Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
"Preserving the Immaterial": A Conference on Variable Media
March 31, 2001

Session on Reproducible Artworks

WELCOME by JOHN G. HANHARDT

JOHN HANHARDT: Good morning, everybody. My name is John Hanhardt. I'm Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts, and it's a great pleasure for me to welcome you back after last night's very spectacular opening to Preserving the Immaterial, our conference on variable media.

Bruce Sterling, in his remarks at the beginning, made vividly clear how precious and how transitory and how increasingly vulnerable technologies are and are continuing to be, and the impact that this has on our culture, and how we will preserve and continue to understand it.

And Ken Jacobs' presentation of the Bitemporal Vision, the projection of the film, demonstrated a tangible engagement with the material of film, which really began in the end of the 19th century, our whole engagement with the new way of representing the world around us, interpreting it, and creating a whole new visual arts language. And then seeing that on video further raised questions of its preservation and the differences between film and the video image, in both a negative and very positive sense. I think that will be something that we'll return to.

So this morning, we begin a day-long conference that will go into greater detail about the Variable Media Initiative. And now I'm gonna take a position over here, where I look forward to moderating the conference, today's first session. But I want to first of all, as I did last evening - some of you were here, and some of you may be joining us for the first time -I think it's always important to identify people who have been very important to this initiative. It's a large and complex project. And so I want to identify the names of some people, some of whom are with us on this panel, from the staff of the Guggenheim Museum.

When I came here to the Guggenheim, I discovered this extraordinary resource in the professional, curatorial and all the support staff. It's been a real privilege for me to be working with them. And I'd like here to cite Lisa Dennison, who's Collections Curator and Deputy Director; Nancy Spector, Curator of Contemporary Art, who will be joining us this afternoon; Carol Stringari, Senior Conservator of Contemporary Art; Lynn Underwood, who's Director of the Archives, Library and Museum Records; Ann Butler, who's Archivist, and has a particular interest in issues of film and media; and Paul Kuranko, Media Arts Specialist, who's joining us this morning.

And I'd also like to acknowledge those folks who've been really working very hard with Jon to realize this project, our curatorial interns, Caroline Aubin and Starr McCaleb; and members of the Film and Media Arts Programs staff, Rajendra Roy and Kevin Murphy; and of course, to Michael Lavin, Technical Director of the Guggenheim Museum, whose always resourceful and imaginative solutions to problems is making this whole event function smoothly.

And it's also functioning because of the financial support of the Education Department and Deutsche Bank, which is supporter of the 2001 Film and Media Arts Program, which this presentation is part of.

And finally - because it's a large institution, so there're all these connected ways that we support what we do - it's being done in conjunction with the Global Guggenheim: Selections from the Extended Collection exhibition, on view in the galleries.

So the Variable Media Initiative, as I mentioned last evening in my introduction, and as Jon filled out in his extraordinary presentation, establishes a process and means to engage artworks across a variety of media and materials, and to serve in a variety of ways, initiatives, protocols that can bring a creative and flexible approach to the preservation of a range of creative practices.

The Variable Media Initiative has had a series of workshops, which have informed what we're doing in each of these sessions today. And what I would just like to stress is that these workshops are going to be continuing into the future, and that conferences like this are also going to be continuing. So this is not just a one-time address of this issue and then it's going to evaporate; it's going to remain very much part of what we're doing; and hopefully, in dialogue with you, continuing to draw from variable media fields at large.

This project has really been designed and conceived by Jon Ippolito, who's really an extraordinary resource to this institution. I've benefited so much from his insights and his input into our program. And this project really demonstrates all the issues of what makes it work, and that's a belief in the artist; a sophisticated and deep engagement with new media and technologies; and bringing these together to make this a new way of understanding these problems of preservation - solvable, perhaps. And I'm just very excited that we are having this program.

And Jon is also gonna be chief moderator. So he's chief of police for the day. So I'm working for him, even though I'm speaking now. So I'm going to turn things over to Jon, say a few words before we get into our panel.

REVIEW OF QUESTIONNAIRE: REPRODUCIBLE BEHAVIORS

JON IPPOLITO: Ok. If we could have the Web site up. Well, yesterday we made a lot of grandiose claims for establishing a new paradigm for art, a paradigm based not on fixed objects stored in vaults, but on a fluid chain of events that can be recognized as an artwork with the help of a collecting institution like a museum. And central to that paradigm is the artist, and the artist's intent as to how their work should evolve over time.

So today we're gonna try to put our money where our mouth is, and look at specific artworks with the artists or representatives of the artists who created them, in an attempt to actually capture that intent. And I'll got into a little background for those of you who missed yesterday; but my goal is to jump as quickly as possible into today's session. There are two other sessions, as indicated on your card, both in the afternoon, one beginning at one thirty and another at three forty-five.

The Variable Media Initiative is a paradigm based on the presumption that ephemeral works - be they, as you can see the variety here, electronic circuits, candies, branches, diodes - all of the unusual materials and media that artists explored in the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of this current century are all doomed unless we do something radical about them.

And what we propose to do is encourage artists to create guidelines for recreating the works in new mediums, once their current formats have expired. That's a fairly unusual thing to ask artists to do. But we've got a list of case studies, eight of them, which we'll be looking at today, in which the artists or the artists' representatives have really come up to the plate and taken this issue on very seriously. As John mentioned, we've looked at this in specific workshops with each artist. Today we're gonna present some of the findings of those workshops.

We've also developed an instrument for helping artists to write down the answers to the very unusual questions that we asked them about: What will their work of video look like in the year 2050? This is a questionnaire that is currently still under development, but we'll be putting prototypes of it online later with our Web site.

