Universiteit van Amsterdam
Faculty of Humanities, Department of Media Studies
MA Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image
Contesting archival authority: towards a
redefinition of participation in online
video art archives
Supervisor: Dr. Joost Bolten Thesis by: Mariela Cantú Student number 11103639 Amsterdam 2016
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the Univeristy of Amsterdam; the Amsterdam Excellence Scholarship; the group of AES scholars; Eef Masson; Carolyn Birdsall; Joost Bolten; the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image professors and classmates; Chia-Wei Tung; family and friends; Camilo Badoza; Eduardo Russo; Rainer Guldin; Sheila Schvarzman and Macu Morán.
And to every authority I have met in my life: for teaching me that every form of power –even when legitimized, can always be resisted.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of figures………..………….v
1. Introduction……….………6
2. Methodology………11
3. Archives and authority……….16
3.1 Historicizing authority: the rising of authoritative principles in archives………17
3.2 Authority, power and the archive: Arendt, Derrida and Foucault………...…21
3.3 Recognizing authority in archival practices: contemporary critiques………24
3.4 Technological grounds for contesting authority: moving image and online video art archives……….29
4. Participation in online video art archives………..……….38
4.1 The techno-political framework of participation……….39
4.2 Challenging authority in the Internet era: participatory approaches in moving image archives……….…….43
4.3 Participatory strategies in online video art archives……….48
4.3.a Playlists………48
4.3.b Social tagging………..59
4.3.c The creation of the archives: uploading and self-managed curatorship…63 5. Conclusion. Towards a redefinition of participation in online video art archives………72
List of figures
Figure 1. Analog video tapes……….……..33
Figure 2. Vannevar Bush’s “memex”………..40
Figure 3. The Internet Map, by Chris Harrison……….45
Figure 4. LIMA’s catalogue: Titles……….49
Figure 5. LIMA’s catalogue: Artists………..49
Figure 6. LIMA’s catalogue: Keywords………..50
Figure 7. PLATFORM:VB. Dots……….51
Figure 8. PLATFORM:VB. Tags……….52
Figure 9. PLATFORM:VB. Mappings……….52
Figure 10. PLATFORM:VB. General interface………53
Figure 11. PLATFORM:VB. Comments………54
Figure 12. Freewaves. Artists………..55
Figure 13. Freewaves. Tags………..56
Figure 14. Freewaves. Videos……….56
Figure 15. Freewaves. Playlists………..57
Figure 16. Video Art World. Categories………61
Figure 17. Video Art World. Uploading……….64
Figure 18. Video Art World. Agents……….……..65
Figure 19. Bola de Nieve. Artist. ………..66
Figure 20. Bola de Nieve. Mentions………66
1. INTRODUCTION
“When power is denied, overlooked, or unchallenged, it is misleading at best and dangerous at worst. Power recognized becomes power that can be questioned, made accountable, and opened to transparent dialogue and enriched understanding.” Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook 2002.
The purpose of this thesis is to redefine the concept and the practice of participation in the context of online video art archives. Given the rise of
contemporary discussions that seek to unveil traditional practices of archival authority within moving image archives, participation can be regarded in its potential to
challenge authoritative principles. When encouraging the involvement of artists and the general public, participatory strategies can expand viewpoints on existent materials, incorporate absent narratives, and help to redefine the field, the concept and the practice of video art.
The effects of authority have penetrated many archival practices, their definitions and their epistemological assumptions, creating a strong sense of transparency and credibility, in which history has relied to build its accounts of the past. While nourishing a certain idea of objectivity, archives have dodged questions concerning the process of their genesis, as well as the strong influence that
authoritative principles have had on the stages of selection of their records, arrangement, cataloguing and presentation to the public.
However, recent debates are challenging this illusion of neutrality. As Marlene Manoff claims,
“[w]hatever the archive contains is already a reconstruction –a recording of history from a particular perspective, it thus cannot provide transparent access to the events themselves. But regardless of what historians may have once believed, there is currently a widespread sense that even government records that appear to be mere
collections of numbers are, in fact, already reconstructions and interpretations. Someone decided what was worth counting and how to count it.” (Manoff 2004, 15).
Given this background, some authoritative principles that have ruled the illusion of impartiality have begun to be contested. Among others, accuracy, institutional legitimacy, authenticity, and value can now be understood as conceptual constructs that, far from remaining in a purely theoretical realm, have functioned as regulating principles for archival practices. And even though the epistemological roots of archival authority have fluctuated through time, its practices have remained firmly bound to the exercise of power. From their very origin, archives have been created and
maintained by those in power, while doing a careful selection of the records they keep. Considering that archives have for centuries been regarded as the authorized
institutions based on which accounts on the past have been written, their underlying dynamics of power affect much more than their content. In the end, history as we know it can be said to be no more than the narrative interpretation of previously legitimized materials.
In trying to dispute the dominant construction of archives as sites of
asymmetrical power, participation has been entering the arena as a potential terrain in which some answers could be found. Lately, many archives have been showing interest in opening their collections to the participation of non-experts –a process that has also been facilitated by the advent of digital technologies and online platforms. According to Isto Huvila, “[i]nclusion and greater participation is supposed to reveal a diversity of motivations, viewpoints, arguments and counterarguments, which becomes
transparency when a critical mass is attained.” (Huvila 2008, 16).
However, consensus about what participation is and how it could be put into practice is far from being established. Although it can be regarded as a self-explanatory notion, participation can be associated to a wide scope of activities according to
different authors. For Isto Huvila, “[i]n the post-modern sense, the notion of
participation is built into any human interaction with information, which makes it and its implications also essential in the archival and records management contexts.” (Huvila 2008, 6, my emphasis). For Giovanna Fosatti, “[a]long with new preservation and presentation practices from within the archives, new online participatory platforms
are being introduced and supported that facilitate the development of what could be defined as “crowd film archiving”, characterized by widespread downloading, but also by uploading and remixing of audiovisual content.” (Fosatti 2012, 178, my emphasis). For Julia Noordegraaf, the authoritative knowledge that has for long constituted traditional archives can be “replaced by participatory knowledge (metadata created and managed by different types of actors, human and technological, trained and untrained).” (Noordegraaf 2011, 113, my emphasis). As is evident in these definitions, participation can range from mere interaction and a diversity of operations with archival materials, to a form of disputing authority in archives.
This thesis will therefore analyze the foundations and the preeminence of the concept of authority in online video art archives within this context, searching to expose their influence on archival discursive constructions and practical activities. In doing so, this research will take a critical view of participation, encouraging the
strategies that can represent possible challenges to the authoritative model, while also proposing substantial alternatives to it. Considering major changes introduced by the advent of digital processes and the Internet on archives, a critical revision of the impact of these technologies on the concept and practice of participation within digital and online environments becomes necessary, and will therefore be addressed along this work.
