Digital Documentation and Performance
Between the 23rd and the 25th of September 2009 JISC Digital Media and the University of Bristol Drama Department hosted a series of three one-day events on the topics of creating, managing and delivering digital documentation of performance work. This series of events was funded by the Joint Information System Committee under the JISC ITT Workshops & Seminars: Achievements & Challenges in Digitisation & e-Content strand.
Detail of Becoming-snail performance by Paul Hurley Photo: Sara Popowa
Seminar Overview
During the first day artist Paul Hurley re-staged his durational performance Becoming-snail.
Becoming-snail was documented via photography, videography, via written description and through interview. The lifecycle of this digital documentation was tracked over the three days: through digitisation, structuring, uploading, adding metadata, licensing and delivery, then on to annotation, tagging and curation by users.
The outcome of the workshop series forms a detailed performance case study complete with rich metadata. Selected documents are available below but more can be found by searching for the seminar hashtag #jdmperform09 within the Internet Archive, Flickr or with an Internet search engine. The PADS (Performance Art Data Structure) score for Becoming-snail can be found here.
Each day began with seminar-style presentations of examples, innovative approaches and discussion; this was followed by hands-on workshops in the afternoon, which saw the featured methods applied to the real-world performance example.
Day One: Creating Documentation
Digital media resources
Audio of day one panel discussion
Video compilation of day one workshop activities
Audio of day one post-workshop discussion
Video compilation of day one workshop activities
Morning presentations
Becky Edmunds spoke about the use of video to document performance. Initially trained and worked as a dancer and choreographer, Becky moved to a screen-based practice in 2000. Giving a choreographic attention to the composition of movement within the space of a frame, and the composition of movement in time as constructed in the edit, she now makes documents, documentation, documentary and screendance works.
Becky's presentation explored the gap that exists between live work and its recorded representation. In video documentation, this gap is created by the attempt to represent an activity that is dependent on space and time, using a medium that has completely different spatial and temporal qualities.Becky discussed the ways in which this gap might be dealt with, by enjoying the gap, stepping into it, widening it and making use of it. Becky also discussed the making of video documentation that does not attempt to be accurate but which aims to be appropriate to the video medium.
Sarah Whatley discussed archiving dance work at the Siobhan Davies Archive and the unique place of notation within the archival record. Sarah is project leader for the AHRC-funded Siobhan Davies Archive, which launched at the end of June following 30 months of working in close collaboration with Davies. She is Professor of Dance at Coventry University and much of her research focuses on the relationship between dance and digital technologies.
Sarah's presentation provided some background to the development of the Siobhan Davie Archive, the collaborative work with Davies and her creative team and discused some of the work of the research teams investigating a range of digital choreographic objects; their intervention into an illustration of the making/documenting process. Some of the unique aspects of the archive were demonstrated to invite discussion around ownership and identity in order to discover how new ways of documenting and distributing dance reflect back on the artform itself.
Open Dialogues is a UK based collaboration, founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces critical writing on and as contemporary performance.
Open Dialogues works closely with Live Art, artists, festivals and producers to explore different ways writing can compose, re-write or punctuate performance. Open Dialogues explores critical writing as a productive discourse, creating a model that is collaborative, participatory and has an unknown result. Rachel Lois and Mary's presentation discussed how digital and online technology is central to our practice and analogous to our critical model. They covered aspects of their recent work, including blogging, ‘Flash’ publishing, durational writing events and collaborative writing.
Dr Heike Roms spoke about the nature of the post-performance interview. Heike teaches Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University. She has published widely on contemporary performance practice, particularly on work emanating from Wales, for publications such as Performance Research (for which she is a consultant editor), Inter, Frakcija, Cyfrwng, Live Art Magazine, Ballett/Tanz and a number of collections. Heike is project director of ‘What’s Welsh for Performance?’
Heike presentation explained how oral history, established since the 1960s is a way of uncovering undocumented ‘lost histories’ and is increasingly applied to help recover non-mainstream performance work of the past 40 years. She outlined why the method of the interview is seen as particularly appropriate for performance historiography as it itself is a mode of performance. The presentation explored the implications of different oral history approaches for the documentation and archiving of performance and illustrated them with reference to the presenter’s own two-year project An Oral History of Performance Art.
Afternoon activities
Paul Hurley performed the work Becoming-snail in the afternoon of day one. Paul has been involved in the curation of projects, exhibitions and artists’ residencies in Wales, England and in Russia. Paul's own work is predominantly performance but also encompasses video and photography. Paul's work has been shown in theatres, galleries and festivals in Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia, and has been published and written about in books and journals internationally. Between 2002-2007 Paul created an ongoing series of becoming-animal performances, drawing from the theories of Deleuze and Guattari and exploring the notion of ‘the animal’ as a way of moving beyond the human.
