Start the Week: Hari Kunzru and Dystopia - 17 June 2013

This episode focused on Hari Kunzru and his dystopian novella, Memory Palace, where books and the act of remembering have been banned. Jane Rogers explained how her apocalyptic tale may be set in the future but points to today's abuse of scientific knowledge and the heroism of youth. James Robertson spoke about his latest novel which explores grief, justice and the truth, and the photographer Adam Broomberg asked how far images of war capture the truth.

Google Cultural Institute: Steve Crossan - 18 June 2013

Google Cultural Institute (GCI) is based in Paris, and is a team largely made up of designers and software engineers (how does this feed into my study? As a form of institutional critique or as a study of the management of heritage resources?)

GCI ran the pilot Google Art Project two years ago. At this stage there were 17 art museums and galleries involved. The pilot threw up several questions, the foremost among them being, what can distinguish the digital object from the authentic object in a positive way? The project explored different lighting options in the museums (see Turning the Pages & 'Valery Proust Museum') and used street view technology to emulate the experience of walking around the building. A lot was learned from the project, although the GCI has subsequently gone in a different direction.

Moving away from the trend for taking very high quality images (the Louvre has a satellite imaging camera), Crossan suggested that the future of digitisation will be smartphone-based, where the sophistication lies in the software rather than the hardware.

GCI has now launched an exhibition facility, which represents the material of partner institutions in online exhibitions. This allows for the display and exploration of archive material. GCI operates the service on a hosting model, it doesn't make curatorial decisions and the rights to works remain with the partners (in cases where rights to contemporary artworks belong to artists it can still be problematic). The Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory site is an example of this format. In reference to a mosaic thumbnail image style page, Crossan suggested that the layout can be difficult to access unless you know exactly what you're looking for (see Europeana's online exhibitions). There is a further question about how to engage audiences who won't necessarily seek out culture. The search engine model entails that content can only be provided if you know what you're looking for.

Crossan focused on the case study of the Yad Vashem Centre to explain how the digitisation of images and their accompanying text shed new light on unknown photographs and provided context for the histories of individuals that were victims of the Holocaust.

He then gave details of the progress of GCI since Google Art Project. It partners with 250 museums and galleries from 42 countries (encompassing both art and historical content). Beyond the online exhibitions of partner institutions, there is now a user gallery feature that can be taken up by anyone (prosumer?) There are currently 300,000 user galleries and counting. Although not intentionally designed for that purpose, the feature has been utilised by a number of secondary school teachers.

A lot of GCI's current investment is going into solving the metadata problem. They have developed a system for tagging items with Freebase elements, and are also investigating image-based search solutions (beyond metadata). Long-term plans include linking projects on different platforms by making content available through APIs. All this work (and the priorities of GCI generally) are oriented more towards digitisation than digital preservation.

The rationale for GCI? Crossan called it part of Google's Corporate Social Responsibility Programme (although they wouldn't describe it as such) - see http://www.google.org/, e.g. Public Health initiative. However the production of high quality content (which is not primarily English-language material) is good for the longevity of the web and thus, long-term, for Google. Incidentally, this is also why GCI isn't based in an English-language speaking country.

Steve Crossan will shortly be leaving his post as head of GCI. His email address is: stevie@google.com

N.B. See Versailles 3D for an example of GCI's 3D scanning effort.

British Library adds billions of webpages and tweets to archive

In a project led by the BL (launched April 2013), material on 1bn webpages from nearly 5m UK websites, plus public tweets and Facebook entries, are being preserved for the historical record at six libraries in the UK and Ireland. 

The aim is to produce a digital record of events and cultural and intellectual works to match traditional print. See the full story here:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/british-library-archive-webpages-tweets

Show your support for #AllezCulture - The Campaign to Defend Europeana's EU Funding

Dear colleague,

I am writing to invite you to get involved in #AllezCulture, a new campaign to encourage the European Commission to commit to ongoing support for Europeana (www.europeana.eu) and its community of GLAMs across Europe under the current EU budget round.

Europeana is included under the 'CEF' funding programme, where it faces stiff competition from a range of agendas including e-Health, e-Justice and a Safer Internet. While these are all important causes, it is equally important that our community makes its voice heard to protect the past 5 years of investment in digital cultural programmes across Europe and to look ahead to new partnerships and opening up collections to new audiences.