But why encouraging participation? And furthermore, why can online video art archives be a fruitful territory to reflect on these processes?
To begin with, archival authority has been grounded on the exclusion of certain actors from the possibility of operating within the realm of the archives. In this context, traditional tasks of selection, arrangement, cataloguing and access have been usually restricted to the domain of “experts”, leaving aside professionals” or
“non-official” actors –such as the general public. Consequently, archives have become almost an exclusive territory for archivists, though missing the incorporation of absent
narratives, new interpretations and allegedly lost materials, which could be brought into their scope by allowing participation.
The analysis of online video art archives could be productive for various reasons. In contrast with film archiving, video art archival practices have not received such an abundant attention on their specific issues. Even within the terrain of
contemporary archiving, they have many times fallen under the wider scope of media art, electronic art, art and technology, and similar labels –which might have prevented video art archival practices from undergoing a more rigorous process of
professionalization. Coupled with the fact that they have been created more recently when compared to film archives -in accordance with the beginning of video art practices themselves, it is possible to expect their authoritative practices not to be so strongly rooted.
Considering the above as a potential rather than as a disadvantage, it is my belief that video art archives can be highly receptive to participation. On the one hand, the Internet has stimulated video art as a highly shareable practice. Even when it is reasonable to expect that different screening settings will result in different works (or at least, different versions of a work), the electronic and digital nature of video, as well as the two-dimensional characteristic of its image makes it prone to online circulation -as opposed to the celluloid constitution of analog films, and the physical quality of installations, which require the embodied presence of the public to be fully
apprehended. This is evident, for instance, in the many online video platforms where artists and the general public upload and share their works on the Internet, such as Youtube, Vimeo, and the like.
On the other hand, video art history has not yet become a strictly canonical one. For instance, the scarcity of video art archives in South America, and the consequent difficulty in accessing works from the past decades, has certainly hampered the chances for certain accounts to be nourished beyond the realms of traditional curatorial and art history narratives. But even in regions where much more information and discussion have circulated -for instance, the United States or certain countries in Europe, spectators’ viewpoints have not yet been integrated into the majority of the histories of video art. Hopefully, the incorporation of these other stories may contribute not only to a multiplicity of versions and a growing contextualization of the works, but also to an incessant redefinition of video art itself.
It is unlikely that each and every online participatory strategy implemented at present can have a concrete impact in fully disputing the principles of archival
authority. However, by critically analyzing the existing ones and delineating future possibilities for redefining participation, a deeper understanding of the potentials of
participation can be reached, as well as the sight for new horizons pursued. As suggested by Karen Gracy, “[w]ith the latest breed of democratic digital archives, the emphasis appears to be on creation of the archive itself by user-creators.” (Gracy 2007, 194).
The present historical moment seems to be marked by a crisis of democracy, which translates into ecological, humanitarian, and economic disasters around the globe. Within such a panorama, our own systems of representation -political, historical, cultural, are also being tested. If we are not allowed to participate in the selection and the creation of the archives that are going to testimony our present time, is it our history the one that is being written?
Art and art archives should not be left outside of the realm of the representational challenges we are facing. In this context, Brazilian scholar and psychotherapist Suely Rolnik wonders: how can we conceive of “an archive “for” and not “about” artistic experience or its mere cataloguing in an allegedly objective
manner?” (Rolnik 2012,4). Art archives do not solely deal with art works, but also with the (re)creation of the contexts which makes those works relevant. Therefore, art archives can also be understood as spaces of representational disputes, negotiations, and deliberations. The more participatory those spaces can become, the more they can allow for the possibility of exchanges, for the visibility of (counter) histories, for the birth of diversified meanings –and for the manifestation of the unavoidable interaction between aesthetics and politics.
Should we understand and historicize the notions in which archival authority is rooted, the better prepared we will be to confront it. In considering participation as a possible answer, it will be crucial to expand what has probably become a restricted perception of the potentials it embraces, ranging from user interaction to new epistemological, historical and political interrogations.
In the present thesis, the notion of authority will be examined as a first step towards the analysis of participation. As already mentioned in the introduction of this work, current participatory strategies as presented by online moving image archives have the potential to disrupt traditional authoritative archival principles: therefore, understanding what authority is and how this notion has been constructed through time allows for comprehending the ways in which it operates at present. Also, acknowledging its historical transformations can help in the consideration of this concept as a mutable one, therefore open to transformations and challenges.
As a concept and as a practice, archival authority has not undergone deep examination, running the risk of becoming a self-explanatory notion, or part of a shallow discourse, devoid of any content. Within this framework, its analysis could enter a problematic arena: is authority to be located in the discursive field or in everyday practical decisions of the archive? Should the origin of authority be found in the theoretical sphere, or should we focus on possible alternatives within the territory of the factual?
According to Thomas Osborne (1999), archives can be regarded as an abstract notion -such as the ones elaborated by Jacques Derrida (1994) and Michel Foucault (1972), but also as a literal place -the actual spaces of storage where records are housed. In his view, it is the principle of credibility -at once epistemological and ethical, which allows for bridging the gap between them:
“epistemological credibility because the archive is a site for particular kinds of knowledge, particular styles of reasoning that are associated with it; and ethical
credibility because knowledge of the archive is a sign of status, of authority, of a certain right to speak, a certain kind of author-function.” (Osborne 1999:53).
Within this framework, authority will be proposed as a notion through which it is possible to connect the abstract and the literal spheres of archives. Chapter 3 will therefore begin by historicizing the epistemological roots of archival authority, proposing four of its most influential archival principles: accuracy, institutional legitimacy, authenticity, value and heritage. Following, the analysis of these
authoritative principles will be extended to the examination of a set of archival practices in which they manifest: selection, arrangement, cataloguing and access. In this same chapter, an affiliation between archival authority and the exercise of power is also to be proposed, resorting to the works of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault on this matter. Based on their reflections, contemporary critiques which aim at unveiling how power is exercised within the archive will also be addressed.
Technology has been of special relevance both for opening material possibilities of contesting authority, and for allowing the design of new participatory strategies. Thus, technology will be structured as a transversal topic in chapters 3 and 4, resorting to the reflections and projects of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Vannevar Bush, Wolfgang Ernst and Norbert Wiener. Political foundations will also be addressed in sections 3.4 and 4.1, with a particular focus on the advent of digital technology and the creation of the Internet.