First performed as part of Hurley’s original series of Becoming-invertebrates in Cardiff in 2003, and since shown in Glasgow, Bristol, Reykjavik and Iceland, Becoming-snail is an attempt to embody Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming-animal’, through the adoption of certain characteristics of the garden snail. The particularities of movement and rest, and the deterioration of the performer’s subjectivity through the physical endurance that the piece demands, are central to the artist’s exploration of a queer becoming that is one of resistance and liberating or transformative catharsis. Throughout the performance the day's presenters lead groups of attendees in the documenting of Becoming-snail.
Day Two: Managing Documentation
Digital media resources
Audio of day two panel discussion
Video overview of PADS workshop
Video of day two post-workshop discussion
Video overview of PADS workshop
Morning presentations
Annet Dekker has been active in the field of media art since the mid 90s as researcher, writer and curator of media art exhibitions, discussions and workshops. Subjects of interest for Annet are the influence of new media, science and popular culture on art and vice versa. She worked eight years as curator and head of exhibition and the artist in residence program at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam. At the moment she is an independent curator and programme manager at Virtueel Platform. She is also writing her PhD at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College: Archeology of the Future, looking at strategies for documenting Internet art.
Annet's presentation discued how the most important trends that have emerged over the past few years that have affected the organization and visibility of art organisations and museums, were brought about by digital technologies. Annet suggested that when added to the growth of projects using locative media, large urban screens, small screens on mobile phones, photo and video cameras, these developments offer a large spectrum of hitherto unknown possibilities and new platforms to create and distribute content. In this presentation Annet argued that art institutions should be aware of this potential for their role in society as it could enable them to reach new audiences and open up digitized data and content in unforeseen ways.
Antony Hudek and Athanasios Velios spoke about approaches to archiving at Flat-time House. Anthony studied art history at Darmouth College (NH, USA) and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where he completed his PhD in 2006. Between 2006 and 2008 he was researcher in the theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, working on the aesthetics of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. In 2008 he joined the Ligatus research unit, Camberwell College of Arts, London, to contribute to the digitisation of the John Latham Archive Athanasios Velios studied art conservation at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens (1998) and at the Royal College of Arts, London (2003) where he completed his PhD on Computer Applications to Conservation. He is currently a research fellow at the University of the Arts and the Ligatus research unit working as a principle investigator on the online implementation and digitisation of the John Latham Archive.
Antony and Athanasios spoke about the John Latham Archive. Central to the work of the artist John Latham was his cosmological and social theory on Event Structures and Flat-Time. His archive is now a primary source for understanding this theory. This project focuses on the digitisation and online indexing of the archive which derives from Latham's theory. This presentation explained the principles of the proposed indexing methodology alongside technical details of its implementation.
Stephen Gray and Dr. Paul Clarke presented Performance Art Documentation Structure or PADS. Stephen holds an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martin's School of Art and a second MA in Preventive Conservation. He has worked for the Tate gallery and as Audiovisual Preservation Officer in the AHRC funded National Review of Live Arts Digitisation project. He is now Technical Support Officer for Moving Images with JISC Digital Media. Stephen has interests which span traditional, electronic and ephemeral art forms. Dr. Paul Clarke is Research Fellow on the GWR project, Performing the Archive: the Future of the Past, hosted by University of Bristol's Live Art Archives and Arnolfini, in partnership with Exeter University. Prior to this Paul was a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Dartington College of Arts. He is the director of performance company Uninvited Guests and a member of the Performance Re-enactment Society.
Stephen and Paul presented PADS which was developed around the National Review of Live Art archival video collection. PADS looked at the challenges faced by established archival cataloguing systems and metadata schemas when applied to collections of performance art documentation. Paul ans Stephen explained how the PADS model is intended to be used to draw these traces together through a process which encourage the artist participation. PADS has been developed around models of interoperability and standardisation.
Julian Warren is archivist with Arnolfini, one of Europe's leading centres for the contemporary arts. Julian is co-developer of project.arnolfini.org.uk a system where creative processes, ideas and research can be hosted and presented alongside the other elements of Arnolfini’s programme.
Julian's presentation described his approach to making sense of the mass of unsorted documentation which is the Arnolfini gallery's archive. Julian outlined the importance of recognising licensing issues in relation to performance documentation collections. This is particularly important when several complex and overlapping of artistic and copyright exist.
Afternoon activities
Using documentation created the previous day, seminar attendees sifted and selected materials for development. Chosen documentation was then uploaded the the Internet Archive and assigned a Creative Commons license. Metadata for each document was also created and searchable tags added. Using embedding code the same materials were added to communal Performance Art Documentation Structure (PADS) record for Becoming-snail.
