keywords : Documentation

Current documentation practices in the arts sector tend to be passive and most often follow the production of a work. Museums that acquire works of art with technological elements have neither the tools nor methodologies to accurately document the technological dimension of these works or make allowances for their high degree of variability. Within the context of works with technological components, documentation is vital to conservation.

The main role of the Documentation and Archival Management sub-committee is to develop strategies and structures adapted to works of art featuring technological components. The committee will also create tools to link archival material to the technology elements contained in the works. These tools will play a very important role in preserving the works and will also provide for a global understanding of the place these works occupy in the history of media technologies. A typology of the documentation found in the artist archives and museums will also be produced.

To this end, case studies on records collections and archive groups will be prepared. Our studies will include the archives of Canadian artist Vera Frenkel, which is housed at Queen’s University. An archives corpus, on a project by architect Greg Lynn from the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), which is distinctive in its essentially digital nature, will also be analyzed. We have planned a total of three case studies on documentation over the five year mandate of DOCAM.

Access to Greg Lynn’s Embryological House Report – A case-study by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (devised by Andrea Kuchembuck and Lawrence Bird)

Access to the article : Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation Strategies for Preserving Art’s History – published by Jessica Santone in the journal Leonardo, April 2008, Vol. 41, No. 2.

Access to the article : Scoring the Work: Documenting Practice and Performance in Variable Media Art - published by Corina Macdonald in the journal Leonardo, February 2009, Vol. 42, No. 1. (not yet available for free download)