In a similar vein as authority, participation is also susceptible to conceptual precariousness, unless defined within particular contexts and practices. This is the aim of chapter 4, in which an overview of a variety of definitions of the term used in moving image archival practices will be provided, as elaborated by Isto Huvila, Karen Gracy, Katie Shilton, Ramesh Srinivasan, Julia Noordegraaf, Giovanna Fossati and Mirko Schäfer. Also, these authors will provide an overview of participation in its potential to challenge authoritative principles in moving image archives.
Although some authors acknowledge participatory strategies in a similar vein as democratic archives (for instance, Karen Gracy, Henry Jenkins or Julia Noordegraaf), the term participation will be preferred. Far from conceptual fashions or a simple matter of taste, this particular choice involves a political dimension. On the one hand, it is questionable whether the mere act of participating can truly lead to a democratic archival system: in order to do that, it is my belief that more thoughtful analysis should be carried out in this sense, examining the actual effect each participatory strategy can have in terms of constructing democracy. But conversely, one could wonder if, strictly defined as the will of the majority, democracy is a desirable goal in itself. As referred by Simone Weil, “[d]emocracy and the power of the greatest number are not good. They are means to reach the good, and either rightly or wrongly seen to be effective”. (Weil
2014, 6). Furthermore, Boaventura de Sousa Santos is of the opinion that “nowadays, democracy has been transformed into a weapon of imperialism”1. According to the Portuguese sociologist, democracy has been captured as a practice by organizations, groups, and even corporations which, while promoting it, work as facades for
antidemocratic and capitalist interests. In this line, he believes that representative democracy is undergoing a serious crisis, which could find a way out by strengthening strategies for participatory democracy.2
Given this framework, participation appears as a more tangible notion through which to approach the possibility of challenging authority in online video art archives. As a matter of fact, participation will be understood in its potential to challenge archival authority, rather than as a fait accompli throughout this project.
Section 4.3 will focus on four participatory strategies in online video art archives: playlists, social tagging, uploading and self-managed curatorship. In order to analyze each of them, five case studies will be proposed, some of which will also be addressed transversally. In prompting this dialog, I will focus on two platforms from Europe, LI-MA (The Netherlands) and Video Art World (Spain); two from South America, PLATFORM : VB (from Associação Cultural Videobrasil, Brazil) and Bola de Nieve (Argentina); and one from North America, Freewaves (USA). In the context of these case studies, references to “non-expert” actors that have become involved in their participatory strategies will be referred to in accordance to the platforms’ own vocabulary; therefore, terms such as public, users, community, audience will be used.
Far from any intention of establishing a comprehensive panorama, the choices of these case studies are grounded on the lasting trajectory and dedicated works that these archives have had in the last decades. All of them have been constantly working for more than ten years, reaching over three decades of existence in some cases. In addition, most of them work in an autonomous way, founded by artists or independent
1 Round table "Los desafíos de las izquierdas en la coyuntura actual - diálogos entre América Latina y Europa” at IMPA “La Fábrica” -Universidad de los trabajadores- , May 15th 2016. Buenos Aires, Argentina. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYmUwx5sqOE. Accessed 07/08/2016.
2 “¿Democratizar la democracia?” Interview to Boaventura de Sousa Santos by Álvaro Sanabria Duque. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKOUN14pDWc. Accessed 07/08/2016.
curators and agents –which make them ideal cases for analyzing challenges to traditional archival authority.
Even though I was born in South America, it was the study of archives that lead me to live also in North America and Europe, which has certainly allowed me to expand my perspectives on this topic, and become curious about archival practices in different regions of the world. The choice of these platforms is therefore also grounded on an interest in examining potential particularities of archival authority and participation strategies in America and Europe. Moreover, Argentinian video art archive Arca Video Argentino3, which I founded in 2008, is also a source of inspiration for studying ethical decisions, practical matters and new prospects in other online video art archives, which can contribute to my current research and improvement of Arca Video’s platform.
The choice for such a specific focus on online video art archives was established due to various reasons. From its beginnings, video art has been usually referred to as a participatory art practice par excellence, which could be observed in the practices many artists performed at the time. In the late 60s and early 70s, collectives such as Videofreex or Ant Farm in the USA would insist on the democratic potential of video, which did not need to rely on big budgets or numerous crews to produce. During the prevailing dictatorships in South America in the late 70s and the 80s, many collectives would also gather together to produce a diversity of works, such as Grupo CADA in Chile, Grupo Teatro-Danza de Montevideo in Uruguay, Centro de Arte y Comunicación – CAYC- in Argentina, TVDO and Olhar Eletrônico in Brazil, among many others. As
expected, this new scene would build quite an ambivalent relation with traditional art institutions, orienting their production towards the construction of new exhibition channels in many cases –such as community TV, public art interventions, etc.
Also, when compared to other artistic practices such as painting, photography, or film, video art has had a shorter life –in general terms, we can situate its initial works in the mid-60s. Therefore, archives dedicated to this practice are also recent in time, which offers the possibility of tracing and analyzing the processes of their formation. Considering that most artists, curators and historians who have worked in this field are alive, and that many initial sources are still available, it can be easier to acknowledge
the way in which participation has (or has not) been considered as an important dimension in video art archives, as well as the strategies used to achieve this goal.
Moreover, the discussion of online video art archives is grounded on the scarcity of literature on video art archiving -at least when compared to film or
contemporary art archiving. Consequently, it is highly necessary that further analysis is to be continued, probably as a response to what I perceive as a sense of urgency in video art conservation: as we speak, more and more works become obsolete, affected by fungus, lost, destroyed or simply forgotten in old shelves and cabinets.
For centuries, archives have exercised the role of the authorized institutions where relevant traces of the past were deposited and safeguarded. While understood as mere record containers, they lead to the belief that their role could be circumscribed to offering the sources for future historical accounts to be written –as if dealing with some sort of passive, neutral task. However, even before being actually included in any archive, records undergone several decision-making processes of selection,
arrangement, cataloguing and presentation: “[t]hrough archives, the past is controlled. Certain stories are privileged and others marginalized.” (Schwartz and Cook 2002, 1).
Despite the fact that any aura of impartiality and objectivity in archives can be regarded as highly problematic at present, archival theory has just recently begun to debate it. On the contrary, the notion of authority that has ruled archival practices seems to have been overlooked for a considerable time, regarded as a sort of
unquestioned intrinsic characteristic, rather than as a concept and a practice that has undergone several epistemological transformations through time.
Considering that one of the main purposes of this thesis is to understand participatory strategies in their potential to challenge authority within the realm of video art archives, defining and bringing to light the historicity of this concept will be the opening move towards recognizing its contemporary preeminence and interpreting its impact on everyday archival practices. In this context, four authoritative principles will be discussed –accuracy, institutional legitimacy, authenticity and value. The link between authority and power will be examined by resorting to the works of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, followed by an analysis of authoritative principles at work –as in the archival stages of selection, arrangement, cataloguing and access. To conclude, an account of contemporary critiques which unveil traditional and uncontested archival practices will be proposed, grounded in the discussion of the technological dimension of moving image and online video art archives.
