Une Archeologie des Media, Exhibition, Seconde Nature (review)

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I managed to catch the excellent exhibition Une Archeologie des Media on its last day at Seconde Nature in Aix en Provence, France <www.secondenature.org/-Archeologiedes-Media-.html>. I was the only visitor in the well-laid-out and airy rooms. The only sounds were occasional chirps from some of the 30-year-old computer equipment on display. Curated by the Preservation and Art-Media Archeology Lab (PAMAL) at the Ecole Superieure d’Art d’Avignon, the exhibition included 10 installations displayed as artworks. These ranged from slide “re-enactments” of Eduardo Kac’s 1985 videotext poems to recoding manifested as menus of DOEK, Jan de Weille and Annie Abraham’s 1990 Amiga 500 proto net-art, to a staging of Scrumology Prod 2015’s collaborative art and technology scrums. The rooms came across as strange combinations of mausoleums and animist ritual chambers. The pieces “spoke” as cultural artifacts rather than as artworks. The exhibition would have been totally at home in Paul Otlet’s 1910 Mudaneum, which he envisaged “as an enormous intellectual warehouse of books, documents, catalogues and scientific objects. Established according to standardized methods, formed by assembling cooperative everything that the participating associations may gather or classify.” (Union of International Associations, 1914, p. 116). In fact their status as artworks seems irrelevant to me; they are clearly evidence of artists’ roles in articulating digital culture as it happens, as early adopters of new technologies, but not only smart users but smart developers—pushing their development in directions driven by agendas very different from those of the hardware and software designers. It seemed to me the exhibition managed to include, in uneasy equilibrium, display of hardware (functional or not), emulation or performance of work, display of work intended to appear online and not in physical space, explanatory material and a successful contextualization of work that was not intended to be shown together.

The accompanying issue of Magazine des Cultures Digitales (MCD), guest-edited by Emmanuel Guez, provides an excellent snapshot of current discussions in the archeology of media (MCD has become a leading theoretical and contemporary digital art magazine in France). The issue provides a number of well-developed texts surveying archaeology/recycling, exhibition and conservation. The texts are remarkably free of the usual contextualizing to our favorite “French” philosophers; their list of “key” books are those by Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski, Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (there is little discussion of variable media approaches—our very recent Leonardo book Re-Collection: Art, New Media and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito would have been a good addition). The issue has a refreshing mixture of theoretical/conceptual articles and texts by artist/developers and curators and comes across as a productive nexus of theory and practice.

The PAMAL group (http://pamal.org/), led by Emmanuel Guez, has a strategy that reminds me of that developed by groups such as Triple Canopy in New York; their practice combines research, exhibition and interventions as ways of unpacking the “history and meaning of things as they happen.” PAMAL has three interconnected axes: on conservation/restoration/archeology of media; Digital Art Vanishing Ecosystem, which seeks through artistic experimentation to reenact and develop work with a particular interest in the glitch (the MCD issue has a number of interesting discussions on bugs and glitches); and a third, which is curatorial and exhibition theory and practices.

The archaeology of media field is beneficiary of the long life expectancy of a generation of pioneers, many of whom are living and active in their 80s and 90s and in a position to “push back” on the young historians, curators and theoreticians trying to write multiple narratives of...