Sunday, July 6, 2014

[Yasmin_discussions] ART, NEW MEDIA, AND SOCIAL MEMORY

Rick
you state "that's why Jon and I (in the book, 'Re-Collection: Art, New
Media, & Social Memory'

http://re-collection.net/

just to dot all my i's :) wanted to frame new media art preservation
in the larger
context of social memory."

Social memory gets us into different kinds of knowledge culture.

By coincidence I am just reading the book " Subversion, Conversion, Development
-Cross-Cultural Knowledge Exchange and the Politics of Design"

http://www.amazon.com/Subversion-Conversion-Development-Cross-Cultural-Infrastructures/dp/0262525836

by Anthropologist James Leach and Political Scientist Lee Wilson.
Their book "explores alternative cultural encounters
with and around information technologies. These encounters are
alternative because they counter dominant,
Western-oriented notions of media consumption; they include media
practices as forms of cultural resistance and
subversion, "DIY cultures," and other non mainstream models of
technology production"

the book discusses in a number of projectt the digital archiving and
knowledge capture by peoples with different cultural contexts for the
very concept of archiving including Tibetans, Orkney islanders,
australian aboriginal cultures, Yaka hunter gathers-
-but also DIY and bricolage cultures which repurpose and recombine,
subvert and redirect the development of media

and the embedded ideas that are in the very design of IT and what
kinds of knowledge can actually be
captured and all the areas of implicit and tacit knowledge that
escapes/is un archivable

in an essay by David Turnbull and Wade Chambers they state "
"much of the thinking around the idea of complex adaptive systems
suggests that we
must develop new ways of working with differing knowledge
traditions..and produce database
that rather than having one unified preset system of taxonomy and
ontology, but would permit
diverse ontologies to interact..and that since no one ontology is
privileged, then the outcome
must necessarily be emergent'

not sure what museum professionals would feel about ontologies that
emerge from their
collection !

Leach's own practice as an anthropologist is interesting (
http://www.jamesleach.net/ ) since he studies
both art-science-technology collaborations
eg http://www.randomdance.org/r_research/current_projects1/current_projects/enhancing_choreographic_objects_echo
and papuan new guinean culture

he is probably the right person to tell us how to archive and capture
the excitement and intensity of massively mutliplayer
on line games - treating MMOGs as johannes goebel suggests as time
based /perfomances and document the
way musical or theatrical performances are documented clearly is
inadequate to capture the multi location
nature of the collective performative experience of MMOGs.

and certainly I remember the intensity and primal social play around
the first impromptu performances
of Survival Research Lab ( http://www.srl.org/ ) archives at
http://srl.org/shows/archive/index1.html

this one in 1983 was a couple of blocks from my home in san francisco
and clearly needed embedded
anthropologists and well as video cameras !

check out

http://srl.org/shows/archive/unrestrained/


I will see if James Leach wants to inject into this discussion


Roger Malina
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