This questionnaire contains two initial questions. "In its original version, this artwork could be... In later recreations, this artwork could be..." So already you have in this bifurcation the notion that the work can't possibly stay in its original medium. Something's gotta give. But even the way we describe the original characteristics of the artwork is medium independent.

There are two reasons for this. One is that a lot of artworks that fall in these interesting categories of ephemeral media tend to be hybrids of different media. So if you were present last night, you saw Ken Jacobs give a remarkable performance of a film piece. It is both based on film stock, film projectors; and it has a performance aspect. Performance archives wouldn't know what to do, necessarily, with the projectors and the film stock; and film archives wouldn't know what to do with the performative aspects. So unless we take into account hybrids of different media, we're doomed from the outset.

It's also, in my belief, pretty much a mistake to let media guide all of the description of an artwork, because if the medium itself expires, you're guaranteed that the artwork itself will.

Under the descriptions, then of "In its original version, this artwork could be...," you find what are more like behaviors. This artwork could be installed, could be performed, could be interactive, reproduced, duplicated, encoded, and networked. These behaviors are not mutually exclusive. You can have something that's both performed and reproduced, say.

And in fact, we're going to focus this session on artworks that meet one of these behaviors, but not necessarily exclusive to that - that is, artworks that can be reproduced. And what we mean by that in the context of this particular paradigm is when you can make a copy of it, but the copy is not as good as the original. In the jargon of preservation, it's a lossy copy; there's degradation involved. And this is true of a number of different types of media.

For example, you can see, perhaps - those of you with good eyesight - at the top of our questionnaire here, "original audio format." So when there's analog audio, like an ordinary tape cassette, that is something that generally speaking, as you copy it, the copy is not as good as the original.

For original photography format, such as a black and white photograph, there is a negative and there are prints. And should you try to make a copy print, that copy print will not be as good as the original print, nor will it contain the amount of information in the original negative. So here you find an example of a work where the original is something that is never viewed, except perhaps by researchers. The negative is not what you look at; you're looking always at copies that represent a level removed from the original.

Video, we're fairly familiar with that as an example of a reproducible technology. Those of us who work with video know that there's usually a master somewhere, and then there are exhibition copies made from that, because playing a tape in a tape deck tends to wear it out.

And prints, of course. We forget that ordinary prints by Rembrandt or Daumier have an original plate, and then there are copies made from that.

But regardless of which of these media the reproducible artwork may be in, there are some interesting questions to ask that are really across the board. And they're questions like the relationship of the master to the sub-masters; that is, the original to all of the copies made for exhibition or other public use.

One of the questions in our questionnaire is, "Where is the location of the master? Where is it archived?" So that people can get access to it. What's the status of it? Is it still viable, or has it been remastered because of obsolescence? What acceptable sub-masters can be made? Well, can you make them for exhibition? In most cases, yes. Can you make them for research? Well, sometimes. Can you make them just to be archived? Generally a good practice. Can you make them for public distribution?

Should the Guggenheim get a request from some art history class in the University of Iowa for a VHS low resolution copy of something that we have a very good exhibition quality copy of, should we just send it to them for free or for a nominal fee, and not worry about the fact that there is another copy out there in the world?

What are the fate of such sub-masters? Should we require the University of Iowa to destroy the tape when they're done? Should we just ask for them to return it? Should we allow them to distribute it freely, to let other people know about the artist's work? What kinds of permissions are required to make the sub-masters and to compress or digitize an analog sub-master?

So all of these different media, generally considered by different specialists in different fields, are glommed on together here in one field, one form of this questionnaire. Why is that? The reason, as I mentioned last night, is that the variable media paradigm puts artists at the center. We believe - or at least I believe - that the creativity of artists may outlast the creativity of technologists. And that's not necessarily a dis on technologists; it's simply a recognition of the fact that for individual media - especially as we move into the digital age - the time that each remains viable is imploding.

So what do we do about that? Well, my feeling is that we work with the artists to ask them to fill out a questionnaire like this and let us know what is the proper relationship between the master and sub-master, on the assumption that the master/sub-master relationship might survive the translation of their work into new media in the future that we can't even predict yet.

Another part of the questionnaire relates to, ok, that's the status now, and what you conceive as the current dynamic of the work; but what about the future? What about the inevitable changes, compromises, translations that are gonna be made? We've looked at four different strategies for working around or accepting compromise. They start with storage - that is, when a work is simply mothballed in a crate, or stored on CD-ROM or DVD or on a computer disk.

Under the category of reproducible media, one question that often happens is what to do with the source. Should an obsolete source master, such as videotape or photographic negative, be restored? That is, you keep it in storage and you just improve that original - perhaps by cleaning it, washing it in some way. That has limited usefulness in many varieties of media which are inherently ephemeral and are gonna fade no matter what happens.

Another strategy is emulation. And this would be perhaps when the appearance of an obsolete source master, like a videotape or photographic negative, is reproduced in an entirely new medium, but one that give essentially the same effect, the same experience of it. So one thing that could happen is to digitize an analog photograph. You take the negative and you turn it into a digital file. A totally different medium. But in some way, it may be a way of preserving the look of the original. And we'll talk about an artist today who just chose to do that.

Migration is an option where the artist's merely interested in bringing that source material up to date, not worrying so much about compromises in sound and visual quality. So in that case, it would be to migrate a videotape or a photographic negative to a new medium that's become the industry standard. Very common practice for video, where a tape might start out as three quarter U-matic, and go to Betacam SP, and then up as a videodisk and DVD and digital video in the future.

And finally, the most radical option of all on this spectrum of possible strategies to use for preserving ephemeral artwork: reinterpretation. Should an obsolete source master, such as a videotape or photographic negative, be rerecorded according to the artist's instructions? Well, this would be an anathema to most conservation programs, the idea that you go in and not only mess with the original, you completely recreate a new one. Yet there are some artists for which this strategy may be the best one. And again, we'll see examples today.