Show your support for #AllezCulture by:

1.       Tweeting your networks with the hashtag #AllezCulture to let
them know how Europeana and European partnerships have added value for
you and your organisation;

2.       Downloading and sharing the #AllezCulture infographic with your
networks (can be downloaded/viewed here: http://researchkb.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/europeana-the-case-for-funding-tweet-allezculture/

3.       Read the blog post about the case for support
<http://researchkb.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/europeana-the-case-for-fundi
ng-tweet-allezculture/>  and blog/share with your own community your
views on how Europeana has impacted on your work, and why it is
important to continue to support collaboration between European GLAMs

4.       Sending a message to @NeelieKroesEU (Vice Commissioner of the
European Commission) to let her know why Europeana deserves her support

5.       Joining the Europeana Network and connecting with other people
involved in the #AllezCulture campaign across Europe - you can join
online at http://www.pro.europeana.eu/network/apply

6.       Joining the Europeana Network LinkedIn group and sharing your
thoughts about how to make the case for investment in Europeana -
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4143376&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

In the UK alone, Europeana-related initiatives have generated more than EUR 10m in new investment from Europe into the cultural industries over the past 3 years. Europeana has been a catalyst for new investment and new digital cultural programmes all over Europe. I hope you will join me in acting today to protect the value of what has been achieved so far, and to secure a sustainable future for Europeana and its work supporting Europe's GLAM sector.

With many thanks in advance for your support, and all best,
Nick Poole

Chief Executive Officer
Collections Trust

Europeana-related conferences

See: http://www.europeana-inside.eu/about/conferences_and_meetings/index.html

The Commons Letter - Nick Poole

Last week we surveyed the commons network in an effort to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and triumphs experienced by individuals advancing the commons and commons solutions. In response, we heard from Nick Poole, chief executive of Collections Trust.

Collections Trust is an independent UK-based organization working with museums, libraries, galleries, and archives worldwide to improve the management of their Collections, a commons shared by us all. The work of Collections Trust “ensures that millions of people worldwide can continue to discover, enjoy, and learn from their history and knowledge and stories which bring it to life.”

Poole’s response to our inquiry about his effort to protect Collections was clear and insightful, and we are delighted to share it with our wider community.
— Jessica Conrad

A letter to On the Commons from Nick Poole:

I lead Collections Trust, a UK-based nonprofit organization working with around 23,000 museums, galleries, libraries, and archives across Europe. It is my firm belief that the principles, ethics, and spirit of the Commons lie at the heart of the public mission of the culture sector.

I have been working to promote the idea of a Cultural Commons for Europe—not only in the digital realm, but also by asserting that the millions of books, artifacts, and records in Europe’s cultural institutions belong to a commons of the world’s memory.

Through this work, I try to demonstrate that the Commons is not just an abstract set of ideas, but a very real and tangible means of building a lasting, scalable, transparent, and relevant culture sector for the 21st century.

But it has been a struggle to ignite this idea in my community. My main challenges include the following:

• Everyone sees the word “Commons” and thinks of the Creative Commons. They go straight to technology and copyright rather than human rights and shared responsibilities.


• The word “Commons” does not travel well. Countries without a well-established concept of common land find it harder to engage with than others.


• When you say you are trying to develop a Commons, everyone wants to see it. Where is it? Is it online? Can I go there? The concept is just too abstract for western scientific rationalists to easily grasp.


• People assume the Commons is anti-money, as opposed to anti-enclosure, so they assume they can’t afford it—particularly in a time of austerity. I try to demonstrate that the Commons can be the basis of a profoundly scalable business model, but examples are few and far between.


• Commons ≠ Communism. People think the Commons is a political statement, not a human one. I find that a lot of people opt out of the conversation because they think they’re getting involved in a fringe lobby group.

Although I’ve faced challenges, I’ve also discovered some successful solutions, including your Commons Framework. I also use a thought exercise where I ask people to imagine the difference between a piece of land that they own in common and one that is owned by a landlord. If you build on a piece of land that someone owns, the results of your labour are never yours. But if you build on, and care for, a piece of land that is held in common, then it is yours and everyone’s forever. This ought to be the primary purpose of a museum, archive, or library.

For more information about Collections Trust, you can visit their website at www.collectionstrust.org.uk. Email us at info[at]onthecommons.org to share your own challenges and triumphs in advancing the commons and commons solutions.

Inside The Green Box

See below for an excerpt from the paper I gave at the 2013 AAH Conference (11-13 April), University of Reading. The paper was entitled: 'Curatorial ‘Translations’: The Case of Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box':

In his 1923 essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’, Walter Benjamin questions the rationale underlying one of the key principles of translation, asking: ‘What does a literary work 'say'? What does it communicate?’ He goes on to suggest that:

It 'tells' very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information. Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information - hence something inessential.

The implication here is that translation should not be understood as a process of transmission. As such, it can only relay information; a good translation will communicate something that exceeds its representation as words on the page. This characterization of translation bears similarities to Benjamin’s concept of the aura which is described as ‘the unique phenomenon of distance’, a distance that is destroyed through the reproduction and subsequent distribution or transmission of the artwork. In the digital realm, the potential for artworks to be rendered literally as the sum of their parts, in binary code, is even more palpable. And it is a particularly relevant concern for literary and text-based objects, which can be manipulated and isolated according to particular search functions. While digitization and the application of text-reading software afford new opportunities to engage with textual materials, in a museum-gallery context, increasing interest in the book as an object of art, rather than a medium of art, leave us with questions about how these opportunities might be realized.

