annet dekker capturing online cultures and storytelling as a method
Online cultures and the value of storytelling, or storytelling as method
Jill Sterrett, head of conservation at SFMOMA, proposes an approach to the
preservation of complex artworks that is based on 'planting finds', which she
describes as documents with information value. Since the material of artworks has
changed, she suggests that museum professionals need to adapt to a new situation:
"Taking into account the transitory nature of ephemeral materials, built-in
physical variability and the performative elements that characterize so much of
the art of the last fifty years, the work of a contemporary art museum is not
business as usual."30
Sterrett was inspired by methods in archaeology, where 'finds' are constantly and
repeatedly placed in new context. However, she suggests using the 'find' mechanism
in reverse - not as an end point for something new to emerge - but as a method to
trace the engagement with an artwork and to reveal its life over time. As Sterrett says,
it enables "seeing and seeing anew".31 This is similar to storytelling: relations and
recognisable patterns in information create meaning and understanding, and while
some things stay constant, other elements may change depending on the time, place
and person. It's important to stress that I'm not only referring to linear storytelling
in which a plot develops based on certain events and culminates in a final message.
Rather I'm interested in storytelling as an ongoing cyclical structure that links
events and actions, which can occur simultaneously, and lacks a clear ending.32
In other words, storytelling in the digital medium provides new modes of
conceptualising and ways of thinking. Similar to the transformative force brought
about by the invention of writing and print, online storytelling affects modes of
understanding.33 In this sense storytelling accounts for the variables - or
malleability and instability - that are inherent qualities of many contemporary
artworks. Potentially this could lead to a new situation where museums would need
to re-assess their 'finds' each time. What does it mean when the preservation of
artworks is thought of in terms of (re)production or creation systems instead of
'fixation'?
The work The Outage (2014) by Erica Scourti shows the relevance of storytelling as
a method, in particular in relation to preserving context. In an attempt to capture
her online footprint Scourti asked a ghostwriter to write her (online) memoires.
It was a first attempt to assess her digital material - from URL histories to Amazon
recommendations, Facebook archives and all the other information that is freely
available online - and see how her online identity was constructed through various
machines. Each millisecond, numerous digital documents are sent between e-mail
servers or shared on social platforms. Aided by cheap data storage, easy access
and distribution mechanisms, these acts of blogorrhea - the excessive, compulsive
or stream-of-consciousness blogging about trivial things - provide unprecedented
access to private lives, and enable the bringing together of large digital collections.
Scourti wanted to understand the influence these often-invisible computational
systems have over her data. The result was the novel The Outage, short blurbs of texts
interspersed with screenshots of online material, which combined form a narrative
that involves the death of the protagonist. For Scourti the entire process provided a
lot of insights into what happens to someone's online data, while leaving her feeling
uncomfortable:
"It was a feeling that I had been objectified, made into an image that I wasn't
in control of; and as the book's narrative involves a sort of death, there was a
feeling that 'my' data body had been killed off in some way, an experience that
was both exhilarating and stressful."34
Employing an outsider to speculate on and fabricate their 'version' of her biography,
also reflects Scourti's interest in life-writing as essentially a performative rather than
a descriptive act:
"We don't just tell the story of our lives, as if there is one singular story that
exists prior to its representation in literary or photographic form, but through
the telling of that particular story, make it a reality."35
The act of storytelling as a way to preserve and pass on information, customs and
cultures from generation to generation has a long history. Also in preservation,
several people have argued to include methods from oral cultures and ethnography
in practice, in some cases, to capture the expedience of an artwork,36 in others, to
communicate and decide on what strategies to adopt.37 These practices underscore
the importance of methods from oral traditions, and more generally, of audience
participation in the practice of preservation.
Another way to use storytelling as method to preserve the context of a work is by
making the context part the work. To remain with the example of Scourti: inspired
by the result of The Outage, in her project Dark Archives (2015) commissioned by
Het Nieuwe Instituut as part of the research project New Archive Interpretations,
Scourti explored the (im)possibilities and effects of online archiving using various
narrative methods. Speculating on what a future, or rather present, online archive
could be, for the project she uploaded her entire fifteen-year personal media archive
of daily photos, videos and screenshots to Google Photo. Next to archiving users'
photos, Google Photo uses Assistant, an application that searches for similarities
hoofdstuk 3
30 Jill Sterrett, 'Contemporary Museums of Contemporary Art', in: Alison Richmond and Alison Bracker eds.
Conservation Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann in
collaboration with Victoria and Albert Museum London, 2009) pp. 223-228: p. 227.
31 Ibidem p. 227.
32 This resembles oral traditions that are characterized by less clear divisions between main and subtopics;
details can convey implicit meanings and in the retelling (a process of repetition and reflection) consistency
and value perdure. See Annet Dekker, Collecting and Conserving Net Art. Moving Beyond Conventional
Methods (London/New York: Routledge, 2018) p. 11.
33 For more information see, among others, Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. Technologizing of the Word
(London: Methuen Co/Ltd., 1982) and N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think. Digital Media and
Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University Press, 2012).
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34 Annet Dekker, 'Archiving Our (Dark) Lives, Interview with Erica Scourti' Het Nieuwe Instituut (2016,
January) https://archiefinterpretaties.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/3-erica-scourti/archiving-our-dark-lives-
interview-erica-scourti last accessed 13/10/2018.
35 Ibidem.
36 Lizzie Muller, Towards an Oral History of New Media Art (Montreal: Daniel Langlois Foundation, 2008)
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=2096 last accessed 13/10/2018;
Heike Roms, What's Welsh for Performance? An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales
(Cardiff: Samizdat Press, 2008).
37 Glenn Wharton, The Painted King: Art Activism Authenticity in Hawai'i
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012).
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