So what we intend to do in using this questionnaire, is establish essentially an aesthetic constitution for the artwork - hopefully, working with the artist directly at the time that the work is conceived, or at least at the time that it may be accessioned into a collection. And what use is this? Well, there are two sort of modus operandi out there for preserving these kinds of works. One is to just let it go - keep it on storage and assume that it'll be there forever - in which case, it inevitably dies.

A second is to say, "Well, we'll just keep going back to the artist every time we need to solve one of these problems." This is a reactionary, ad hoc model. "And when the artist has died, we'll go back to whoever was the previous recreator of the work." So maybe if the Museum of Modern Art was the last person to recreate a certain video performance, well, we'll ask them how they did it, and we'll just sort of adopt their model to maybe the current technologies we have available.

I think of this sometimes as analogous to the common law model of British law, where there is no set thing written down; you have an inherited history of how something has worked, and you try to imitate whatever the previous judgment was. Of course, the problem is it's kind of a game of telephone. It may veer; the artist's intent, as represented in the artwork, may drift with time. And we have many examples of artworks that now look very different from the way the artist originally intended.

I'm interested in a model that's more like constitutional law, where there is this body of case law, if you will, of different curators and conservators making judgments and writing them down over time, so you can look back at that. But there's also some document at the end of that chain - a constitution, a set of variable media guidelines that the artist has signed and has set into motion. Doesn't specify everything, can't possibly predict the future, but at least gives a basis for judgment back to their original intent.

So the first case study we're gonna look at today is going to be Jan Dibbets' photo collage, A White Wall. But before I go into that, I thought maybe we'd do an introduction of the panelists by John Hanhardt.

INTRODUCTION OF PARTICIPANTS

HANHARDT: Thank you, Jon. Just picking up on what Jon has said, in focusing this first session on the reproducible media - on photography, audiotape, film, and video - I just want to say that in choosing these individual projects that we're gonna be discussing, I think they become exemplary instances of the challenges we face. And this workshop that we had on this issue was an extraordinary experience. And I hope that we can convey a sense of what that meant to each of us. And as I introduce each of the participants in this morning's discussion, I'm gonna introduce everybody in order of presentations.

Jon will be discussing the work of Jan Dibbets, A White Wall, from 1971, a photo collage. And a workshop was organized around Jan Dibbets, a presence here in New York in the exhibition installation of his work.

Our next presentation will be by Carol Stringari, who I've identified already, Senior Conservator, Contemporary Art, who's been with the museum since 1992, and has a long career in conservation, beginning with the Museum of Modern Art. And so she'll be discussing Bruce Nauman's False Silence, from 1975, an audiotape installation.

And then that will be followed by Jon Gartenberg, in discussion with Ken Jacobs. Jon Gartenberg is a figure, really a singular figure in issues of preservation in film. I first met Jon many, many years ago, when he was archivist at the Museum of Modern Art. Following that, he was involved with a number of important projects; I brought him into the preservation initiative around the films of Andy Warhol, and he contributed very strongly to the design of that project.

Since being at the Museum of Modern Art, Jon has been involved in issues of media preservation and popular culture - television and film - and is now president of Gartenberg Media Enterprises, his own independent consulting firm, that deals with issues of film preservation; and in that capacity, was director of the preservation project of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. And the films of Warren Sonbert were preserved through that project and presented here in an exhibition.

So John also has a special relationship to our evolving edition of films through our collecting program here at the Guggenheim Museum. And both the professional base of working as an archivist within the FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives, and his sensitivity to the nature of the artist-made independent films.

And John is gonna be speaking with and interviewing Ken Jacobs, whose Bitemporal Vision, from 1994, was presented last evening. Ken is really a key figure in the history of the American avant-garde cinema, creating an extraordinary body of work. Star Spangled to Death, Little Stabs at Happiness, Blonde Cobra, Tom Tom the Piper's Son, which we will be discussing a bit this morning - films that have been essential to defining the idea of an artist-made film that really recreates and understands, in a profound sense, the nature of the film medium.

Ken's also been an activist, establishing, with Millennium Film Workshop many years ago, a source and resource for filmmakers. He has been the recipient of many grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Fellowship, and exhibitions internationally. I just realized, looking at this, that Ken was in five Biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art when I was curator there, and representing my indebtedness to him as an artist who has also worked both with film to be presented in a theatrical setting, but also as we saw last evening, the performative engagement with the material of film. His Nervous System projects really take apart the instrument of the projector, as we have a new experience with film. And I should also add, Ken is Distinguished Professor of Cinema at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

And that will be followed by my conversation with Stephen Vitiello about Nam June Paik's TV Garden, a work from 1974. And Steve Vitiello has played a very important role. He's, I should say, an artist as well, working in sound. And he has been the archivist for the Electronic Arts Intermix, director of distribution from 1988 to 2000, and also developing their archival and preservation initiatives.

He played a very important role in The Worlds of Nam June Paik, our exhibition here, in restoring videotapes of Nam June's, as well as audiotapes. He has been guest curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and curator of sound art for the exhibition The American Century, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. And he too is a special resource to our program here, as videotape and video materials become more and more a part of our collecting program.

We also have our respondents, who will be here to engage in this conversation, and have been very important to the workshop process. Bill Brand, who is a filmmaker, whose work I showed at the Whitney Museum many years ago, and made an important contribution to film, and has now, through BB Optics created a very exciting, very important resource to the preservation of eight millimeter film and sixteen millimeter film - someone who we all call upon with a challenge of a strip of eight millimeter film: How do we blow that up? How do we reshow that? How do we maintain the marks in the celluloid, and the hand of the artist? And with great sensitivity, Bill has led in developing the means to do that. He's also Professor of Film and Photography at Hampshire College.

