Hot Data on Data Action

I am doing research on access to New Media in academic libraries for another SLIS course this semester. As an artist, I’ve always been interested in the non-objective art forms. To me, this type of work is more challenging and therefore more interesting to me on many fronts- not least of which is archiving/ access challenge.

For example, when I was an undergrad, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster series was all the rage in New Media and we learned about it in art history courses through still images and synopsis… nothing close to actually seeing the video series. It wasn’t until I was in grad school that I finally saw a bootleg copy that a fellow art student attained somehow. Elite video artists who are collected sell limited edition copies of their dvds, which are rarely screened, and unless you live in a large art city with a major museum you are very unlikely to see the piece. So access is limited by the very nature of the art market/ collector/ museum self-perpetuating cycle of commodification. Access limited by commodification and art market influences is of particular interest to me.

Then there is of course, the more standard issues of archiving (technological obsolescence, material deterioration) , and creating access to art that cannot be conveyed through static images. Performance Art, Video Art, Installation, Sound Art… all of these art forms are becoming increasingly prominent in the contemporary art world, increasingly collected by museums and collectors, and increasingly studied in art school. Access to them is an issue.

Archiving the Avant-Garde is a project at the University of California Berkeley that is dealing with some of these issues. From my exploration, they seem more interested in the archiving aspect rather than access at this point. But there is a lot that is relevant to what we’re discussing in this class:

“Description of and access to art collections promote new scholarship and artistic production. By developing ways to catalog and preserve these collections, we will both provide current and future generations the opportunity to learn from and be inspired by these works.”

Also the more research and readings I do between metadata and other courses, I’m noticing Richard Rinehart, who is the contact person for this project, keeps popping up all over the archiving of New Media art subjects. I’m assuming he’s the New Media archiving guru… next up for me is to do more research on his work.