3.1 Historicizing authority: the rising of authoritative principles in archives
Far from any form of stable definition, archival authority needs to be
multiple meanings and practices that have been addressed by this notion through time. By resorting to different historical backgrounds and epistemological frameworks, four authoritative principles will be addressed in this section: accuracy, institutional legitimacy, authenticity, and value.
According to Francis Blouin Jr. and William Rosenberg, archives have been characterized as records of transactions since the beginning of civilization (Blouin and Rosenberg 2011, 17). Among others, these types of documents would include records of official decisions, land transactions, taxes, decrees, recordings of births, marriages and deaths, property deeds, etc., establishing archives as keepers of essential and accurate traces of social transactions and activities. In this context, accuracy “refers to the truthfulness of the content of the record and can only be established through content analysis.” (Duranti 2001:11). According to Brent Lee (2005), a record can be considered accurate when it contains true information. By distinguishing what is true from what is not, accuracy becomes strongly related to the exercise of authority in the archival realm. While safeguarding only the social records which are considered accurate, archives have contributed to the empowerment of social and political institutions that gave birth to them, “constructing and reproducing social structures, political institutions, and values.” (Blouin and Rosenberg 2011, 17).
From the Middle Ages onwards, several transformations of this initial role of archivists as safe keepers of relevant documents occurred. In Europe, the increasing influence of the church built a strong relation of cooperation between the papacy and the State, using their institutions to retain and organize official records. Along this process, authenticity gained entrance as a foundation authoritative principle -a notion that would be firstly connected with documentary truth. “With the introduction in the seventeenth century of the principles of ‘diplomatics’ (the study of the origin, form and function of specific documents), archivists became identified with the practices of documentary verification.”4 (Blouin and Rosenberg 2011, 7). In other words, the role of archivists would be modified in accordance to this newly established canon of
authenticity: from being the keepers of valuable and accurate records, to being responsible for the authenticity of their holdings.
4 Established by French monk Dom Jean Mabillon in his De re diplomática (1681), diplomatics was conceived as a means of establishing the authenticity of medieval charters or diplomas (Skemer 1989, 377).
Another turn in defining authority within the realm of archives was to be set in correspondence with two main events: the rapid increase in the quantity of records as a consequence of Europe’s imperialist development, and the arrival of printed
documents -and not only manuscripts, into the archives. In this renewed context, verification of the records could no longer be as efficient, fast and trustworthy as before. Thus, “a protocol system had to be developed that linked documents to the specific bureaucratic process responsible for their generation.” (Blouin and Rosenberg 2011, 19), in a new turn towards an idea of authenticity that rested on the affiliation of the documents to an institutional context, as an acceptable means of verification. In other words, the legitimacy of the institutions where documents were housed would become a sufficient criterion for a record to be considered authentic. In this line, Luciana Duranti (1998) stresses the role of institutions by referring to the legal form of determining authenticity. In her own words, “[l]egally authentic documents are those which bear witness on their own because of the intervention, during or after their creation, of a representative of a public authority guaranteeing their genuineness” (Duranti 1998, 45). The practice of authentication would therefore become of special relevance for archives, in cases when a record is “guaranteed genuine by a public authority” (Lee 2005:5, my emphasis).
With the advent of the French Revolution, authority held by archives would be contested, particularly through the creation of the Archives Nationales. Within this process, “[l]egislation creating the archives specifically designated the records of the previous regime as historical documents, separating them from contemporary and future records.” (Blouin and Rosenberg 2011, 21). Consequently, records of the royal family and the church did no longer held any authority as administrative documents, but rather as the historical patrimony of the nation. Analogous transformations would occur in several countries of Europe, such as Austria, Belgium, England and Spain, in accordance with a complex set of political shifts in the region. In the case of The Netherlands, for example, “[t]he political upheaval of 1795 (when the Batavian Republic replaced the Republic of the United Netherlands) further changed the legal-antiquarian interest in documents into a historical-legal-antiquarian interest.” (Horsman, Ketelaar and Thomassen 2003, 249).
This archival shift -from keeping bureaucratic documents to safeguarding historical records, involved another variation in the grounds of the concept of
authority. Indeed, value became the new notion in which authority was to be rooted, associated in this period with ideals of tradition. In that particular context, the fact that some records could be classified as “particularly valuable” (Blouin and Rosenberg 2011, 22), would once again stress authoritative practices in archives - although with a new meaning and a different set of practices and principles.
Within the context of the aforementioned principle of value, the notion of heritage was introduced since the latter half of the 20th century. As stated by Carolyn Frick (2011), this heritage discourse is to be coupled with 19th and 20th century notions of national identity in new nation-states, though a new reinforcement of these ideas would also impregnate contemporary archival theory. In this context, powerful
institutions such as UNESCO would contribute to the legitimization of an understanding of archives as sites of cultural preservation, and of archivists as their protectors.
According to Frick, it was not until the 1980s that preservation was established as the most important function of archives. As opposed to library practices -in which access is considered to be the main task, authority in archives would only recently begin to consolidate itself on the activities of preservation. However, as historian David Lowenthal comments, there is another side of the story behind this laudable task: “[t]he “logic” of cultural heritage, however, has traditionally worked to reify and strengthen ties to a particular level of authority and power, the nation, and thus to legitimize particular players and artifacts in the archival process.” (quoted in Frick 2011,13).
During the course of the nineteenth century, archival authority would also become discursively validated with the creation of schools and associations -such as the French École des Chartes in 1821, or the Association of Archivists in The
Netherlands, in 1891, as well as with the publication of the first manuals and journals. Archival authority would be also reinforced by the professionalization of the archivists and the development of the discipline. In this context, a major event was constituted by the publication of the Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives -best known as the Dutch Manual-, written by Samuel Muller, Johan Adriaan Feith, and Robert Fruin, in 1898. Called “a bible for modern archivists” (Horsman, Ketelaar and
Thomassen 2003:268), it has been translated into several languages (German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Estonian, Russian, English and Chinese), clearly exposing the relevance and the impact this publication have had in archival theory.
Aimed at setting some standards for the archival professional practices, the Manual introduced the definitions of essential notions, starting by that of the archival collection itself:
“[an] archival collection is the whole of the written documents, drawings and printed matter, officially received or produced by an administrative body or one of its officials, in so far as these documents were intended to remain in the custody of that
body or of that official.” (quoted in Ketelaar 2003,13).