And another respondent is Mona Jimenez, who is Interim Director of the Independent Media Arts Preservation, IMAP. And Mona's an artist and I've always valued her activism. I mean, really motivating and moving the independent media field to respond to this pressing issue of preserving their own work, the individual artists' works, and how institutions can work together. She's been an inspiring example to all of us, and it's great to have her as part of this process.

And Paul Kuranko is part of the staff of the Guggenheim Museum, media arts specialist. And Paul is someone who has a fine understanding of the media arts, the medium, and artists' intention, and how to support the artist in realizing and installing the work in museum exhibitions - a quality that is very special, very rare, and someone who we rely on as a resource for all that we're doing here in the media arts.

So this is our group. And I will now ask Jon to return and talk about Jan Dibbets' A White Wall.

CASE STUDY: JAN DIBBETS

IPPOLITO: A White Wall is a work on board, twelve photographs, about six inches, wide apiece, square, in two rows, that originally ranged in a continuous gradient from white to black. The way they were created is that the artist, who is well known as a conceptual photographer, active in the seventies - this is a work from 1971 - shot a white wall with a little letter, the number "1" there, with his exposure setting of the camera set wide open, at say, two seconds. So the camera let in a lot of light and got a perfectly white photograph as a result.

Then systematically, over time, in each successive shot, he reduced the exposure time to one second, half second, quarter second, eighth of a second, sixteenth of a second and so on, each time letting in less light, thereby creating a darker image, until it went to black.

The results of this systematic approach to photography in the original version of this piece created an even gradient, a very beautifully, smoothly varying spectrum from white to black through all the grays in between. But when we brought the artist to a warehouse to show him what the work looked like now, he was aghast. It looked like this - basically, a row of nearly white photographs, followed by a row of nearly black photographs.

The contrast of the prints had increased dramatically over time. There were also discolorations due to the glue that was used to affix the photographs to board. And in essence, he said, "This is no longer my work."

Now, many artists would have given up there and said, "It's your piece now; you do whatever you want with it." But Jan Dibbets, as a conceptually minded photographer, and as someone who's been at work in the field for a long time, has a very foresighted view and a very interesting attitude toward the medium of photography. He's maintained all of the negatives for his work; so what he recommended is that we actually pry the photo prints off of this board, reprint from the original negatives, and glue the new prints, which are made on better paper and more recent standards of archivalness, onto this board, keeping the original prints, the faded contrasty ones, in a file for future reference of researchers and so on.

I don't know too many conservators who would have dared to propose ripping off part of a collage as a way to preserve it. Yet in this case, because of the artist's clear vision of what his work was meant to be, we decided that this was an appropriate action. And the artist is not a person who is completely willy-nilly about his work. He's actually very fastidious. We looked at many more works; there are many photographs where he would not possibly consider reprinting, and others where he would.

There are some things that he cares a lot about, and other things that he doesn't. But in this case, by essentially migrating the photographic prints to new, better quality paper, he's ensuring that more people will see his work for what he intends it to be; and also setting up the precedent for reprinting this work again, should it need to be reprinted in 20, 30, 50 years.

In order to do this, he has to set up a mechanism for the control of the masters and the sub-masters, that is the photographic prints and the negatives that they're printed from. And one of the things that he has done is essentially consigned his negatives in the future to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, with the presumption that a museum like the Guggenheim that may own a work of his would approach the Stedelijk in the case where it felt that a reprinting was called for, and then essentially the Stedelijk would facilitate access to the masters.

This is not a decision that he made early on, it's not something that was a big preoccupation of his early work; it's a decision that's he come to over the last 30, 40 years, based on his conclusions about what has happened to his work.

One other question that comes to mind, however, in this issue is the instability of the negatives themselves. Bacteria eat the emulsion and make effects on the negatives in their original analog film form. So what to do about that in the year 2050? And Dibbets has thought a little bit about that, too, and I think in a somewhat reluctant way has decided that digitizing the negatives and storing them on a medium like CD-ROM may be the best way of keeping them alive.

But in doing so, he's had to make some decisions; and frankly, there's some decisions that were a little bit surprising to myself and some of the conservators who worked with him. One of the decisions, for example, in a different piece, not this one, was to actually essentially airbrush parts of the original negatives, so as to counteract the changes due to this bacterial decay. There was a piece which was a systematically created series of photo panels, where the horizon tilted at something like 30 degrees each time, creating an unusual and somewhat dynamic composition over the course of a wall.

However, the whole gist here of him tilting his camera, set on exactly the same scene, in a field in the Netherlands, was that there must be a very clear kind of connection of one photograph to the next. If one photograph looked drastically different, it would lose the conceptual integrity of the piece. And in some cases, some of the negatives corresponding to certain of these views had been damaged, again by bacterial decay.

The area where there were some wispy clouds in the sky, in the otherwise bright blue sky, had been worn away, so that essentially, there were white spots in the negative. And what Dibbets authorized was that those white spots be essentially airbrushed over, using of course, a Photoshop-like digital tool, but one that changed the look of the piece when it went from the original negative into the CD-ROM version.

However, because of the way that all the pieces looked similar together, he had to then go and airbrush out the clouds in all of the panels in the sequence - meaning that he actually almost predicted a decay before it happened. And to me, this is a fairly drastic thing to do. I don't criticize him; I think it's actually quite consistent with his intent. But it fits, on my scale, fairly far down on the level of a strategy for preservation. I would call it reinterpreting the original by essentially cleaning up and presenting a different-looking photograph in the long run.