The focus of my PhD is on issues pertaining to the digitization of heritage collections and in this paper, I want to examine the display and representation of art texts digitally, and explore the extent to which the relationship between visual and textual art has been defined by a practice of ‘translation’. However, rather than expanding a theory of curatorial translation, my purpose is to introduce Benjamin’s notion of translation as a way of conceptualizing both the curatorial and the artistic process; I believe this approach offers a different way of thinking through ideas that are often linked with the aura, and the transformative potential implied by translation seems fitting for my case study, Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box. Working at the University of Leeds Library and the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery has informed my choice since I’ve studied a copy of the box held in the Library’s Special Collections. But this is not a straightforward or uncomplicated example of an artist’s book; in fact, as a box, it is debatable whether the term ‘book’ applies at all. Somewhere between archive, work of art and literary text, it is a commentary on Duchamp’s famous work, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even. The box and its contents, a collection of loose facsimile notes, are ostensibly good candidates for digitization but their random accumulation and method of production complicates the process of generating a digital reproduction. By challenging the well-established dichotomy between copy and original, Duchamp’s work provides an opening for thinking about a form of translation that goes beyond the transmission of information.

In undertaking the research for this paper, I’ve cross-referenced the Leeds box with the Tate’s copy, which is available through the Tate website. The results of this comparison have been very interesting, if not conclusive, and I’ll touch on these findings at in the second half of the paper, before reflecting on the practical considerations associated with digitizing The Green Box.

In 1934, Marcel Duchamp announced the publication of The Green Box - produced in an edition of 320 - as a literary counterpart to his seminal artwork, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor, Even, also known as The Large Glass. Comprised of 93 separate documents, plans, sketches and notes held in a green felt-covered box, reproduced from originals made by Duchamp, the box gave an insight into the artist’s creative process during the conception of his Large Glass. Even the box itself was representative of how he had compiled the notes, storing them away in a green cardboard box for future reference. Out of the edition of 320, Duchamp added to 20 of the boxes one original note, alongside the 93 reproductions. The edition I worked from contains 93 notes and, so far as I can tell, includes no original note.

As I’ve already indicated, the idea of artistic and curatorial translation seems particularly relevant to Duchamp’s box. The pretext for publishing it was what George Heard Hamilton called ‘Duchamp’s elegant invitation to the reader to thread his own way, with the aid of the notes, through the artist’s mind’. Yet, contrary to this apparent desire to explain The Large Glass, Robert Lebel has claimed of Duchamp that, ‘his work was meant for no one but himself, and he took every precaution to see that nothing of it should be intelligible to an outsider’. How, then, are these contradictory impulses to be reconciled? Keeping in mind the sort of process that attempts to capture the essence of the work beyond a mere likeness or literal communication of language, I want to think about ways in which The Green Box has both resisted and played into the notion translation.

Throughout his famously short artistic career, Duchamp was renowned for making difficult art, often more engaged with intellectual than aesthetic concerns. The words ‘insoluble’, ‘enigmatic’ and ‘ambiguous’ have frequently been used to describe his work, particularly the piece he laboured longest over, The Large Glass. To suggest, therefore, that he published The Green Box purely as a means of explaining his artistic rationale would appear somewhat out of character. Instead, it seems to be the case that the Glass was only one dimension of the larger work, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachlors, Even. Sometime after the publication of the box, Duchamp remarked that the Glass was not just an object to be looked at, but a ‘wedding of mental and visual elements’ in which ‘the ideas […] are more important than the actual visual realization’.

Of the relationship between the Glass and the box, Richard Hamilton sums up this juxtaposition of mental and visual elements very well, when he writes:

It was his (Duchamp’s) intention that the ‘Large Glass’ should embody the realization of a written text, which had assisted the generation of plastic ideas, and which also carried layers of meaning beyond the scope of pictorial expression. The text exists beside the glass as a commentary and within it as a literary component of its structure. Without the notes the painting loses some of its significance and without the monumental presence of the glass the notes have an air of random irrelevance.

The box and the Glass, then, are co-dependent entities. While neither reveals itself easily, a fluid dialogue between the visual and the textual components does unlock a greater understanding of the work. As such, the two are engaged in what could be described as a reciprocal process of translation; one is not a literal translation of the other but together they do give the viewer the key to begin deciphering its mysteries. Likewise, it was Duchamp’s belief that it is not the artist who creates the work but the viewer who completes the creative cycle. Both, again, are co-dependent entities.