As we can see, this definition has a prescriptive character, since it not only narrows the type of documents that an archive can hold (“documents, drawings and printed matter”), but it also specifies the need to maintain the archive’s original structure, provided one wants to fully comprehend it. As already noticed by Horsman, Ketelaar and Thomassen, this idea was not entirely original, being traceable to the French concept of réspect des fonds. However, it was the Dutch contribution to determine that archives should not be mixed with each other, but also that their internal structure should be preserved -an idea that was expressed in the biological metaphor of the archive as an “organic whole” (Horsman, Ketelaar and Thomassen 2003, 255).
In addition, the Manual’s understanding of authority in the archive can also be observed in an explicit formulation of the archive as an administrative power, which is the one that creates the archive. Besides the establishment of a specific methodology for archives, distinct from that of library theory, this publication also instituted a particular role for the archivist, which was now oriented towards records management (Blouin and Rosenberg 2011, 30).
Archival authority comprises a set of epistemological affiliations and a diversity of practices. In Medieval times, accuracy and institutional legitimacy would contribute to the crystallization of archival authority, to be later replaced by authenticity as a
governing principle -in turn, closely related to the influence of diplomatics and humanist philology. This authoritative principle of authenticity would be also strengthen during the 18th century, while value would begin to play a major role in defining archival authority after the French Revolution -encompassed with incipient processes of institutional legitimization of the archival profession. In this context, the notion of heritage would strengthen the principle of value in archives, rooted in concepts of national identity. As it will be commented in the following section, these authoritative principles still regulate many contemporary archival practices of our time.
3.2 Authority, power and the archive: Arendt, Derrida and Foucault
Even though common sense would tempt us to believe in a necessary alliance between authority and power, a critical analysis on this relationship becomes
unavoidable, provided the authoritative dimension of the archive and its potential influence on historical writing are to be scrutinized.
In “What is authority?” (1961), Hannah Arendt introduces a distinction between authority and power. Quoting Cicero, she refers to the expression “Cum potestas in populo auctoritas in senatu sit”, which means that while power lies on the people, authority resides in the Senate. By virtue of being the keeper of tradition, the function of the Senate becomes that of giving meaning to people’s action. But as asserted by Garduño Comparán (2014), the grounds of these ideas might be problematic. Firstly, because Arendt presupposes that people’s action is based on a set of common values, which are hard to establish: “[p]olitical life, as presented by Arendt, must be bound to a tradition that refers in turn to the legendary time of the foundation of a community of equals that discuss freely, while respecting the plurality of perspectives, in order to achieve a consensus that defines the sense of communal life.” (Garduño Comparán 2014, 67). According to Arendt, this type of authority is based on tradition, “resting on a foundation in the past as its unshaken cornerstone.” (Arendt 1961, 3).
Despite the fact that Arendt does not identify authority with violence, she does acknowledge that “it implies disciplinary practices as well as obedience and
elaborate on the forceful effect -that is to say, the power, that such institutions as archives can exert on the creation of these traditions, on the establishment of origins, and on the imposition of foundational and historical narratives. It is precisely this point which will be elaborated in this section, by resorting to the works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, who would bind together the dimensions of authority, power and the archive. The works of the two French intellectuals have constituted a conceptual milestone in the field of contemporary philosophy, while having a profound impact on our understanding of how authoritative knowledge is built. In this context, it is not a coincidence that both authors have dedicated an important part of their work to the topic of the archive.
One of Derrida’s most important contributions to the reflection about archives consists of his analysis of the power relations involved in their dynamics. In his “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” (1994), he resorts to the double meaning of the Greek word Arkhé. On the one hand, this notion implies the existence of a place, a
domiciliation in which the archive is located. In order to be defined as such, archives require an inscription in a location, which is to be found in an exteriority (Derrida 2002). On the other hand, Arkhé also refers to the law5, to power, to a sort of pre-established order which entitles the archons not only as keepers of the archive, but it also provides them with an “hermeneutic authority: “[t]hey have the power to interpret the archives” (Derrida 1994, 10).
Derrida also prompts the issue of technology as a relevant matter to be analyzed, since there is always a necessary act of inscription involved in archival processes. But according to the philosopher, technology cannot be regarded as an accessory component of the archive, but rather as the key element in determining the nature of what is (or will be) archivable. In other words, technology shapes but also allows for a record to be included or excluded, not to mention a number of possible representations of the record which have an enormous impact on its future
interpretations. For Derrida, this point defines “the technological power of the archive.” (Derrida 2002, 46).
5 “Arkhé we recall, names at once the commencement and the commandment.” (Derrida 1994:9)
In analyzing the dynamics of power in the archive, the work of Michel Foucault is also of great relevance. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), Foucault examines the role of what he calls discursive formations, defined as groups of statements. In his proposal, the analysis of statements can allow for an understanding of the conditions and modes of existence of discursive fields, rather than the search for the origins. In turn, these groups of statements also define the term discourse, whenever they belong “to a single system of formation; thus I shall be able to speak of clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse.” (Foucault 1972, 108).
In his proposal, the concept of the archive does not refer to a location or a material inscription -as in Derrida’s first meaning of the word Arkhé, but it is rather linked to the second one -the law, the commandment, the order. In this context, the archive determines the possibility of existence of statements, while it also allows for their transformation. In his own words, “[t]he archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” (Foucault 1972, 129).
As previously discussed, the connection between authority and power is not natural: on the contrary, it needs to be unraveled. Although for Hannah Arendt authority and power belong to two different realms, the latter exerts a disciplinary force over the creation of traditions and narratives which, in turn, reinforces authoritative practices within society. For the specific case of archival authority, Jacques Derrida would refer to the hermeneutical and the technological power of the archive. In the first case, power is related to the archive as a set of commandments, that empowers the archons with the control over the interpretation of the records. In the second, it is connected to the material dimension of the archive, which allows or rejects the inclusion of certain elements, discriminating what is archivable from what it is not. Finally, Michel Foucault would conceive the archive as the discursive framework which allows for certain statements to originate and to exist, but also to be
transformed and to perish. Once again, forceful power dynamics operate within these processes, either admitting or withholding the existence of certain discourses and practices. Following on these topics, next section will present some of the above
mentioned principles of authority at work, embodied in the form of contemporary critiques to authoritative archival practices.
3.3 Recognizing authority in archival practices: contemporary critiques
As it was previously mentioned in the introduction of this thesis, a sense of transparency and credibility has been erected on the grounds of archival authority. While lacking a critical approach towards authority, archives have then been able to establish themselves as unquestionable institutions –when in fact they have been founded on power dynamics over the inclusion and exclusion of records, their interpretation and their presentation.