So here is an artist who has chosen both migration - that is, reprinting a photographic negative, in a way that few photographers would ever even think of doing, who are working today; and also reinterpretation, in the case of changing the negatives, the actual look of those. This is an example from one of the older and more usually conservative media, yet one that, when we start to look at examples of this in the video world, makes a certain amount of sense.

CAROL STRINGARI: Jon, can I just make a (Ippolito: Yeah, yeah, please) few comments on that? I'm afraid my perspective will often take us out of the ivory tower into the trenches. Although I'm really excited about having all of this contact with the artist, and having their will and testament, so to speak, written down, we're often asked to do things that practically are a problem. Sometimes they're impossible, and sometimes they're just so extraordinarily complicated and complex that we don't have the time or the resources to do them.

In this case, with the White Wall, we will be able to achieve the effect, but I just wanna point out a sort of simple fact, is that it's not very easy to pry those photographs off of the support without ruining the support and ruining the original photograph. In this case, he doesn't mind that the original photograph is destroyed; but in other cases, he wanted us to retain that as documentation. So that's just a comment on the actual hands-on aspect of something like this.

And the whole digital file issue, and how long will we be able to keep that, and when we upgrade that, and the preservation of that file just gives us more and more and more work and more things to think about.

CASE STUDY: BRUCE NAUMAN

IPPOLITO: Do you wanna go into the Bruce Nauman piece, then?

STRINGARI: Sure. The next work we're gonna look at is a conceptual work which belongs to the Panza Collection. We have a very large and wonderful collection of conceptual art. And this is Bruce Nauman's False Silence. It was done in 1975. And essentially, what the museum owns is a certificate and a drawing, which you're looking at here on the screen, of the physical construction of the installation, which has specific dimensions, parameters.

It's a long corridor, with two triangular rooms off of it. And it has an audio component to it. I'm trained as --I wouldn't say a classical restorer, but I am a paintings conservator- so I'm starting to deal with new media from a preservation standpoint. I think most museums don't have a conservation specialist looking at new media. I think the Tate Gallery is leading this. They actually have a conservator in house who works on this.

We, luckily, have Paul Kuranko, who is our media arts specialist. The restoration of the audiotape, which we own for this work, is played into the corridor- You can see on the left, there's a notation. Actually, the work was requested for loan. And Paul and I went over what exactly we needed to do to get this ready for loan. And of course, you think: Oh, it's a conceptual piece; it has a certificate; we send them the certificate, they figure it out and, you know, that's it.

Well, (Laughter) that wasn't it, and it turned into this very long and complicated story, which was fun, and also time consuming. So I had a long conversation with Jon Gartenberg on the phone, because this was the first time I was dealing with restoration of this type of thing, and somehow I got to an audio specialist - his name was Art Shifrin - and what we had was a quarter-inch reel to reel, which at one point had been looped.

There's a poem on this audiotape, recorded in Bruce Nauman's voice, and it repeats itself over and over again. We're gonna play a small excerpt from it for you. And I guess we can do that now, so you have some idea what the piece is.

BRUCE NAUMAN VOICE ON TAPE

STRINGARI: I think that's enough to give you some idea of what the poem is. And this is repeated consistently in the space- What you were hearing just now is a transfer onto CD from the original quarter-inch reel tape, which was very sensitively restored by Art Shifrin. And I worked together with him, and what we realized was that the original tape had been spliced, not at the beginning; and so we basically had to find the text and find out where the beginning was, and resequence it. And we also had some dropout. We had one word which had dropped out during the splice, and we were able to very carefully take that word from another sequence and put it back digitally. And so now we have a CD of a continuously running audio performance, or poem, whatever you might call it, which comes into this corridor.

Simultaneous with this, we had sent what we had, which was an old cassette -- The quarter-inch reel had been transferred to this cassette by the Panza Collection. And this cassette sounded pretty rough. I mean, you'd hear a lot of popping from the microphone. And a lot of noise. I imagine the original equipment wasn't that good that he used to tape the original tape. And we didn't take anything out in that version that you heard now.

But when it was transferred onto this cassette, it got noisier and sounded very gravelly. And we had sent that to the artist to review. In the meantime, we were trying to restore the original. We didn't hear back from the artist. We restored the original, and we had it on CD, ready to send out for loan, and we heard from the artist. And it turns out the artist had decided, number one, that the tape sounded fine. This was the nasty cassette tape that we thought was too noisy and gravelly. (Laughs) Which is ok, because we have that version, and we can use that.

In addition to that, he had rerecorded the poem for the installation, which was in Vienna, and he had rerecorded the poem with the voice of Joan LaBarbara, who is a sound artist, a very well known sound artist. So here we were, (Laughter) scrambling to get this tape restored and doing, you know, all kinds of things. Just the complexity of an institution and all the people who have to make decisions, and who you have to talk to and we finally had this tape, and we heard: Well, Bruce rerecorded it and it's gonna be Joan LaBarbara speaking in this (Laughter) corridor. So obviously, it brings up a lot of issues. It brings up, you know, how variable is variable? And was that our piece that they showed in Vienna? Of course, we have, in fact, gone back to the artist and asked him how he felt about all these things, and we have some fairly good information about what he thinks of the various Silences. And that tape by Joan LaBarbara is an integral part of the piece now, and so is the original.

And it has an open ended paradigm for how to reinstall, reinterpret the piece. So what we have to do now is go through all of those things again with him, because he said, "Well, maybe we can, at some point, do simultaneous audiotapes, with my voice in one room and her voice in another room. Or I think I don't want the sound coming from the end of the corridor; maybe we can try putting the sound in all of the spaces."

