The Qualities and Significance of Documentation

co-written with Gabriella Giannachi, MAP Media Archive Performance #12

Introduction

The acquisition of performative, time-based, and digital artworks, which are often hybrid, ephemeral, and subject to change, has led to significant changes in practices of documentation, collection, and preservation for museums and other cultural organisations. Funded by the AHRC, and a collaboration between University of Exeter, London South Bank University, LIMA, The Photographers’ Gallery and The Australian National University, The Documenting Digital Art project (2019–23), explored how digital art has induced museums and other cultural organisations to reflect about what, despite these changes, had remained undone, undocumented, un-conservable. Four workshops organised by LIMA, Amsterdam[1], one of the project partners, offered an insight into the work carried out by museums and cultural organisations not only to understand these artworks’ components and technical requirements, as well as the parameters for their (re)activation, but also to imagine how these artworks might transform over time, and consider whether these processes of transformation would affect them beyond recognition. Reflecting about what and when to document, here, we suggest that thinking of these artworks through a series of axioms, namely process, interaction, relationality, pervasiveness, and decay, may generate useful knowledge for understanding and potentially creating their documentation. In what follows we are analysing the artworks based on their documentation qualities. In focussing on how documentation is created and used for rehearsal and reactivation, we noticed that the significance of documentation shifts from a past-facing documentary bearing witness about an ‘original’ artwork, to the use of documentation as (part of) the artwork, indicating that documentation is becoming a generative method to enable further iterations of existing works as well as the development of new artworks.

 

image credit: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Agent Ruby, 1999-2002, screenshot. Commissioned by SFMOMA; Collection SFMOMA, gift of bitforms gallery, Paule Anglim Gallery, and the artist; © Lynn Hershman Leeson