According to Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook (2002), it was only until recent that the illusion of objectivity, impartiality and neutrality within the archival profession has begun to be called into question. Among these contemporary remarks, archives have been acknowledged as sites where power is exercised, considering the fact that only a fraction of the records produced by society are selected to enter their vaults –which allows for partial interpretations only. In addition, archivists would also be perceived as the figures who mold archives’ inner dynamics: “the principles and strategies that archivists have adopted over time, and the activities they undertake (…) fundamentally influence the composition and character of archival holdings and, thus, of societal memory.” (Schwartz and Cook 2002, 3).
For the archival community, the works of Derrida and Foucault on the archive provided a solid philosophical basis for detecting and analyzing power dynamics involved in archives, and thus for potentially challenging their authority. In this sense, contemporary reflections would start to focus on a diversity of strategies through which authority permeates many of the different stages involved in an archive’s even most pragmatic actions -such as the choice of what is included or excluded, the cataloguing of its materials, or the presentation of its documents. Accordingly, a renewed awareness on archives as authoritative institutions would began to emerge, unveiling traditional and uncontested practices which tint their practical dimension.
Selection of the records constitutes the first moment in which archival authority operates. In this stage, archives -and archivists- discriminate between what is worth keeping, and what is not, raising awareness of archives not only in terms of what they contain, but also, of their omissions, suppressions and absences. Decisions about selection can be based on different criteria. For instance, the specificity of the archive regulates what types of records to admit- depending on whether the archive is concentrated on a certain country, community or historical period; whether it is focused on maps, official documents or films, etc. In another cases, it is financial restrictions that prevent a certain record from entering the archive, depending on the quantity of records it can manage (storage space and the problem of bulk),
technological equipment needed to operate, the amount of employees an archive can have at disposal, etc. In addition, value can be assessed as another criterion that affects archival selection. The extension of this section does not allow for a full elaboration of this notion, but it is pertinent to refer to Lynn Spiegel’s (2005) work in this sense. In commenting on the relations between television, heritage and preservation, she acknowledges the influence of power dynamics in the very constitution of archives, commenting on a set of selection logics, which can mutate through time, or according to institutional goals. Among other, she refers to potential economic value (as in the case of audiovisual archives renting their footage), the fine arts value (as in the case of media specificity or originality), or the museum value (as in the case of space and location of the institutions becoming distinguishing values, sometimes even above collections themselves).
Concerning the issue of selection, Eric Ketelaar distinguishes between archivization, archiving and archivilization, acknowledging the existence of three “phases” in the archive. For the Dutch scholar, the first term refers to the inscription of the record in the system, that is to say, the moment of consignation, of imprinting a material trace in an external location. With respect to archiving, Ketelaar defines it as the activity of capturing the records, that is, when they are “accepted by the system.” (Ketelaar 2001, 132). But even before these two steps, the neologism archivilization represents for him the “conscious or unconscious choice (determined by social and cultural factors) to consider something worth archiving.” (Ketelaar 2001, 133, emphasis in the original).
Arrangement can be recognized as another stage in which authority operates within the archive. Criteria for deciding on arrangement of records have fluctuated historically, shaping a particular understanding of the collections even before actually reaching the cataloguing phase. A clear example of this type of epistemologically- based record molding can be found in the explicit prohibition on alphabetical or chronological arrangement, as established in the Dutch Manual (Horsman, Ketelaar and Thomassen 2003, 260). In turn, both alphabetical and chronological order were based upon provenance as their regulating principle, a notion that would be adopted from the French original réspect des fonds, which established the need to maintain the archive as a whole, respecting its original structure. If records were to be assembled by name or date (or even place and kings, as used in the past), the collection ran the risk of losing its internal and original coherence.
However, such a governing concept in archival theory and practice as that of provenance has also undergone several modifications through time. Tom Nesmith discusses the difficulty to find a unique definition of provenance, due to the various meanings it can reach. In his view, archivists are the ones who, in the end, decide what counts as a collection -in a set of actions that amounts for considerable power of interpreting and therefore, of shaping provenance. On this topic, he concludes: “[w]hat an archivist decides to include or emphasize when constructing this provenance will help shape the meaning of the records and thus the reality they create for their readers.” (Nesmith 2002, 36).
Cataloguing can be defined as “[t]he process of providing access to materials by creating formal descriptions to represent the materials and then organizing those descriptions through headings that will connect user queries with relevant material” (Pearce-Moses 2005, 63). By referring to the content of the collections, identifying the types of materials, and establishing the records, cataloguing becomes a sort of
interface between the archive and the public, orienting -but also sometimes diverting, possible searches. In the words of Eric Ketelaar, “[n]umerous tacit narratives are hidden in categorization, codification and labeling.” (Ketelaar 2001, 135).
Among other archival processes, cataloguing can be regarded as one of the most ostensibly authoritative, which becomes evident in the numerous manuals and publications that have regulated its practice. Some of the most recent ones that can be
mentioned are The Library of Congress Descriptive Cataloging Manual (2008), the FIAF Moving Image Cataloguing Manual (2005), the AMIA Compendium of Moving Image Cataloging Practice (2001), the IASA Cataloguing Rules: A Manual for the Description of Sound Recordings and Related Audiovisual Media (1999), the UCLA Film and Television Archive Cataloging Procedure Manual (2004), or Cataloging Sheet Maps: The Basics (2003). But despite the efforts of these prescriptive publications and of the associations that have created them (and bearing in mind the obvious differences among the types or records to be described), the lack of cataloguing standards is striking. In this sense, the fact that each association or institution develops its own cataloguing system (which is applicable to many archives, but also to several libraries and museums around the globe), does nothing but reinforce authority, since the description of the records remains invariably tied, not only to the archival discipline and the archivists, but also to the will of the institutions that house the collections. Whether to seek for unique standards still remains, of course, debatable. However, it should be considered that, in some cases, the absence of standards might be posing a threat to the possibility of sharing materials -not only among the general public, but also between archives as well.
Providing access to the collections should be mentioned as another archival practice in which authority operates. Even though contemporary discourses coming from archival institutions emphasize the importance of providing access to their collections as one of their defining tasks, an actual approach to the records has not always been permitted.6 In fact, the notion of the public archive is to be found in the context of the French Revolution: prior to this, archives were under the scope of sovereign, non-public power, and were inaccessible for most citizens. Even though the creation of the Archives Nationales dates from 1790, “the key date for the emergence of the really modern kind of archival spirit is surely 25 July 1794, the date of a decree opening up those archives to the public.” (Osborne 1999, 55).
