Documentation as Art: Expanded Digital Practices

co-edited with Gabriella Giannachi

Documentation as Art presents documentation as an expanded practice that is radically changing the ways in which to look at, participate in, and generate art.

Bringing together expertise from different disciplines, the book provides an in-depth investigation of the development of documentation as a set of production, circulation, and preservation strategies. Illustrating how these are often led by artists, audiences, and museums, the contributions offer new insights into digital art and its history, curation, and preservation, through documentation. Considering documentation as the main method of preserving these art forms, the book analyses how it can address the inherent challenges of capturing live events, visitor experiences, and evolving artworks. Showing how documentation itself can become (part of) an original artwork, the book discusses ways in which these expanded practices can impact the value and experience of the documented event or artwork, giving consideration to how this might affect the traditional authority of the museum as creator of documentation used for future reference, historical relevance, or cultural memory.

Documentation as Art demonstrates how the curation and preservation of documentation and the introduction of audience-generated documentation are radically changing exhibition and visiting practices in which documentation is becoming a significant and emergent cultural form in its own right. The book will appeal to researchers and students engaged in the study of museums and curation, art and art history, performance, new media and digital art, library and information science, and conservation.

 

CONTENT

Introduction
Annet Dekker and Gabriella Giannachi

Part 1: Production
– Annet Dekker: The Tension Between Static Documentation and Dynamic Digital Art
– Katrina Sluis: Documentation in an Age of Photographic Hypercirculation
– Orit Gat: Fifty-Two Weeks: A Year of El Paquete Semanal, the Cuban Offline Internet, and the Two Artists who Archived It
– Annet Dekker in conversation with Marco de Mutiis: In-game Photography
– Annet Dekker in conversation with Matt Adams: Documentation as a Creative Act

Part 2: Circulation
– Sandra Fauconnier: Challenges in the Creation, Perception and Distribution of Documentation
– Ofri Cnaani: Leaking Lands: Museum Documentation without Digitization
– Nour A. Munawar: Digital Culture: Heritage, Social Media and Documentation Practices
– Gaia Tedone in conversation with Dena Yago: Step-And-Repeat: The Feed as The Great Flattener
– Annet Dekker and Katrina Sluis in conversation with Olia Lialina: One Terabyte of Documentation. The Circulation of GeoCities

Part 3: Preservation
– Gabriella Giannachi: The Use of Documentation for Preservation and Exhibition: the Cases of SFMOMA, Tate, Guggenheim, MOMA, and LIMA
– Yuhsien Chen and Tzuchuan Lin: Rendering the Moment. Virtual Reality as Documentation Tool for Spatial Kinetic Artwork
– Anni Wallenius: Collecting Social Photo. A Nordic Project in the Search of Sustainable Methods for Preserving Social Media as Cultural Heritage
– Dragan Espenschied: In Between Performance and Documentation
– Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi: How a Guitar Started to Self-Document its ‘Identity’. The Future of Art Documentation

 

The book is part of the AHRC funded project Documenting Digital Art (2019-23), with Gabriella Giannachi (University of Exeter); Annet Dekker (London South Bank University / University of Amsterdam), Katrina Sluis (ANU), Gaby Wijers (LIMA), and Francesca Franco (University of Exeter), in partnership with LIMA in Amsterdam, The Photographers’ Gallery in London, and the Venice Biennale.