Panel Statement
Chair Person: Nina Wenhart
Presenters:
- Rosa Menkman – The Collapse of PAL
- Melissa Barron – Glitch Weavings
- Daniela Kuka – Disorder
- Nina Wenhart – <3break(s)core: an inappropriation
Digital corpses all abound, zombie data that is still there, but cannot be performed anymore. Change is inevitable, if the artwork should survive. Besides the archivists’ efforts to revive the work in its original state, artists have developed their own strategies of embracing the errors and glitches of re/de/transcoding processes.
Codecs, programs, protocols and formats that are not supported anymore have become creative challenges and often initiate subversive practices. Not THAT, but HOW a work is changed and distorted becomes the choice of the artist. In this process, the original and its resurrection enter a dialogue and open up questions that go beyond the surface, a dialectics of original and copy, sameness and change, obsolescence and progress, memory and forgetting, survival and death. And as the original (file) is dead, the original (as a concept) is reborn at the same time.
Artistic strategies of re/de/transcoding and serendipidous errors are positioned as an antithesis to an elitist or naive euphoria of constant technological progress i.e. perfection. Nevertheless, they are not nostalgic but celebrate a handson approach where the code becomes tangible and material, literally.
- Nina Wenhart is a Media Art historian and independent researcher. She is a PhD candidate at the Interface Cultures Lab at the Art University, Linz, writing on Experimental Archiving of Media Arts, and graduated from Prof. Oliver Grau’s Media Art Histories program with a Master Thesis on Descriptive Metadata for Media Arts. She was teaching the Prehystories of New Media class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and in the Media Art Histories program at the Danube University Krems.
Full text (PDF) p. 2571-2576