However, providing access cannot solely guarantee that authority does not operate. Far from being able to provide any sort of direct, unmediated contact with the records, every archive designs strategies for its public to access its materials. As above
6 Indeed, still today many records, specially governmental, industrial or corporative, are kept “classified” and, therefore, not made accessible to the general public.
mentioned, arrangement and cataloguing are two of them, but other forms of
mediation should also be considered. Among others, the influence of the architectonic space of the archive itself (is it easily accessible in the city it is located? Is it necessary to make an appointment in advance to make a consultation?); the mediation of the archivists (should the public know in advance what they are looking for? Are the archivists properly trained to orient their research?); and, for non-physical online archives, the impact of the interface and web design (are the contents accessible from any point or the planet, or are they restricted to certain territories? What sort of browsing does the interface allow for?).
In this regard, we can once again resort to Eric Ketelaar when intending to overcome the more traditional understanding of archives as repositories, and of archivists as passive custodians, by stressing the importance of recontextualisation:
“[a]s David Bearman writes When we accession, transfer, arrange, weed, document and inventory archival materials, we change their character as well as enhance their evidential and informational value. The facts of processing, exhibiting, citing, publishing and otherwise managing records becomes significant for their meaning as records (...)” (Ketelaar 2001, 137).
As previously discussed, archives are sites where authority and power can be located. Even in tasks previously regarded as neutral, such as record selection, arrangement, cataloguing and access, archivists mold not only the content of the archive, but also the frameworks that define our understanding of archives as such. Therefore, archives constitute a locus of power that enables a specific archival
epistemology, and a set of highly regulated practices, which have only recently begun to be unveiled.
3.4 Technological grounds for contesting authority: moving image and online video art archives.
As any other archive, moving image archives have also been impregnated by an authoritative epistemology and set of practices. In the particular case of online video art archives, the practice and roots of their authoritative principles are very much
intertwined with some of their technological particularities. In this section, they will be addressed not only in terms of a technological specificity that needs to be
acknowledged, but also in their potential to contest traditional authoritative principles in archives.
Recalling Derrida, an archive without an inscription in an external location is unconceivable. Therefore, the issue of the technical imprint is closely tied to the moment of the creation of the record, and it also defines the very dimension of what is archivable. As remarked by Eric Ketelaar, “[t]he technologies of records creation, maintenance and use color the contents of the record, and also affect its form and structure.” (Ketelaar 2001, 135). Since the extension of this work does not allow for a full elaboration on this topic in historical terms, I will only refer to the changes
introduced by two of our more contemporary technologies: the advent of digital technology, and the creation and civil dissemination of the Internet, both of which have had an impact on contesting the authoritative principles of authenticity, value, and institutional legitimacy. Beware of enthusiastic discourses that proclaim a sort of radical turn to “democratic archives” rooted on these developments, the focus will be laid on critical discourses about them, concentrated on their potential ability to contest archival authority.
In order to critically examine this panorama, references to both media art and moving image archival theory will be necessary, due to a quite ambivalent position video art archives have occupied over time. On the one hand, video art has belonged to the institutional sphere of media art and contemporary art collections: just to mention a few, it is worth mentioning the cases of the video art collections of Centre Pompidou (France)7, MoMA –Museum of Modern Art (USA)8, Museo Reina Sofía (Spain)9, Stedelijk Museum (The Netherlands)10, MAMBA - Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Argentina)11, and CeDoc Artes Visuales (Chile)12. Nevertheless, many reflections from within the framework of film archiving are also applicable for video art, when considered part of the moving image universe –particularly when recognizing 7 https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en 8 http://www.moma.org/ 9 http://www.museoreinasofia.es/ 10 http://www.stedelijk.nl/ 11 http://museodeartemoderno-buenosaires.blogspot.nl/ 12 http://www.ccplm.cl/sitio/coleccion-audiovisual/
the challenges that both film and video have posed to the authoritative principles of authenticity and value. Therefore, I am bound to consider both fields in this section, in order to provide a substantial ground for reflection on authority in online video art archives.
That authenticity prevails as a powerful discourse becomes evident in many professional publications. For instance, when referring to best preservation practices, FIAF mentions that
“[a]ny duplication of analogue material will inevitably create a new element which is different from the original. However, the process should attempt to create a duplicate that adheres as faithfully as possible to the original. It is of the utmost importance that newly created elements retain the originals’ authenticity. Maintaining authenticity is not only an issue of image quality, but also of frame ratio, aspect ratio, etc.” (FIAF Technical Commission Preservation Best Practice 2009).
The advent of digital technology has openly questioned authenticity as an authoritative principle. However, many decades before digital devices have reached our daily life, Walter Benjamin’s crucial work “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), would claim that when technologies of mechanical reproduction enter the scene (being his analysis mostly devoted to photography and cinema), the aura of the work of art disintegrates. “We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.” (Benjamin 1969, 5). For Benjamin, the aura of an object is thus interwoven with a notion of uniqueness and, in his view, of authenticity. In his own words, “[t]he presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.” (Benjamin 1969, 220). However, far from any nostalgic longing for authenticity, Benjamin’s point introduces a crucial conceptual turn: in the absence of a difference between an original and its copies, the very notion of authenticity becomes meaningless in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Furthermore, the vanishing of the aura and the consequent emancipation of the artwork from its cult value increases public access, by means of mass exhibition. In this sense, the possibility of disseminating works of art poses a challenge –referred by
Benjamin as “reception in a state of distraction” (Benjamin 1969, 239), which needs to be understood in the context of his political project. Written in full swing of the
destructive fascist upraising in Europe, “The Work of Art…” can also be read as a serious warning against the dangers of certain uses of mechanical reproduction by totalitarian regimes.
Even when these reflections occurred early on in the 20th century, authenticity remains a controversial matter among moving image archival theory. From a more traditional perspective, still today it is claimed that “[a]udiovisual archivists have, amongst other responsibilities, the task of maintaining the authenticity, and guaranteeing the integrity, of the material in their care.” (Edmondson 2004, 8, my emphasis). Although highly questionable (and indeed, questioned), the concept of authenticity still impregnates many contemporary debates around preservation, conservation and restoration of the moving image. Particularly when discussed among film archival theory, authenticity finds its grounds on some sort of celluloid fetishism, which strives for a value principle of “materiality” of film, over its “content”. In this sense, film projection would be perceived as more “authentic” than the same film projected on another format (for instance, a digital version), an idea based on the notion of an “original format” (Fossati 2011, 100).
Recalling Benjamin, Giovanna Fossati questions this notion of authenticity, when considering film as a serial, reproducible product. However, authenticity might re-enter the scene when film is introduced in an archival context: “when entering the archive, a film acquires authenticity status; the authority of the object is restored, the film copy is re-territorialized. Copies are compared and differences are assessed, such as different soundtracks (…), different texts (…), and different image qualities (…).” (Fossati 2011, 119).
