Performance capture is one of the lively topics confronting preservation professionals in libraries, archives, and museums right now. My major encounter with this problem was at UCLA Library, where we had a strategic plan that led to an actual performance capture report and the hiring of a real live person to work on the issues it framed. I got to thinking about the issue again over the weekend, after watching two fascinating videos of Keith Haring painting (at Brooklyn Museum) and reading an article about Nicholas Serota’s work at Tate.
I was a musician and occasional actor before I made my retreat into the stacks, though, so performance capture is something I’ve encountered from a variety of angles. There’s a lot to be learned by the preservation profession from the work on historic performance practice in the performing arts. Part of the lesson is theoretical, I’ll even dare to say epistemological. But happily, a more immediate lesson is practical, and I’ll double dare say we can bring lessons from the performing arts to bear on preservation practices in the present time.
Some comments about the New Media and Social Memory Symposium at the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive made by Gunter Waible and Perian Sully are a good indicator of the issues as stake.
Waible and Sully are some of our best thinkers in the area of contemporary preservation practice and I am not linking to them as thinkers needing critique so much as reporters (because the recordings of Symposium itself are, ironically, hard to access). In their posts as well as the symposium, though, I do sense an blind spot in the discussion of performance capture and new media preservation. A better grounding in (as it were) old media might help this discussion precede on better footing.
Waibel summarized Jon Ippolito’s remarks on the value of oral culture models for preservation by writing that “an important mechanism of keeping the impact of artwork alive is and can be recreation – not a fixation on the original object and its upkeep, but an authentic re-staging of the work informed by a detailed record of the artist’s intent.” I don’t disagree with Ippolito’s observation, but would opine that it is missing one word, that in fact “an important mechanism of keeping the impact of artwork alive is and can be recreation – not only a fixation on the original object and its upkeep, but an authentic re-staging of the work informed by a detailed record of the artist’s intent.”
If we do wish to be informed in detail by the artist’s intent, it is clearly imperative that we keep up the original objects precisely so that we can fixate upon them. Even if we had good recordings of Beethoven or Ben Johnson in their day, for instance, I do not think we would say that our contemporary understanding of their work was compromised because we also have their manuscripts.
Indeed, reinvigorating a performance tradition often begins with the act of returning to and fixating upon primary sources. In the hypothetical case where there is no original object (and this is more accurately the case in oral traditions, and possibly collaborative net.art/works) the only preservation actions possible are to a) record an instance of the work or b) to somehow document, or “fix,” the parameters for re-creation of the work. I do not think this is different in principle than what we have already been doing for centuries with operas, symphonies or chemistry experiments, or the reconstruction of boats and building from historic plans.
Ippolito’s discussion centered on the “Media Art Notation System,” an application of XML to fixing the parameters of these interactive or indeterminate works, and I think this gives the lie to the notion that “a fixation on the original item and its upkeep” will not be central to this supposed new model of preservation. Philosophically, nothing has changed MANS is another useful tool for the kit, standing beside music notation on paper, electronic music markup and encoding, the rules of a game or the script for a play, but it is still a tool for fixation.
Performance and interactive work must be instantiated from a notated set of instructions, and the preservation of those instructions is well within the domain of preservation as we have always understood it. We need new conservation approaches for new media, but no new theoretical framework is involved. This is just another example of the well-established relationship between conservation and preservation which libraries have been consciously developing since the mid-1960s.
In his post about this same symposium, Sully writes that “keeping a digital artwork in an obsolete media only dooms the artwork to an early death… Sometimes, the artwork must be transmogrified into a new type of media in order to preserve it.” Call it transmogrification or reformatting, this is nothing more or less philosophically fraught than what we did decades ago transferring books onto microfilm.
That last sentence should be read with the very full weight of recent history behind it.
Librarians were subjected to the harsh but largely right-thinking critiques of professional scholars (as well as the brutal ad hominem of an enraged novelist) because of the decision to reformat books and newspapers and discard the originals. We always have to do both: we have to keep works available in usable contemporary formats and keep artifacts in their original state of issue.
Sully concluded by musing that “[p]erhaps trying to reproduce cultural memory is too difficult, and allowing the user to reinterpret their own memory is the solution.” Here I would add that we do not abstain from reproducing cultural memory just because it is difficult, but because sometimes it courts unethical behavior.
I assume that “cultural memory” means “the past events of which people are generally aware,” and that “preserving cultural memory” is meaningful only as a label referring to a suite of activities. Someone would document the state of knowledge at a point in time and according to a codified practice, for example, and we would then preserve the documentation for someone else to interpret later. Or, we would collect representative artifacts and documents from the era in question so a researcher could develop a later interpretation of a particular zone of cultural memory. It would be ethically fraught for us to pre-empt that interpretation or obstruct the user’s chance to “reinterpret their own memory.”
We supply artifacts and the metadata that enables their discovery, use and contextualization. There is an interpretive element in this work, of course, but we only have a right to call ourselves professionals so far as we are able to manage and document the influence and effects of our work. Cultural memory does not belong to libraries, museums, and archives. Cultural memory belongs to culture. We serve that memory, enable that memory, support that memory, but we do not make it.
I think that there is a lot of confusion between the need for new technologies, required to accomplish the specific preservation tasks related to digital objects, and the need for a new model of preservation itself. This creates the possibility for a false dichotomy that can draw attention away from the ongoing need for preservation activity for everything in our collections. I wonder if this, in turn, inverts the genuine preservation problem: not a lack of potential techniques or a dearth of need, but avoidance on the part of the cultural heritage community to admit to the scope of the preservation requirements facing all of our collections and a subsequent failure to advocate for the support required to address our preservation goals.