annet dekker capturing online cultures and storytelling as a method While this is a very good example of what a large institute can do, in most cases the Wayback Machine proves to be less reliable.8 As also argued by Web historian Niels Brügger, an archiving process actively shapes and determines how a website is archived and hence what kind of reconstruction or analysis is possible.9 Not only do websites, and their copies, often suffer from temporal or technical inconsistencies, but as Brügger argues 'the archived website is not an exact copy of the one on the live Web but a unique version as the result of the archival process'.10 This uniqueness combined with the arbitrary crawls of the Wayback Machine and possible technical inconsistencies make it an insufficient tool for art historical analyses, let alone for the preservation of an artwork. For example, inconsistencies can be part of an artwork, but they may just be glitches, or a case of bitrot. What one does not see or know cannot be traced by looking at random crawls. To overcome a single-page history the Wayback Machine introduced Memento, an API that allows you to move back in time.11 The application allows users to see the page around the time it was made rather than the present time. In 2011 the Internet Archive began to use Memento, which makes it possible to use the Wayback Machine in an 'interactive' mode. In some cases this generates interesting results. For example, looking at the changes over time to the website mouchette.org by French artist Martine Neddam and clicking one of the links via the Wayback Machine on any random date shows a standardized answer with a link that redirects to a random other part of the site and not necessarily to the one that it would normally go to (even in the past). In this case the misdirection is interesting because it has always been Neddam's desire to make navigating the website as convoluted as possible: "I wanted to get the viewer lost in a very complex navigation, where the placement of the links was invisible or unexpected."12 Another example, for which I used Memento's ability to recall history, is the work by Slovenian artist Igor Stromajer. In 2011 Stromajer began to delete his earlier net art pieces. After annoucing the project Expunction on Facebook and other social media, some of the reactions expressed concern: "Igor Can't you do something else to go through your mid-life crisis 13 I tried to trace his deleted works in the Wayback Machine with Memento. With a few exceptions, I was redirected back to his present Expunction project page - even in that past I couldn't revisit earlier instances of his work. I was stuck in a circular present, no past, no memories. Such inconsistencies pose huge challenges to researchers who are unfamiliar with the documentation process, in particular around the nature of absences, redirections and the limitations of the techniques that are applied. Next to a critical assessment of the methods and tools that are used, as well as a thorough understanding of the interfaces in which history is viewed, researchers are advised to collaborate with Web archivists and Web users to create a socio-technical perspective.14 A cultural perspective is just as important, in particular in cases where artists and other users have purposely obfuscated or misused a site's 'standard' functionality. This means involvement of the primary 'Web users' such as the artist(s), or creator(s), of a site. In the case of Stromajer, his process of deleting many of his online works is well documented. All the conversations and the discussions around Expunction can be traced on Facebook. However, these discussions are not saved on the Wayback Machine, since Facebook is a closed system and the data of individual users cannot be cached.15 To avoid the dependency on Facebook, Stromajer took screenshots of the discussions that are still available on his website. Recently, other tools have been developed to document social media platforms. One of them is the Webrecorder created by Rhizome, a non-profit organization based in New York. As Dragan Espenschied, one of the developers, explains: "Current digital preservation solutions involve complex, automated processes that were designed for a web made up of relatively static documents. Webrecorder, in contrast, can capture social media and other dynamic content, such as embedded video and complex javascript."16 Indeed, Webrecorder is a good tool to capture social media platforms, it records the posts, the likes and the comments of other users, and the replay functions as if you're browsing the live site. But users cannot add anything or make any comments as one normally could do. For example, one of the recordings is of Amalia Ulman's project Excellences Perfections (2014). For five months and in almost 200 posts, Ulman acted out a scripted performance that culminated into an extreme makeover, which she performed on Instagram and Facebook. Playing on the cosmetics culture and as a comment on the demands social media makes on users' appearances and experiences, Ulman convinced many of her followers and (artist) friends that what she was doing was real. The Webrecorder team documented the entire Instagram performance, including the Instagram interface, to create a faithful re-performance of the context in which the photos and comments were embedded.17 At the same time, Ulman reposted everything to Facebook where the discussion and comments were more intense. As she says in an interview: "People got so mad at me for using fiction. That was the main critique: 'It wasn't the truth? How dare you! You lied to people!"18 hoofdstuk 3 8 For more information about the challenges of Web crawling, especially the impact and interactions of contextual factors see, for example, Emily Maemura, Nicholas Worby, Ian Milligan and Christoph Becker, 'If These Crawls Could Talk: Studying and Documenting Web Archives Provenance', in: TSpace (University of Toronto, 2018), https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/82840/1/JASIST_IfTheseCrawls- Preprint-20180122.pdf, last accessed 13/10/2018. 9 Brügger 'Website History and the Website as an Object of Study', p. 126. 10 Brügger 'The Archived Website and Website Philology: A New Type of Historical Document?', p. 156. 11 For more information see, http://mementoweb.org/about/ and http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/about/, last accessed 13/10/2018. 12 Annet Dekker, 'In Search of Unexpected', in: Cathy Brickwood and Annet Dekker eds. Navigating e-Culture (Amsterdam, Virtueel Platform, 2008) pp. 66-68. 144 13 Annick Bureaud https://www.facebook.com/intima/posts/144916102244400, last accessed 13/10/2018.14 Maemura, et al. 'If These Crawls Could Talk'. 14 (Meamura et al. 2018) 15 See, http://www.techcomet.com/2011/05/facebook-profiles-alternative-to.html, last accessed 13/10/2018. 16 Dragan Espenschied 'Rhizome Releases First Public Version of Webrecorder. A new Perspective in Web Archiving', in Rhizome (2016, 9 August) https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/aug/09/rhizome-releases-first- public-version-of-webrecorder/, last accessed 13/10/2018. 17 However, as stated on the site some elements were adjusted: "The online exhibition version on Rhizome's Webenact server was modified to contain contemporaneous emoji, mute links that would allow to leave the artwork's boundary, and to not display items that have been posted before the performance started," https://webrecorder.io/despens/amalia-ulman-excellences--perfections, last accessed 13/10/2018. 18 Rachel Smal, 'Amalia Ulman', in: Interview (2015, 14 October) https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/ amalia-ulman, last accessed 13/10/2018. 145

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2018 | | pagina 73