The advent of digital technology has certainly disturbed the authenticity discourse that has for long functioned as a source of legitimacy and authority in moving image archives. For some, namely the “celluloid fetishism” advocates, a digital copy can never equal the “original” celluloid copy. For others, digital-born materials and digitized copies inaugurate a new interpretation of authenticity, which may not necessarily be based on the material artifact anymore. Summarizing, “on the one hand the original artifact could be considered so precious that it becomes untouchable, on
the other hand access to the original artifact could be considered irreplaceable and thus granted with the consequence that its deterioration would be accelerated.” (Fossati 2011, 123).
Within the field of video, the question of authenticity is to be found more directly addressed in the realm of media and contemporary art archival and
conservation theory -most specifically, in the context of time-based art, which “refers broadly to works that are dependent on time for the maturation or completion of the experience. Relevant media include film, video, digital, audio, Web, performance, and installation art, and some types of kinetic sculpture.” (Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art 2010). According to Pip Laurenson (2006), fine arts conservation theory still resorts to a 19th century notion of authenticity, based upon criteria of uniqueness and physical integrity. But as opposed to the physical integrity approach, time-based art conservation –while dealing with “works that incorporate a video, slide, film, audio or computer based element” (Laurenson 2006, 1), ponders the fact that video, as a medium, is characterized by a wide variety of formats. Just a few among the analog ones are 2" Quadruplex videotape, U-matic 3/4", Betamax, VHS, Betacam, Video8, S-VHS; among the digital tape formats, Digital Betacam, DV, Mini DV, HDCAM, HDV; while for the digital formats, AVI, MOV, MPEG, MPEG-4, FLV, M4V, 3GP; and their
correspondent codecs, MPEG-2 Part 2, MPEG-4 Part
Figure 1. Analog video tapes.13
Within the scope of contemporary art conservation, many efforts have been dedicated to the exploration of “alternative ways of understanding authenticity” (Laurenson 2006, 4), in an attempt to transcend its more traditional definition. Faced with the frequent and repeated actions of migration14 and emulation15, analog and digital video have shifted away from the archival “chain of custody”16, that has ensured the work’s authenticity: ‘[f]iles repeatedly copied to new strata face the likelihood that changes will be introduced into these files, and we know little about how to control mutability across repeated "refreshments".” (Besser 2001, 7). In this sense, Besser’s remark seems to be pointing at the fact that archival authority can be contested when
13
http://www.andreadicastro.com/academia/Tec/Video_Todas_Partes.html14 “To migrate means to make regular updates of equipment and source codes of the works, from one technological generation to the next. By doing so, it becomes possible to access the information for existing systems at the time of the update.” (Hofman and Rozo 2009, 91) 15 “To emulate a piece means to copy its original appearance with fully or partially different methods. In the case of constitutive materials (or hardware) it is based on mimicking the impression of the early work, while for the case of functional systems (software), it is based on the possibility of being executed in an special programming environment (an emulator), that mimics the old context in which the piece ran.” (Hofman and Rozo 2009, 91)
16 “The succession of offices or persons who have held materials from the moment they were created” (Pearce-Moses 2005,67).
based on the principle of authenticity, due to the instability and mutability of video images, and to our inability to manage them.
When dealing with electronic materials, other authors would also stress the challenges posed by digital technology to any conventional interpretation of
authenticity. When analyzing the impact of digitization on video art works, Cosetta Saba detects a major transformation, at least in two aspects. Firstly, due to conversion and compression algorithms, both of which introduce a mutation in the original analog environment. In addition, the reception conditions enabled by a digital environment are not usually fixed ones, in correspondence to variable dimensions and media (Saba 2013, 112).
“Solutions” to this authenticity crisis have been offered in many different ways. From focusing on the elaboration of proper documentation that enables the
preservation of the context of the artwork (Saba 2013); to redefining the concept of authenticity for the digital environment, referred to as “digital provenance metadata” (McDonough and Jimenez 2007); to expanding the notion of authenticity beyond the work’s materiality, thus beginning to acknowledge the “medium-independent
attributes of an artwork” (Jones 2003); or the recommendation of best practices and the elaboration of questionnaires (Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art 2010; Ippolito 2003; Edmondson 1997; Fleischhauer 2003; Besser 2001; Bordina and
Venturini 2013; Enge and Lurk 2013), authenticity remains a matter subjected to active debate. What all these opinions show, whether originated in moving image,
contemporary art or time-based art conservation, is that the authenticity discourse is still in good health. But if not completely elucidated, the truth is that the traditional stability of the concept has been certainly shaken by the adoption of digital technology in video archival practices.
Furthermore, when considering this issue in relation to media art archiving, Wolfgang Ernst remarks that “[i]t is not the digitality of the so-called digital archive that is new but the fact that what is involved is the binary code” (Ernst 2013, 82). According to the German scholar, media art archivalia lose their specificity by means of this new form of encoding, bringing it closer to other forms of data objects. In the context of this thesis, acknowledging this point becomes highly relevant, particularly when facing the plurality of materials that can become part of a digital video art archive. Far from
consisting exclusively of video art works, these platforms might also include written material (such as catalogues, articles, reviews, etc.), sound material (for instance, interviews), and/or other types of audiovisual materials (artists’s statements, video documentation, etc).
For its part, the creation of the Internet and its availability to the general public17 has also defied the long-established authoritative principle of value in video art archives. Needless to say, the fact that many archives have been making their
collections available through a diversity of online platforms represents a valuable contribution to the dissemination of knowledge and of artistic works. Online availability certainly broadens the access scope, otherwise restricted by the physicality of the archive. For non-dominant countries and regions, which usually remain far from artistic and cultural epicenters, online access increases the possibility of approaching distant focus of production and archiving materials for wider audiences.
In addition, online distribution can also battle a general perception of video art as an artistic practice in lack of a properly documented history. On the one hand, in countries or regions where conservation strategies have not been developed in parallel with the production of the works, it has occurred that many of the early tapes were lost, damaged or destroyed. This has result in a restricted circulation of video art, almost exclusively among specialized festivals and exhibitions, and generating the impression that video is always new, contemporary, that it has no past. Except for a few exceptions, among which the cases of Brazil and Chile should be included, video art archives in South America mainly exist due to the initiatives of independent groups and projects. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this lack of (traditional) institutional frameworks has created a prolific scenario for these autonomous projects, many of which, as expected, take the form of online platforms. In the cases of these non-traditional archival environments, new or presumably lost information on the works can be found, expanding narratives that have been considered as a closed issue.
17 The Internet was actually conceived as part of a research project of the Department of Defense of the United States, which ties its origins to developments in the field of bellicose technology. Later on, it would be open to civilian use. Section 4.1 will elaborate on this topic.
