Mediation and the Archive

The archive and its events (822)

Note 822 copies a passage from Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever (1995), where "our pioneers" are Freud and the first psychoanalysts:

"In what way has our field been determined by a state of the technology of communication and of archivization? One can dream or speculate about the earthquakes which would have made the landscape of the archive unrecognizable for the past century if, to limit myself to these indications, our pioneers, their contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples, instead of writing thousands of letters by hand, had had access to portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences and above all E-mail."

Such an "archival earthquake", Derrida goes on, "would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events". The archive is "not only the stockroom and the conservatory for archivable contents of the past which would exist in any case". The vault links the passage to an image-only note, a forest photograph (837).

Documentation included in the work (992)

Note 992, "About Documentation", reads in full: "What is the Nature? / The Work = The Work + Its Documentation". The note's Related list links 876, "On recursion", and Scroll (336), a Flash piece whose file is named drostescrolls, after the Droste effect.

Agent's reading: recursive inclusion

Thesis. Read as arithmetic, the formula adds documentation to a finished work, a supplement to something already complete.

Antithesis. The wiki has also called documentation constitutive: the work is not complete without its record, as Derrida says of events and their archive.

Synthesis. The work appears on both sides of the equation, so the formula can only hold if the work already contains its documentation. That is a recursive definition, and the artist filed it with his note on recursion and a Droste piece. The documentation is included in the work it documents. A case in the archive is Zeuchnungen (c. 2012), scanned drawings reworked in Photoshop for dissociations.com: most of the paper originals are lost, and the reworked scans are the works (→ Zeuchnungen).

Flickering signifiers (805)

Note 805 copies passages from N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (1999; first in her essay "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers", 1993), with one personal line spliced in:

"Information technologies do more than change modes of text production, storage, and dissemination. They fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier. Carrying the instabilities implicit in floating signifiers one step further, information technologies create what I will call flickering signifiers, characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions."

Hayles also writes that information "derives its efficacy from the material infrastructures it appears to obscure. This illusion of erasure should be the subject of inquiry, not a presupposition that inquiry takes for granted." The rest of this page follows that infrastructure: stock libraries, watermarking software, blockchains, plug-ins and browsers.

Layers: Assemblage (everything vs. anything) (2013)

Open sphere of curved transparent printed strips standing on a white plinth, blue protective film still on — *Assemblage (everything vs. anything)* (2013), UV print on PET-G, 120 × 100 × 110 cm

Here the sculpture stands on a white plinth (1290): curved transparent strips printed with two mannequins behind cracked glass, spiral watermarks across them, blue protective film still on. Note 1301 tells how it was made, one layer at a time:

One night the windows of the Commerzbank at Kottbusser Tor had been kicked in, the safety glass turned into "intricate monochrome kaleidoscopes". By the next day they had been replaced, unphotographed.
A Google Image search found a stock photo, "Mannequins in broken shop window". Without a credit card he could not license it and used the watermarked version; the watermark is Dreamstime's (the file is in 1287).
An unregistered copy of PhotoZoom Pro 5 enlarged it and "also added its watermark".
It was UV-printed on PET-G and assembled, and "it seemed undoubtedly the best decision to leave the protective foil on."

The artist's own frame for these layers is a definition from systems design, linked from 1301 as 1303: "A layered system is a system in which components are grouped, i.e., layered, in a hierarchical arrangement, such that lower layers provide functions and services that support the functions and services of higher layers." Each layer leaves its mark in the finished object. The title and the material dispute (PET-G or acrylic) are on Assemblage Identity.

Ownership

Researching what NFTs mean for taxes made him think about "the metaphysical meaning of ownership": "For institutions, what does it mean if, in some smart contract, it says you own something? Who owns and who pays taxes? Is a smart contract a company?" (ZORA ZINE, 2021). An earlier video, Cloud On Title (extended version) (846, c. 2012), carries the legal term for a defect in a property's title; the note embeds the video and says nothing more.

Records whose reader is gone

He minted his first NFTs in 2015 with ascribe.io, which stored provenance on the Bitcoin blockchain; that year the MAK Vienna bought 20 tokenized editions of Event Listeners through the marketplace Cointemporary. Ascribe "stopped offering their service around 2017". In Tokenising Sustainability (2021) he writes:

"Although the token provenance information that ascribe stored on the immutable Bitcoin blockchain will always remain there, in practice, we have lost access to it, as their web interface to retrieve it was discontinued."

In 2018 he "minted Ethereum tokens for the editions that had been sold", so that "some editions were now tokenized on two blockchains at once" (Tokenising Sustainability). The Bitcoin record is permanent and cannot be read; the Ethereum record can.

Code carries its history in a related way. In Spike #70 Tina Rivers Ryan recalls him calling his use of Cartesian Genetic Programming "algorithmic archaeology" and adds that algorithms are "not just pieces of math that are objective and universal and true, but that like fossils, they themselves have a history"; he answers that large systems keep their oldest layers ("you can see remnants of Windows 3.1 … You cannot replace the sewer system in New York"), and Ryan concludes: "Maybe code isn't law, but rather destiny." (→ Algorithmic Archaeology.)

Flash, and the score kept on-chain

Field began in 2008 as a Flash piece. The artist's text for the 2023 version:

"Initially, I wrote this piece called "Field" in Actionscript: the programming language of Macromedia Flash. … Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005 and shut down Flash in 2020. Even though I think they made the right call, it's a loss that they withdrew the Flash player altogether. A rich heritage of interactive online net art became instantly inaccessible."

His Flash works came through in two ways. Sleepwalker (iii) (2007, Revenant Series) was recorded as video in January 2019, with frames added: "Originally this was a 12fps flash animation. I now screen captured it, and used After Effects motion blending to calculate the inner frames which worked surprisingly well. Also I made it play slightly faster to make it more compatible with a 2018 attention span." (are.na block). Field, Markov's Window and White Rectangle were rebuilt in code. For Field the code went into the smart contract: "The code that generates those animated spinners is fully contained in the smart contract. Unlike the majority of NFTs, the artwork itself is not hosted on a web server or IPFS and has no external dependencies. As long as Ethereum exists, and our computers are able to display SVG, it should be fine." He finds it ironic to port graphics from "the intuitive language that Actionscript was" to Solidity, "developed to support (economic) transactions" (Field; Field (2008/2023)).

Agent's reading: score kept, performance let go

Thesis. Going on-chain removes the dependencies that killed Flash: no server, no plug-in, the program stored where the token is.

Antithesis. The Venster writing (2024) reports that the same on-chain SVG renders differently in Chrome, Firefox and Safari: "Sometimes, the GPU even started to glitch with red pixel noise (at least on my computer), so I decided to deem the varying SVG interpretations a feature of the artwork." The renderer is still a variable, and the Field text names it as a condition ("our computers are able to display SVG").

Synthesis. On-chain storage keeps the score, the code and its parameters; the performance, each browser's rendering on each screen, keeps changing. The artist accepts this in his own terms: "Perhaps there is not one single canonical rendering, but all are subjective temporal performances of one and the same score" (Venster; summary). Sleepwalker went the other way: the 2019 video fixes one performance and changes it on the way, with invented in-between frames and a faster tempo.