Back in 1995, an artist named Douglas Davis created an Internet-based work called “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence”, which…
…functioned as blog comments do today, allowing users to add to the opening lines. An early example of interactive computer art, the piece attracted 200,000 contributions from 1994 to 2000 from all over the globe.
Now we’re in 2013. The Whitney Museum of American Art wanted to bring back “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence”. But:
…the art didn’t work. Once innovative, “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence” now mostly just crashed browsers. The rudimentary code and links were out of date. There was endlessly scrolling and seemingly indecipherable text in a format that had long ago ceased being cutting edge.
This raises some questions about the nature of digital art. If you change the code to make it work on newer hardware, are you changing the art itself? Could the Whitney have run the code on an emulator? Would that change the nature of the art as well? And even if you run the code in emulation, what do you do about broken links?
“We’re working on constantly shifting grounds,” said Rudolf Frieling, a curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which has been at the forefront of sustaining online art. “Whatever hardware, platform or device we’re using is not going to be there tomorrow.”
“Frankly speaking,” he added, “it’s a huge challenge. Not every museum is set up to do that. It takes huge technical expertise.”
More:
After much deliberation, the curators decided on a nearly unheard-of artistic solution: to duplicate Mr. Davis’s installation and present it in both original and updated forms.
One version is the frozen original, with broken code, pages of oddly formatted, garbled text and instructions for users who wanted to fax in their contributions (including the number for the Lehman College gallery, which first showed the piece). Links were redirected, through the archiving site the Wayback Machine, to their 1990s counterparts.
Noted:
In 1995 Mr. Davis’s piece was shown in a biennial in South Korea attended by the celebrated video artist Nam June Paik. It has hundreds of comments in Korean, but the code for the characters was so degraded that Mr. Fino-Radin was stumped. If other viewers fix it, he said, seeing those messages “will be a first for Western audiences.”
Dear digital artists: this is why it is important to make your code Unicode safe. (Yes, yes, I’m aware that Unicode 2.0 didn’t come along until 1996. This is a note to the future.)
This entry was posted on Monday, June 10th, 2013 at 8:31 am and is filed under Art, Clippings, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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