Preservation of Net Art through ‘Networks of Care’: Challenges and Potentials

The Web That Was: Archives, Traces, Reflections
A three-day conference, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, June 19-21, 2019
The third biennial RESAW (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials) conference. Organized by the University of Amsterdam.

As the first generation of web users goes grey, it’s clear that the internet they remember is no longer around. The early web is now simply another object of nostalgia. Tech anniversaries are a dime a dozen, while once cool digital aesthetics have made several ironic comebacks. All of this reinforces a sense that we’ve left behind a digital history that was as clunky and slow as it was idealistic and naïve.

How can we rethink this relationship to the web’s past and the past web? This question is crucial today as the open web continues to lose ground to platforms and apps. How can this history be reconstructed and re-evaluated, and how are web archives and web histories impacted by technological change? What do traditional problems of preservation and historiography look like at scale? And what stories capture the diverse transformations and continuities that mark nearly 30 years of web history?

There is of course no single web history, materially or conceptually speaking. There is instead a politics of archives, technologies and discourses that needs to be uncovered. How can we expand our view of web history beyond Silicon Valley and celebrated cases? And how can we reveal the technological, social and economic contexts that have shaped not just the present web, but how we access its past? What role do archives play in uncovering the histories of the web, platforms and apps, as well as their production and usage contexts?

This conference aims to bring together scholars, archivists and artists interested in preserving, portraying and otherwise engaging with the web that was. In addition to paper submissions, we invite proposals for audiovisual installations, posters, software demos, or other media that connects to the conference themes.

 

Presentation by Annet Dekker and Karin de Wild
Abstract
This paper will present the outcomes of a round-robin conversation about the preservation of an online artwork through a ‘network of care’, addressing both benefits, as well as challenges. Although the premise of ‘networks’ received quite some theoretical attention (Brown 2016; Lovink and Rossiter 2015/18; Munster 2013; Fitzpatrick 2011; Van Saaze 2013; Dekker 2018), little has been theorised about what it means to create and sustain a network of care, in particular in relation to digital art and preservation. There are still many questions about the construction and functioning of such ‘networks of care’. By bringing together individuals from diverse backgrounds, this paper will gain further insights in what is needed to develop preservation review processes and guidelines that detail specific actions for establishing and sustaining a ‘network of care’. It will address questions like: What are the different elements of a ‘network of care’? What and who would be involved when initiating such a network? What are benefits (or challenges) for the study of these artworks, when they are preserved through a ‘network of care’? And what could be the role of an established institution of, or preservation professionals, to persist and evolve such a network over time?

We will explore these questions through specific case studies, in particular, the preservation of the online artwork Brandon (1998-present) by artist Shu Lea Cheang. On June 30 1998, the Guggenheim museum launched its first artist project for the Web Brandon. This title refers to the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was sexually assaulted and murdered in rural Nebraska because of his gender identity. The artwork was released five years later as a collaborative platform, still undefined, inviting guest curators to illuminate Brandon’s story. The tragic story of Brandon Teena was kept alive with the intention that it could lead to a variety of social and political debates. Through the involvement of multiple authors, from different parts of the world, the artwork started to grow and expand in unexpected directions. Brandon became a multi-author and even a multi-institutional collaboration. As the artwork was distributed in a way that gave various parties control over it, what does this mean for how the artwork is preserved today? Moreover, and as also mentioned by among others Lovink and Munster (2013), most networks consist of online and offline components, agents and temporalities that cannot be studied and apprehended as merely (a set of) tools. These networks need to be analysed within the ecology in which they partake and are forming. This also reflects the key intention of Cheang, when she states that the medium (the Web) and in particular its collaborative aspects made the artwork possible. It follows that the process of studying, preserving and presenting Brandon must involve a network that includes the expertise of multiple people, as well as the involvement of non-human actors (i.e. the artwork and its contextual dependencies of the Web). In this research we aim to make a thorough investigation of the different roles of these stakeholders, or more precisely caretakers, which will provide insight into the political, technical, and social dimensions around the artwork. In other words, we will analyse the underlying structures of such a network of care, and how they are constructed, to show how sustainable a network of care can be over time.

 

Image credit: Shu Lea Cheang, Brandon.