And so he's musing and thinking of all of these things, and we, as the curators, the preservation specialists of the piece, have to decide: What exactly is the piece? How will it live on? And what are the parameters, when Bruce is no longer around, to say, "Well, here, we can do it this way this time." And that is exactly what Jon's questionnaire is trying to achieve, and we're hoping that Bruce will work with us on filling out that questionnaire, because his work is very complex with these issues, and it's very interesting, and provides a lot of good examples.

Do you wanna just play a short version of the cleaned up tape, because that's another issue about the depopping and what we do when we restore tapes, and how much do we preserve of the artist's original intent? He probably made a noisy tape because that's the equipment that he had. But Bruce Nauman is also an artist who is interested in that kind of irritation, the noise within the installation. So with him, it's not so clear that he would want the tape cleaned up. And so we have a cleaned up version of the tape, which we're also gonna present to the artist to see how he reacts to that.

NAUMAN'S VOICE ON TAPE: I don't sweat. I have no odor. I inhale, don't exhale. No urine. I don't No excretions of any kind. I consume only, oxygen, all foods, any form. I see, hear. I don't speak, make no other sounds. You can't hear my heart, my footsteps. No expression, no communication of any kind. An observer, a consumer, a user only. My body absorbs all communications, emotions, sucks up heat and cold. Super-reptilian, soaking up all knowledge, compactor of all information. Not growing. I feel. Don't touch. [...]

BILL BRAND: Actually, could we just jump to track one, so we can hear the difference between the two?

STRINGARI: Yeah.

NAUMAN'S VOICE ON TAPE: - a user only, my body absorbs all communications, emotions, sucks up heat and cold. Super-reptilian, soaking up all knowledge, compactor of all information. Not growing. I feel. Don't touch. [...]

BRAND: I can hear the missing frequencies in the cleaned up version. And even though it is by some standard normalized, to my ear it lacks the presence of the "bad" one. And it's a simulation of something that never existed in the first place. And I think those are pretty important distinctions.

PAUL KURANKO: I guess the second version we heard was cleaned up to take care of some of the mic popping, and that it certainly does occur; I don't know how important that is for the actual installation of the artwork. That's what seems to be critical here, is how it sounds in the installation. But I'm assuming that's how it was originally from that recording, and that's how it sounded in that installation. Also, the artist hasn't heard any of these cleaned up versions, so...

KEN JACOBS: The speech popping is Ps and Ss? But that's the way he did it.

KURANKO: Right, exactly. So he has to hear this to see if he finds that the lack of mic popping important.

STRINGARI: Well, it's also interesting, because when he decided to do it over, he even did it with a different voice. So we probably, as preservationists, would tend to install the not cleaned up version, because that's historical information, and we always feel that that's important to retain. But I think what we're trying to do is pin down the artists and look at what they actually intended when they first created the piece, and how much of it just had to do with what was there when they created the piece.

We had another Nauman piece where we had to put the sound of the film projector onto the video track, which he asked us to do. So, it might be very important that the popping of the microphone stays on that tape. But these are all questions we have to go back to the artists with.

KURANKO: Originally, we just got a cassette and a quarter inch reel to reel, and we didn't really want to play them until we were ready to make dubs of them. So that was part of the confusion, too, in initially just trying to get going so we can get this loan out and we didn't know exactly what the quality was for these different tapes that we had, these different versions.

So originally, we just made a copy of the cassette, 'cause we figured out that that was probably the exhibition copy. So that would be safe to play and make a CD of, and send that to the artist for approval. But we hadn't heard the quarter inch at that point, so we didn't know in what shape it was in.

STRINGARI: Right. That's a very good point. This is also part of what we're trying to do, is establish some sort of institutional program, where we look at all this media, and we look at it every five years, or we decide how we're going to upgrade it, at least for the time being. There may be more technologies, more things to think about; however, at the moment, we couldn't play the tape because we didn't know if it had a tremendous amount of oxidation, or it needed to be cleaned. And you can't rewind a tape like that, so we had to bring it to somebody who was an audiotape specialist for the dubbing, because if it needed to be cleaned, they had to do it right then and there.

STEPHEN VITIELLO: Something I could say, too, is that half of the work we all do in preservation, restoration has to do with the research in finding the right people to work with, even getting that first - what Art Shifrin would call - a clean, straight copy. He's one of the few people I've ever met in twelve, thirteen years of being involved with artists, who could get clean copy that sounds that good. And he has a Web site where he poses some interesting suggestion, which is that he believes that an analog and a digital copy should be always made of any audio work, and that any kind of so-called corrections or improvements or enhancements or noise reduction should be done to the digital copy. And that might be what we use for exhibition; but that for pure archival sake, it's that analog copy that he feels is most important to retain.

MONA JIMENEZ: Yeah, I think that actually, through TechArcheology, which was the symposium last year on the preservation of technology-based installation art, one of the things that became clear was that in the process of a work being exhibited, the transfers are made to media, really because it's more durable for the length of the exhibition.

So if you were doing a video projection, putting it on DVD, that DVD is gonna be more durable playing all day long, many, many days - or same thing with a CD and that institutions tend to have that machinery available, that equipment available. So actually, in the process of doing an exhibition, there are some interesting interactions between the exhibition needs of the institution and the preservation mandate of the institution. And also, the way that that work evolves and is shown in different venues.

It's interesting to see how these are getting transferred to digital formats, and that will eventually become the work. Which is a little frightening, when you lose frequencies.

JON GARTENBERG: I think this is also an issue very directly affecting film preservation: the technology at the point at which the object is created, and then years later when it's preserved, how much to "clean up" the work. I remember when I worked at the Museum of Modern Art, there was a preservation of the Raoul Walsh film, The Big Trail, which was one of the early sound westerns. And this issue came up very directly, in terms of the technology that was used to record the sound at that point. And when the film was represerved, how much should that track be "cleaned up."

