring metaphor for preserving art in the changing societal, political, cultural and technological contexts. She linked preservation of art to the ritual practiced at Ise Jingu, the most sacred Shinto shrine in Japan. Every twenty years since the 7^th century, the old shrine is demolished and a new one – with exactly the same dimensions – is constructed, just next to the site of the current shrine. Even if the building is for centuries a copy of a copy, every time new wood and contemporary tools are being used. To renew the connection with the deities (concept/software), they are being replaced to the new building (technical infrastructure + context of time/hardware). The performative process of updating the past in the now takes about eight years of different rituals. This metaphor seems to be especially accurate when it comes to time-based art and media art as a specialized subdiscipline of it. It also demonstrates how art has always been connected with negotiating meanings, dealing with specific settings, codes and filters, all changing over time.

Another stimulating thought in this regard comes from Erkki Huhtamo, a media theoretician and archaeologist, who in his talk at the symposium on art and science “Future Mind 2” organized in 2018 by the Kyoto University described art in general as a stream of recurring “concepts trying to find their contexts”. [both examples delivered by AKD, who was there and made her notes – please decide if we should make a footnote with this information]

Both conceptual inspirations are helpful when it comes to presenting another example of preserving the essence of media artworks rather than their physical forms that become obsolete for different reasons. The exhibition Reincarnation of Media Art [RoMA] (https://wrocenter.pl/en/rma/), curated on behalf of the WRO Art Center by Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka, was originally conceived and co-curated by the Japanese, New York-based artist duo exonemo (Yae Akaiwa, Kensuke Sembo) on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of YCAM [Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media], a vibrant site of production and presentation of media art in Japan, where it was premiered in 2018. Exonemo, who themselves have experienced the obsolescence of their own digital-born artworks, created a unique environment to ponder on the limited life-span of media art, and its potential future trespassing the impermanence of their materiality. The exhibition featured chosen ‘dead’ artworks by artists who have collaborated with the YCAM in the past: Koichiro Eto, exonemo, Masaki Fujihata, Toshio Iwai, Kazuhiko Hachiya, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Nam June Paik, Tadasu Takamine, Nao Tokui, and Tetsuya Umeda.These no longer functioning artworks were exhibited in grave chambers inside a massive Mausoleum of Media Art resembling a burial mound, video interviews with these and other artists provided different perspectives on the role of art as a transcendent vehicle for concepts traveling in time and finding their appropriate new forms of expression. The audio guide that could be played on different historical devices (ghetto blaster, walkman, CD-player, minidisc player etc.) provided another layer of documentation and contextualization. Most significantly this strategy of preserving media art by documentation and (re-)contextualization was represented by choosing a certain culturally coded object, a burial mound, commonly associated with impermanence of life and death, that served as a universal platform for researching and documenting also the local histories of media art in other regions.

When Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka visited the RoMA exhibition at YCAM, the preparations for the 30^th anniversary edition of the Media Art Biennale WRO 2019 were already well underway. She immediately wished to realize this unique exhibition formula to look back at the history of the WRO festivals, through the no longer functioning media artworks from both institutions’ archives: the WRO and the YCAM. Presentation at the WRO Art Center was the first – and so far the only – successful attempt to create a living archive of ‘dead’ artworks enhanced by the local content, and by doing so to extend the scope and timeframe of the RoMA exhibition.

Together with exonemo and the YCAM team (coordinated by the curator Kazuhiko Yoshizaki), and thanks to the special support from the Japan Foundation, we prepared the regional iteration of the show by arranging grave chambers inside the gallery at the WRO Art Center, the entrance to which resembled the guide way into a burial mound with walls made of clay and straw. Inside such an environment we decided to display a few dead artworks from the exonemo’s original selection (Koichiro Eto, Masaki Fujihata, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Nao Tokui) mixed with pieces by Piotr Wyrzykowski, Anna Płotnicka, Gameboyzz Orchestra Project, Łukasz Szałankiewicz (aka Zenial), that were created/produced/presented by WRO in the past.

Following the original concept in which a special tribute was given to Nam June Paik (two special burial chambers for Paik’s dead artworks from the collection of the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul), we also could show two unique remains of his works from a unique private collection of Paik’s former student and technical assistant. One of these two corpses was the inner life of an old CRT monitor, originally showing the 1976 “Zen for TV” installation. Paik made it then on site for the purpose of the exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen. The technical intestines of the old TV-set were replaced in 2001-2002 according to the artist's instruction, when another CRT monitor was put in the original Danish case. Later, this particular version of “Zen for TV” was acquired to the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The fact that the “European remnants” of the oeuvre by the father of media art came from a regional collection, and were not “imported” from Asia, demonstrated the power of the RoMA exhibition to trace and display the local histories of media art.

Essential element of the exhibition was the Wrocław-specific audio guide explaining the varied reasons for which the displayed objects – traces of bygone artworks – became dead without losing their meaning accumulated over time. This curatorial comment provided an insight into more universal aspects of the media art’s history, whereas the series of video-interviews with Polish artists, offered thoughtful comments on the issue of life and death of time-based art. These interviews were displayed inside the burial mound of the RoMA exhibition, and they can still be viewed on WRO’s vimeo channel adding to the – seemingly – dead artworks further layers of meaning, keeping their essence active despite the passage of time.

Among WRO’s archive-based artworks resulting from our archive-activating attitude, we would like to draw particular attention to the installation “On the Silver Globe” as an example of an activity undertaken around an original physical artwork from the collection (photogram) giving rise to new autonomous work (installation), activating other meanings of the original work in a new context.