As interesting as the relation of the box to the Glass, was Duchamp’s approach to reproducing the notes as a printed book. As Paul Thirkell suggests the box was, ‘produced in a medium carefully chosen by the artist to best convey the conceptual aims of the piece’; for Duchamp’s purposes, a print process that would give an accurate idea of the original notes was the chief aim, and he eventually chose a photomechanical technique. Various Duchamp quotes support the view that he meticulously and obsessively worked to recreate each note, piece by piece, and these have frequently been cited by critics. For example, he once stated in an interview:

I had all of these thoughts lithographed in the same ink which had been used for the originals. To find paper that was exactly the same, I had to ransack the most unlikely nooks and crannies of Paris.

However, as Roland Shearer and Stephen Jay Gould have since discovered through comparison with the originals, the ink and paper of the print boxes are deliberately and unashamedly different. It is possible that Duchamp was implicitly aware that if he created an exact copy, he could not avoid losing something of the spontaneity of the originals in the conversion, or translation, from one format to another. It seems certain, at least, that he was playing with all the theories of value the concept of the facsimile sets up. By introducing subtle variations into the reproductions, Duchamp was creating a likeness that was somehow unlike. Furthermore, by adding original notes to 20 of the printed editions, he was effectively destroying the template the copies were based on.

Part of the attraction of the The Green Box is its elusiveness; the disorder of the notes and their arbitrary sequence is integral to the artwork. While the digital medium does provide options for supporting that sort of representation, it could be argued that something is ‘lost in translation’ in the production of the digital surrogate. Digitization therefore complicates a notion of translation that explicitly works against the transmission of information. However, complete versions of the box are quite rare, partly because it was produced as a limited edition, partly because of its loose leaf format, and there are perhaps only two or three copies in the UK. Consequently, there are many practical reasons for creating a digital version of the box and putting it online. As well as increased potential for research, being able to directly compare multiple editions will reveal more about how they were produced and compiled.

My own experience of studying the Leeds box in relation to the Tate’s online version has been a difficult and sometimes frustrating process, which has confounded the method of cataloguing I initially planned to apply. The fact that some of the notes are double-sided is also potentially confusing, since it requires the production of multiple digital images per note. Far more confusing though, is the experience of trying to reconcile one version of the box with another. While both the Leeds and the Tate editions are complete, the Tate’s does have a 94th note. However, even taking account of this addition, comparison of the boxes has thrown up some questions. For example, there are at least two leaves in the Leeds edition of the box that don’t match any of the Tate’s counterpart images online. Equally, there are two or three Tate images that I have so far been unable to find the counterparts for in the Leeds edition. These omissions could partly be due to human error on my part and will require further checking but I’d feel confident enough to say there is some disparity between the two copies. Furthermore, in a few cases even where the notes are the same, the shape they’ve been torn into is different; here’s one of the more obvious examples (see below), which casts doubt on the received wisdom that Duchamp created a set of templates to replicate the shapes of the original scraps of paper. The torn edges introduce an element of contingency to the box since each tear is slightly different.

This is in keeping with the earlier suggestion that Duchamp deliberately misled critics and commentators about his painstaking efforts to replicate the notes and find the papers and inks from which the original ones were made. He seemed to enjoy upsetting the distinction between copy and original that privileges the authentic work of art. And it was a successful move on his part for the extent to which these pieces could be viewed as copies is challenged by the differences the comparison of two boxes has revealed.

The closeness of the comparison has been made possible through digitization. It could also be argued that it is precisely the capacity to render exact digital copies that highlights Duchamp’s deviation from the facsimile format, a model that usually implies exactitude and uniformity. The assumption of fidelity to an original that has become associated with the box diverts attention away from a more significant aspect of Duchamp’s work; the fact that his concern is not with a static likeness but with a moving and developing process. The art is constituted in the process, and any attempt to represent the material art, digital or otherwise, must be mindful this.

References

Benjamin, Walter, 'The Task of the Translator', in Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999, pp. 70-82

Duchamp, Marcel, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp's Green Box, trans. by George Heard Hamilton. London: Lund, Humphries, 1960.

Lebel, Robert, Marcel Duchamp, trans. by George Heard Hamilton. London: Trianon Press, 1959.

Further Sources

(suggestions from panel members)

Fluxus Group works, Joseph Beuys etc. (see also Huyssen chapter)

Nigel Henderson, Win Henderson, Hans Ulrich Obrist (on Richard Hamilton).

Duchamp, Marcel, The Portable Museum: the Making of the Bôıte-en-Valise de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Selavy. Inventory of an Edition by Ecke Bonk, trans. by David Britt. London: Thames & Hudson, 1989.

Sarat Maharaj, Sarat, 'Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other', in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. by Jean Fisher. London: Kala Press in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994, pp. 28-35. URL = http://www.iniva.org/library/archive/people/m/maharaj_sarat/perfidious_fidelity