Re: <nettime> Digital Decay and traceless art

[Tilman Baumgaertel <tilman_baumgaertel@csi.com>]

Beautiful thoughts from an imaginary museum. 

Did you set your magazine archive in Amsterdam on fire yet? ;-)

I guess to a lot of people active on the net, one important point is that
everything they publish/do/distribute there will be gone at one point. Yet
I prefer to reserve that descision to these people or to future archivists,
not to the banal contemporary reality of crashing hard disks, unreadable
magnetic tape, unpaid provider bills etc. And if it really has to go I want
it to go with a big bang, like the library of Alexandria, not on a small
flame, like it happens now.

But actually the point of this presentation/panel was to raise these
questions, not to answer them. I don't think I would like to be the
director of the internet museum 2001. Who wants to look at all these data
anyway? 


To everybody else: keep those MacClassic-offers coming! I appreciate it. 

Yours,
Tilman

At 23:49 01.03.99 +0100, Tjebbe van Tijen wrote:
>Is it for the pleasure of the moment itself or for posterity that we act?
>
>We can not and need not keep track of everything..forgetting is a necessary
>basis for knowing... What if all the artifacts, all things judged
>worthwhile, for some reason at some moment in time, would have been still
>with us...
>
>It is not so that we willfuly have to burn palaces and temples, to destroy
>museums and libraries, to create a new order, a new culture... as so many
>hot headed leaders have tried and dictatorial artists have proclaimed (but
>were afraid of doing, likethe futurists). But the other extreme also holds
>a danger... Too much preservation is suffocating, does not leave enough
>space for new creation.. Nice  real time experiences should not all be made
>into objects of adoration, be commodified, be given 'eternal value'.
>
>So to narrow my argument down again to the posting on the Nettime list of
>Till Baumgarten, one could ask if a lot of what is by some classified as
>'Net Art' should not be seen as a broadcast, a life event... something that
>maybe is not happening in one moment but in many short moments during a
>quiet limited period of time... art for just for the moment itself...
>
>
>I have the feeling that the pleasure is just that... that it fits in the
>long tradition of what I like to call 'traceless art', the singing of a
>song, looking at the funny shapes of drifting clouds, making traces in the
>sand...
>
>Temporal silicon traces washed away by the digital tide...
>
>See its function as the  ceremonial sand drawings of the Navajo, only meant
>to exist during the ceremony, to be blown away by the northern winds
>afterwards.
>
>
>Tjebbe van Tijen
>
>Imaginary Museum Projects (IMP), Amsterdam
>
>Background information on:
>http://www.iisg.nl/~tvt/index.html
>
>Do check the upcoming Next 5 Minutes conference on:
>http://www.n5m.org/index.html
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