As an inspiration and departure point for the piece served two photographs by Zygmunt Rytka (1947-2018), the Polish pioneer of conceptual time-based art, donated by the artist to the WRO collection. When he photographed the TV screen on July 20^th-21^st, 1969 during the broadcast of the first manned landing on the Moon, Poland was the only country in Warsaw Pact, in which this first global media event was available live on TV. The broadcast from the Moon served as an evidence for the 20th century Mankind’s aspirations’ in pursuit of “space exploration” and the power of developing media technology. The event inspired artists across the globe and made its way into the history of television. Rytka's photograph depicting the board: “The transmission from the Moon has ended” [PL: Zakończyliśmy transmisję z Księżyca], released by the Polish TV after the broadcast, however had evoked back then rather the political undertone than the cultural one. From the perspective of harsh daily life in a totalitarian regime praised by the communist propaganda as the glorious incarnated utopia, the landing on the Moon – an achievement of the hostile political system – seemed to be an irrational event in a galaxy far away from reality. The Apollo 11 mission was a strong point in the arms race, but also a significant blur of the official glossy image of the advanced socialist world.

The first, 2012 version of tribute for Rytka (conceived by Piotr Krajewski and authored by the WROcenter Group, an ephemeral creative collective) consists of the original framed vintage print of a photograph, a video projection on the convex of cathode-ray TV monitor from the late 1960s or early 1970s presenting a YouTube clip of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the Moon. The recording of that TV transmission, once a phenomenal media sensation, functions now as a meme circulating on the internet.

The installation updates the original context of Rytka’s work highlighting how media technology and cultural phenomena can be used as raw material for art. The two later versions of the work became interactive. The audience could manipulate the video signal with their own mobile devices connected to the internet via an original interaction system. With the image processing software the video component could be transformed into a matrix of pixels generating a live 3D picture, enabling the viewer to control the perspective of the view and literally adding a new dimension to the archival footage. Eventually, these next versions used another cultural artefact: one of the earliest sci-fi films of the genre, Georges Méliès’s “Voyage to the Moon”, a classic not only in terms of the cinema but also in the history of human imagination. Méliès’s original film, a treasure guarded in the archives, is at the same time widely available on the internet in countless copies (files), reflecting the changing notion of the original work of art and its value. 

As the example of “On the Silver Globe” shows, WRO’s strategy is not an example of museum preservation, where overriding reason is to maintain the artwork in its original state and condition. This practice is rather white gloves off with acquiescence in the freedom of creative reconstruction and putting the original work as a Stack Overflow open-source base for further query and development, to use this strangely matching metaphor taken from computer sciences. The weigh of historical preservation and keeping the notion of the evolution of the artwork itself is shifted to the process of documentation and opening the archives to broader audience and scholars. Camera-based recordings are of course limiting in a sense, especially concerning the issue of user experience and interaction, however they are partly resistant to the problem of media obsolescence and limiting factors of exhibiting actual artworks, such as time and space.

In a sense, we are also heading back to the origins of media art: to the counter-culture and volatile character of time-based media. From its very beginnings, media art was not meant to be shown in museums, focusing rather on the constant process of expression and anarchistic exploration of new devices emerging from the dark blessings of capitalism. Artistic practices based on re-contextualisation of the content were in a way possible forms of liberating artworks from institutional preservation and letting them live, die and reincarnate freely.

While thinking about pros and cons of this perspective, what comes to the fore is of course the issue of intervention and modification, and the notion of authorship. The remix culture and a deep dive into internet community can be used as anecdotal evidence of the contemporary free flow of thoughts and contents. As well as disobedience to the concept of ownership and copyright, even in the “official” art market with NFT’s in the first place. However, internet-driven culture with its anarcho-hacking background doesn’t erase the legal issues for the museums and art galleries. With the example of “On the Silver Globe” it was rather simple as the original artwork (Zygmunt Rytka’s photograph) was kept in its original state as a part of the installation. What has been manipulated was the context resolving around. And even more: at some point the original photograph just disappeared from the installation and remained only as an incorporeal concept that led to the process of creating “On the Silver Globe” in its different incarnations.

At this point, there are more questions than possible answers when it comes to the issues of possible preservation of media art in the process of its re-contextualisation. However, despite the flaws, this strategy has also some promising traits, especially in the terms of obsolete systems and devices. Possible remix of an outdated interface brings the artwork back to life even if the original programme is no longer supported by the app store or was, for example, destroyed due to data carrier malfunction. Basing on a text-, photo- and video-documentation, such an “active conservator” would be able to restore the original interface using contemporary devices. However, emulation is not 1:1 restoration process either and requires much more modification than re-contextualisation itself. While letting creative aspect in, it can open possibility to maintain fresh, living ideas resolving around technology, rather than reviving technological zombies speaking language that no one understands any more.

In that sense, art institution can become a time travel machine for concepts and contexts. As both, technology and ideas, can become obsolete. The goal of the WRO’s Active Art Archive is therefore to provide tools and content for reconfiguration of visions and inventions not viewed in isolation from the history and development of media art. The preservation process is based rather on re-play than freezing an artwork in a certain point of time and space. Even if the original artwork can sometimes be lost in the process, the growing layers of possible contexts don’t let it die. It just brings it on another level of historic continuity.

However, many issues of re-contextualisation are still not set. Despite long-term experience of creating an active archive of media art, we can only keep raising certain questions that could be considered by other institutions while building collections and archives of media art. The case study describing the “On the Silver Globe” installation is an example of how a single collection item can kick-start the entire complex process of redefining collections/archives as graveyards, it also underlines the necessity of creating a new future-reaching imagination for each and every new acquisition that feeds growing collections of art institutions.

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links for further reading:

https://wrocenter.pl/en/o-wro/

https://wrocenter.pl/en/archiwum-biennale-wro/

https://wrocenter.pl/en/czytelnia-mediow/

https://wrocenter.pl/en/publikacje/