Anna Mladentseva
Electronic Media Review, Volume Seven: 2021-2022
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the conservation of net art that has been shaped by user-generated data, suggesting that its participatory nature engenders new possibilities for conservation. Unfortunately, current research and documentation strategies seem to undervalue the potential of user-generated data, directly impacting the ways in which access to these artworks is restored. I propose a “peer-to-peer” framework that offers a distributed approach, which sanctions acts of collective conservation by identities that have been excluded from mainstream economies of information exchange, namely the hacker and the spammer. By inserting heritage value into data that is otherwise classified as “spam,” I make the case that time-based media conservation ought to be de-institutionalised to include the expanded community of “spammers-hackers-caretakers.”
The above proposal emerged out of my own efforts to document net art as an independent researcher and the obstacles which I have faced: for example, in the form of automatically issued bans. This suggests that online activities which may be productive to conservation also tend to be associated with “hacking” or “spamming”—an association that is likely to be tied to the contemporary landscape of the web. By considering a post-Marxist interpretation of the term “peer-to-peer,” practitioners can acknowledge the potential struggles and exploitations of the communities that they may want to integrate into their collective conservation workflows. Most importantly, this theoretical framework allows us to consider the ethics of delegating acts of conservation.
Collective conservation points to an emergent form of community-driven stewardship that takes place outside an institution. Possible manifestations include ongoing crowdsourcing initiatives that aggregate documentation generated by users as a result of interacting with the work. In this way, we can start to reconsider what aspects of net art require documentation and re-evaluate who gains permission to enter, what Annet Dekker calls, “networks of care.”
AUTHOR
Anna Mladentseva
University College London, London, United Kingdom