![]() The processing speed of computers keeps on improving, the software designers keep on developing their products, new creation and search media are created, while other software-tools get “stale,” servers and formats wear out…ĥThe inherently ephemeral nature of certain digital art and literary works questions the characteristics of the digital apparatus, sometimes exacerbating them to the point where lability, instability, the procedural and performative nature of the work are raised as fundamental esthetic principles. The designers and producers of digital contents, just like the institutions in charge of their preservation, have indeed had to acknowledge that preservation was not limited to storage and that the digital apparatus itself was ephemeral. However, the attempts to record the whole content of the web have shown that it is impossible to preserve an ever-changing set of data in detail, because of the lack of two components that are essential to any integration into heritage: a well thought-out mediation allowing readers to make their way through this set of data and a reliable storage format. ![]() The obviousness of “permanent heritages” is therefore put into perspective, so much so that the ephemeral now appears to be one of the essences of heritage.ģWhat is true for every heritage when put in the context of its selection and mediation processes holds true for artworks that originally fall within the “esthetics of the ephemeral”: every performing art, street performance, land art, most installations, ice sculptures, flower-petal mandalas, all last but a short moment and therefore constitute a challenge in terms of their integration into “heritage.” Does the preservation of something ephemeral even make sense? If such is the case, what are the potential preservation methods and media?ĤIn the past few years, digital technologies have been regarded as a solution for the recording and storing of a large amount of data on sustainable media. A first series of articles, written for the special report of the Hybrid journal, will focus on these issues, tackling both the selection of heritage objects and museum mediation approaches in a context of unstable reception. ![]() This issue of the Hybrid journal not only questions the decision-making bodies and socio-cultural contexts in which objects are integrated into heritage, but also the means implemented to preserve heritages, from the preservation of original works to remediatization, including total reconstruction. Whether we talk about a monument, a literary work, a painting, a film or a ritual raised to tradition, isn’t heritage first defined in terms of permanence?ĢHowever, to regard heritage as something immutable would amount to overlooking the extent to which the selection, promotion, mediation and exposure processes are determined by cultural policies, value systems, changing trends and habitus. 1“Ephemeral Heritages” -the association of these two terms may seem paradoxical at first.
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