Another interesting example was when I was working with Bill Brand in the Estate Project on preserving the films of Jack Waters. One of the very conscious decisions to make was films that had serrated splices in it; it had all sorts of physical defects. To preserve the defects, rather than to clean them up with new splices. Because it's very important for us to understand the artist's intent. Waters used very limited resources, whether it was three quarter inch or sixteen millimeter camera original.

And the idea was, in the preservation, how to preserve the sense of what he was creating. So these issues that apply to audio are also very relevant, and have been for a long time, with film.

HANHARDT: A number of important issues have been raised around this work. Carol brought up the point of the Panza Collection here at the Guggenheim Museum, which is a large collection of conceptual work. And the issues of conceptual work as a plan, and an exhibition history, and what it may have sounded or been, I think is also interesting to bring into this. And Carol's point about the messiness, to this whole effort. Jon has created this very fine template, but these individual stories that it's leading to answering, I think are very important. That we are not trying to reduce the complexity, but to identify the complexity of these challenges we have with individual works.

And also, Carol's point about time consuming process. I mean, this takes a lot of institutional time and resource. And you have to have it. There's pressure, as Paul indicated and as Carol has spoken to, of getting work from the collection out- in the new kind of renewed interest in this history, and the need to have the time to do it fully. And the ability to bring in resources from outside, to both have a staff and to supplement it, I think is also very important, because there's such a variety of challenges that we face in this work, and being able to call upon Jon Gartenberg to identify another person, and create a network of resources. And that can only happen when there's a willingness on the conservation side of the institution to do that, and this is, with my long experience in museums, one of the ultimate initial challenges. And that was immediately answered by Carol.

And I'd like next to turn things over to Jon Gartenberg and his conversation with Ken Jacobs.

CASE STUDY: KEN JACOBS (REPRODUCIBLE ASPECT)

GARTENBERG: Thank you, John Hanhardt. Ken, the first thing I just wanted to say is it's been a real privilege and challenge working with you over the last few months, for myself, to try to more fully appreciate the experience of your work. And I'd just like to preface everything that we talk about now by saying that as a human being, I am sure I'm experiencing that I'm moving through three dimensional space; and as a film spectator, I had a clear understanding that, since I was age five, seeing my first Charlie Chaplin film, that films were two dimensions with the illusion of the third.

But I have this very unsettled feeling that you're projecting me into another dimension, and I'm not quite sure where I stand in that dimension right now.

KEN JACOBS: The queasy dimension.

GARTENBERG: Yes, the queasy dimension. (Laughter) Your Nervous System performances are so paradigmatic of two aspects of this issue of your creation and the preservation. One is the physical materiality of what you're working with, and the other is the performative.

So these are the questions that I asked myself: What does it mean to preserve a Ken Jacobs film? What is one preserving? Is one preserving the physical film stock? The performative aspects of the projection? The external projection of your inner nervous system sensibility? The spectator's own appropriated experience of your spatial and temporal manipulations?

So to me, already my experience of seeing this film has become a much more complex issue, having to do also with the audience and the creation. I don't know if you have any comment about that.

JACOBS: I know I have to forget those questions very quickly, otherwise I'll be paralyzed.

GARTENBERG: Ok. (Laughter) We'll move on, then, to the specific film, to break it down. We'll start with Tom Tom the Pipers Son, and I think we'd just like to show a minute or two of this.

[Film begins]

JACOBS: This is the original film, from 1905. And I had read about these paper prints at the Library of Congress. And when I began teaching, and had a budget to draw on at St. John's University, I was just able to order films, and I ordered these films to look at. I could indulge myself with this school budget. And when I saw this one, I was just amazed.

First of all, I didn't know the original "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son" limerick - is that what it's called, a limerick? And I never saw the pig. I never understood why they were doing all this. (Laughter) And I illegally - and now you're all part of this illegal operation - made a print from it. So now I can never properly criticize anybody else for stealing my stuff. And began looking at this print, and I had a projector that I could play. Ah, there's the pig, see? Wow, that's the pig.

But I'd be looking all over the screen; I'd be seeing all these other things. And I began showing it to friends, showing my print to, you know, friends coming over, and I was playing it on this projector that allowed me to go back and forth, and to slow down and to stop. And at some point I began thinking along the lines of filming this thing. And at some point, after doing this for some friends, my painter friend John Koos came over and said, "You should film this." And I said, "Yeah, I've been thinking about it." And he said, "Do it!" And I began doing it. And still not knowing anything about the story or the pig, and just picking up on all these fantastic things that are happening - including the scratchiness, including the deterioration of film over time.

Now, look at this amazing thing over here, where the camera just looks at these real ducks and chickens in a painted set. It's so incredible. And the camera lingers. By the way, this is traveling at 24 frames per second, and originally, it would be shown around 16 frames. So it's much speeded up; and still it's on screen a long time before the humans come in; we're are supposed to be really just following this, you know, the adventures of... Ah, that bird goes up, and the people come in. See, the bird went up along that diagonal stick, and the people rush in. Why are they doing this?

And then everything is bouncing, so you know, you're really getting the sense of film and bad registration, and look at this incredible, crazy thing! So... Why are they pointing at this poor kid's butt? Well, ok, that was the original. You didn't see anything that I did. (Laughs)

GARTENBERG: Well, in relationship to this from your respective at the Museum of the Moving Image in '89, I think there's something wonderful that you said. The words you said which popped out at me is, "This is a love of the existence of things in their various states of corporeality; that because something is porous, can condense or vaporize. It isn't something solid, as you believe it is, but it's more dimensions of existence. It's a love of the whole process, a love of the whole stretch from immaterial to material." And so that really struck home with me.