Day Three: Delivering Documentation
Digital media resources
Audio of day three panel discussion
Video overview of STARS workshop
Video overview of A-Database workshop
Audio of day three post-workshop discussion
Audio of day three panel discussion
Morning presentations
Mark Waugh and Anna Arca presented the A Fundation's A database. Mark is Executive Director of the A Foundation. He has been engaged in documentation of Live and Performance Art since establishing Blunt Cut in 1995. He has participated in a number discussions on the mediation and reception of Live Art. Anna Arca has been collaborating on the A Database project since the very beginning of system implementation. She is now responsible for the project management and development. After an initial career as a Chemical Engineer she moved to London where she trained as a photographer and specialised in fine art reproduction and documentation.
Mark and Anna presented the work of A Database. As contemporary art expresses content in a variety of formats that expand the boundaries of the traditional inventory of art objects, this erasure of boundaries defining what falls within and beyond the work itself (the remainders) have been most keenly contested in the domain of Live Art and Performance. A fragment that leaves the living body behind but takes on an art afterlife is a contentious issue for a practice focused on the Live Work. Mark and Anna explained how A Database provides a context to present both these fragments and the discourse which binds them in proximity to something we might call a live archive: not isolated in a fixed taxonomy but rather one which mutates through a folksonomy. A Database is a solution offering robust preservation of documentation and its cultural and social impact and exposes the interrelations and aggregates of otherwise segregated data. In this process specialised and public participation becomes essential to nurturing interpretation ecologies, alternative research routes and a shared resonance space to amplify the impact of artistic production.
Laurence Rassel is the Artistic Director of the Fundacio Antoni Tapies. During her professional career, Laurence has developed a line of investigative work centred around feminist artistic thought and practices as well as a critical effort on intellectual property in the area of the new technologies. This line of work can be seen reflected in the artistic programmes of Constant, the cultural organisation that Rassel has directed since 1998 and which explores the intersection between the new technologies and artistic practices from a critical perspective by organising expository projects, lectures and publications.
Laurence's presentation was entitled "Art history and free software and free license archive: fiction, frictions". Laurence’s talk was based on concrete examples, and on the work in progress of delivering a digital and web archive of the 20 years work of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. It took the form of a reflection on the necessity, the utopia and its consequences, of the use of free software and free license in a context of a cultural institution.The Fundacio Antoni Tapies was taken as an example of a complex environment. On the one hand, it is a consumer and a producer of (cultural) content. On the other hand, it functions with a double objective: the preservation and diffusion of the work of a modern artist and the study and transmission of modern and contemporary art. Laurence looked at how rethinking ways of delivering and processing archived information using web technologies can generate new forms of understanding, of using art works and of art history.
Geoff Cox is a lecturer at the University of Plymouth (UK), an occasional artist, writer, and Associate Curator of Online Projects at Bristol's Arnolfini, as well as an adjunct member of faculty at Transart Institute (Donau University, Austria). He has a research interest in software (art) studies.
Geoff's presentation introduced attendees to 'project.arnolfini' - an online experimental production and management system linked to the physical spaces and curatorial programme of the Arnolfini. The 'platform' area includes a 'dump' where all digital media is collected but remains unorganised, a number of tools which allow users to organise materials, as well as a curated collection of online projects. The sections correspond to levels of control and degrees of user feedback using common data. Many of the curated projects respond critically to the promises of social technologies and the tendency to characterise the internet as a collective machine.
Angela Piccini and Nikki Rogers introduced STARS (Semantic Tools for Screenarts Research). Angela is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at Bristol University and former Research Associate on the PARIP project. Nikki Rogers is the Coordinator of the Web Futures Group at Bristol University’s Institute for Learning and Research Technology. She is also a Project Manager and Senior Technical Researcher working with Web technologies with a specialist interest in the Semantic Web.
The STARS Project aimed to produce a demonstrator based on extending the existing semantic web based tool, PARIP Explorer, to support screen arts (and related) research resource discovery, annotation and re-use across a range of domains. Both moving and static media were made available through this end-user tool in order to demonstrate and test how the semantic linking of screen arts research may inspire new collaborations and facilitate the research lifecycle in this area. STARS aimed to be an exemplar of how semantic web technology may link with e-Infrastructures to facilitate 'seamless', cross-domain knowledge and resource integration. STARS was built on a selection of open-source software to provide a complex, yet highly performant, web application. STARS has been a partnership with the Watershed Media Centre, one of the UK's premier creative industry hubs.
Afternoon activities
Attendees took part in two separate afternoon workshops. Both workshops gave attendees the opportunity to organise, make sense of and deliver their documentation of Becoming-snail.
Angela Piccini and Nikki Rogers lead a workshop in STARS. The application allowed users to annotate and link resources as well as visualising their relationships in an interactive network graph. Video and audio resources were augmented with a timeline of user-created annotations.
Anna Arca gave a workshop in the A Foundation's A Database. Attendee's created records for the artist Paul Hurley, the work Becoming-snail, the performance event itself within the seminar context and the venue: the University of Bristol Drama Department. Each of these records was then augmented by embedding multimedia documents.
If you have any enquires or comments please contact Stephen Gray or Dr. Paul Clarke.
