Valiz, ISBN-13: 978-9492095268, English, 304 pages, 2017, The Netherlands

Fate and the notion of archive is at the core of an increasingly visible debate, triggered by art institutions’ involvement in the global digitalisation of culture. The digital representation of materials, the access they grant and the separation from their physical objects, together with the changing relationship with the massive and increasing amount of information, animate this debate. Annet Dekker is an acknowledged expert in born-digital artworks’ conservation, and she has previously edited collection of texts on the topic in, like ”archive2020” and “Speculative Scenarios”. In the introduction she explains the disruptive dynamism of digital archives, and how everybody is pushed to turn into a digital archivist, but she also states the key argument of how ”technology changes the content of what is archived”. These concepts resonate in all the included texts. There are interviews with Dusan Barok, about his seminal Monoskop archival project, and Igor Stromayer with his Intima.org historical net.art website’s deletion as an artist’s gesture. Also there are articles about historical efforts, like the Mondotheque experiment contextualised by Femke Snelting, Olia Lialina illustrating her Geocities archive, and Manu Luksch, sharing her experience in making the over-sampled Dreams Rewired movie. The three sections altogether cover the most compelling issues: the still entangled relationship between analogue and digital, the lost content and the performed one, considerably rendering the dynamics of archiving within screens.

 

Contributors: Babak Afrassiabi, Dušan Barok, Tina Bastajian, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Özge Çelikaslan, Annet Dekker, Olia Lialina, Manu Luksch, Nicolas Malevé, Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh, Josien Pieterse, Ellef Prestsæter, Robert Sakrowski, Stef Scagliola, Katrina Sluis, Femke Snelting, Igor Štromajer, Nasrin Tabatabai