5.12.1 Artists have long recognised the conceptual and aesthetic power of databases, and much work has resulted using archives as a deliberate base for artistic endeavours. In view of activities such as those sited above, this is a rich territory for artists to work in, on many levels. Databases and archives serve as ready-made commentaries on our contemporary social and political lives. Even the places that are traditionally outlets for the work become ready-mades. The museum as an institution and the general societal attitude towards art objects can be viewed and dissected from this perspective. The gallery becomes the public face while the storerooms are its private parts, with the majority of the collection residing there. Storerooms are places where artwork resides cut off from the critical aura and in the graceless form of regimented racks. Artists have produced work that comments on these dynamics of collection and display by museums, the institutions they traditionally depend on. Let us consider some art practices in this domain before moving into how contemporary artists working with digital technologies are responding to knowledge organisation and production described above. [9]

5.12.2 Marcel Duchamp's Boites-en-Valise is seen as the first critique of museum practice: "[it] parodies the museum as an enclosed space for displaying art . . . mocks [its] archival activity . . . [and] satirically suggests that the artist is a travelling salesman whose concerns are as promotional as they are aesthetic." (McAllister and Weil, 1989, pg. 10). After publishing an edition of three hundred standard and twenty luxury versions of the Green Box [10], Duchamp devised a series of valises that would contain miniature versions of his artwork to be unpacked and used in museums. He commissioned printers and light manufacturers throughout Paris to make three hundred-twenty copies of miniature versions of each of his artworks and a customised briefcase to store and display them: "In the end the project was not only autobiographical, a life-long summation, but anticipatory as well. As an artwork designed to be unpacked, the viewing of Valises carries the same sense of expectation and event as the opening of a crate." (Schaffner, 1998, pg. 11).

5.12.3 In the 70's and 80's, artists such as Richard Artschwager, Louise Lawler, Marcel Broothers, and Martin Kippenberger have commented on museum practice using the archiving and packing practice as an anchor. Ironically, storage of fine art in many cases is more elaborate and careful in execution than the very art it is meant to protect. Perhaps anticipating the art of 'containers' of interface to data, Artschwager takes the crate and elevates it to an art form by creating a series of crates and exhibiting them in museum and gallery exhibition spaces. Similarly, Andy Warhol (an obsessive collector in his own right) curated a show at the Rhode Island School of Design that consisted entirely of a shoe collection from the costume collection, shelf and all. The show was part of a series conceived by John and Dominique de Menil, who were interested in bringing to light some of the "unsuspecting treasures mouldering in museum basements, inaccessible to the general public." (Bourdon, 1970, pg. 17).

5.12.4 Warhol's Time Capsule project, very similar to Fuller's Chronofile, consists of stored away documents of Warhol's daily life such as unopened mail and an enormous amount of marginal notes, receipts, scraps, and other details of little or no importance. The similarity lays in the approach of not wanting to categorise the items collected or grant them any other type of specific or special significance. Warhol's obsessive collecting throughout his life time resulted in forty-two scrapbook of clippings related to his work and his public life; art supplies ad materials used by Warhol; posters publicising his exhibitions and films; an entire run of Interview magazine, which Warhol founded in 1969; his extensive library of books and periodicals; hundreds of decorative art objects; and many personal items such as clothing and over thirty of the silver-white wigs that became one of his defining physical features. Warhol also owned several works by Marcel Duchamp, who had a important influence on him, including two copies of the Boite-en-Valises (Smith,1998, pg. 279)

5.12.5 Documentation of an artist's life is an investment in the future of the personae that will continue to survive in the form of information. Collecting, storing, and archiving is very much connected to time, to our anxiety over the loss of time and the speed with which time travels. We preserve the all-important self in this age of relentless movement by creating a memory bank that testifies our existence, our unique contribution, and promises to perhaps be brought back to life by someone in the future who can unpack the data and place it in a space of cultural importance. How much we leave behind, how much shelf space we occupy, is how our importance is measured. Meg Cranston makes this point in a compelling way in her piece "Who's Who by Size": Edgar Allen Poe, at six hundred-thirty three volumes, occupies sixty three and a half feet of shelf space, while Muhammad Ali, at a mere fifteen volumes, only one and a half feet. (Schaffner, 1998, pg. 106).

5.12.6 Artists working with digital media, particularly on the networks, are acutely aware of information overflow and that design of navigation through these spaces has become a demand of aesthetic practice. One of the first artists who used the World Wide Web early on with the now obsolete Mosaic browser was Antonio Muntades. Muntades's project, the File Room [11], was devoted to documenting cases of censorship that are frequently not available at all or else exist somewhere as dormant data. Similarly, Vera Frankel has created an installation that extends out onto the Web and addresses issues of collection of art, specifically of Hitler's obsession:

5.12.7 A particular focus of these conversations has been the Sonderauftrag (Special Assignment) Linz, Hitler's little publicised but systematic plan to acquire art work by any means, including theft or forced sale, for the proposed Furhermuseum (accent) in Linz, his boyhood town. Shipped from all over Europe to the salt mines at the nearby Alt Aussee, the burnt collection was stored in conditions of perfect archival temperature and humidity, until found by the Allies after the war: cave after cave of paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings destined for the vast museum that was never built. (Frankel, 1995, www.yorku.ca/Body/Missing)

5.12.8 Frankel invites other artists to contribute their own narratives, works, and bibliographies to the work, thus making the piece itself become a kind of archive whose content does not belong to one artist alone. Fear of the loss of originality and the revered artist personae is frequently connected to the endless reproductions that the digital media affords. Another source of fear for artists confronting the new technologies is the integration of individual artists into the context of other works or creation of meta-works. Of course, this is not a fear for those who have taken on a broader view of what 'originality' may mean. Ultimately, artists working with digital media necessarily work in collaborative groups and are context providers. Indeed the development of context in the age of information overload is the art of the day. This is particularly true of the current artistic practice on the net in which artists frequently coopt and summon work and data of others. One of the by products of a "global culture" is the emergence of meta-structures, which include physical architectures, software such as the browser technology that allows us to view information on the Internet via the WWW, and artworks that are meta-art pieces, including work of not only other artists but the audience itself. [12]

5.12.9 Artists working with the net are essentially concerned with the creation of a new type of aesthetic that involves not only a visual representation, but invisible aspects of organisation, retrieval, and navigation as well. Data is the raw form that is shaped and used to build architectures of knowledge exchange and as an active commentary on the environment it depends on-the vast, intricate network with its many faces.

5.12.10 Fuller's Chronofile, although not without problems, is an example of a system consciously conceived without fixed categories, which poses an explicit commentary on traditional modes of categorisation through juxtaposition. Similarly, Cage, in his last exhibition piece entitled "The Museum Circle," makes a point about categorisation in cultural production and exhibition. In 1993, shortly before his death, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles realised another version of The Museum Circle (the first being in Munich, 1991), in which more than twenty museums participated with a large number of exhibits. The Museum Circle changed its order daily according to the principle of the I Ching. This constant change enabled new kinds of connections to emerge and cast doubt on any "truth" the works may have revealed through their former categorisation. (Blume, 1998). And this is where I will leave off my tour of databasing our collective knowledge efforts. I believe that there is an opportunity for artists to play a vital role in the development of the evolving database culture. If we can conceptualise and design systems that in their core are about change and multiple ways of access and retrieval, we can truly anticipate a new type of aesthetic emerging. [top]