JACOBS: In a certain way, I guess I'm trying to pin down transiency. Transiency is the big drama for me. This moment. Everything coming and going. But to become blithe about transiency and think that everything is there, and now we can make up a story and follow the story that's this strife between people - which is usually the, you know, the content of dramatic narrative... What for? It seems to have missed the main story, which is things coming into existence and immediately going out of existence. That's what's happening.

GARTENBERG: You talked a little bit about Tom, Tom, finding the paper print. Could you talk a little about Bitemporal Vision, about the source footage that you used?

JACOBS: Well, I've worked with this film. In 1969, and then again in 1971, when I revised it, that's when I did Tom Tom the Pipers Son. And the title of my work, which seems like the title of the original work, isn't, 'cause the original work, made in 1905, is patterned after this little - what do you call it? The little rhyme. So that film in 1905 is an embodiment of the little rhyme. And the subject matter of my film is a film made in 1905, called Tom, Tom the Piper's Son.

So my Tom Tom the Pipers Son title is different from the 1905. Ok? It's talking about two different things. (Gartenberg: Right) Ok.

And seeing time manifest, and that whole idea that this thing was a paper print, never made to be projected, just made to keep a patent on the original film. And then somebody, sometime in the fifties, I think it is, resurrects it as a film, refilms the paper. So it could be projected. And so the lost and foundness of this is already very, very interesting. And then the lost and foundness within each image is fascinating to me. The middle tones have gone. You know, so much has fallen away. There's all this visible, quotes, "decay," and this patina of time. And (SIGHS) it touches me. And it's beautiful. The idea of trying to penetrate this phenomenon of cinema to see these people running around the stage so clearly, persons wearing costumes, having a kind of party in 1905... And the struggle of those moments in 1905 to come through this passage, which also offers resistance, the cinematic resistance or deterioration, film deterioration, is all the drama I would ever want. I mean, phwha! It's very powerful.

GARTENBERG: Well, I think it's really incredible because we're talking here about the preservation of these works, and already in the embodiment of it, and your whole enterprise is about the recognition of the ephemerality of it. And that's also what makes it so fascinating for this. Could you talk a little about Bitemporal Vision, in terms of the footage that you used from Phil Solomon?

JACOBS: In this case, I used a contemporary film about Old Man River, just keeps going along, right? So the ocean is all the eternal quality one might need. Ok, but most often, I've been drawn back to earlier film. Like I said, the early Nervous System works worked with the same material. That fascination with Tom, Tom the Piper's Son remained, and I kept doing other things with it after years after my film was made.

But I wanted to work with natural phenomena. So I began thinking of Bitemporal Vision, you know bitemporal, first of all, meaning two times. To be in two times at one time is incredible. So this is the only work that actually makes use of this filter [a filter the audience holds over one eye], which enables us to be in two times at one time. Because the filter, as I explained in my notes last night, delays the message of light to the brain, so one eye is seeing the light that's there, and one eye is sending the message of the light that was there.

This is an uncanny thing. Uncanny. Bitemporal Vision. And as I say, I wanted to work with natural phenomena. Bitemporal vision, the sea, bitemporal vision, the flames, bitemporal vision, the earth. I began dealing with these basic materials.

GARTENBERG: I think another incredible statement you made that jumped out at me from the retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image in 1989 was a quote from you, "I've never exhausted the time bounded by two frames." How long was Bitemporal Vision when you showed it in its complete version? And then how many frames, or how many seconds of footage is actually used in this experience?

JACOBS: Well, the whole work is 60 minutes long. If you showed it normally something like 20 seconds. And last night's ten minute excerpt was probably three seconds.

GARTENBERG: So that's three seconds of film, which is what? About 70 frames?

JACOBS: Yeah, but you know, I was galloping through it.

GARTENBERG: Uh-huh. (Laughter)

But to me, it's just really incredible. It's film, which is the still photographs which move through, with the illusion of three dimensions; and here you're going back to these frames and it's hard for me to articulate this, but it's like you're creating a whole new experience of this reality that we're used to seeing, but the way that you find these worlds and universes in these images, to me is just really astounding. It's like this never ending search.

JACOBS: It's there, you know? It draws me.

GARTENBERG: The last thing I wanted to get to about the physical preservation of the materiality of film is that you've also recently approved a PAL version of this Tom Tom the Pipers Son being released in video by Pip Chodorov in Europe. And you've also created a new digital work, a new work in digital format, Flo Rounds a Corner, which we'll see a brief excerpt of this afternoon. So I just wanted to ask you about your reflections about working in film, video, digital, and what your thoughts are about those media for presentation and preservation.

JACOBS: Well, the idea of putting Tom Tom the Pipers Son on tape never occurred to me. It's totally unkosher. This is all about film, you know? How could it be video? And Pip, you know, came over from Paris and began working on me. And all right, you know, I finally said, "We'll try it, we'll look at it." Ok, I wasn't gonna commit to it. And it looked good. I really liked it on the screen. It really took some reshaping of my receptivity what to expect.

But there it was, I really felt. And he did a very, very good job. And I became accepting of it. I did think that it was strange to watch it in complete silence. That was spooky. And so I added sound to the videotaped version. At the beginning and the end of the work, you hear the projector. And at the end of the work, before the film image comes on, you hear the projector grinding. You know, (Makes a noise) And then - click - the light appears.

This film ends with the instructions to the projectionist of all these works: Let the film go completely through the projector, and let just the pure, uninterrupted light of the projector be on the screen for 20 seconds more. And then the light goes out, and I want the audience to hear the projector still going, with the film flapping on the reel. You know, flop, flop, flop, flop.

And then it goes off. (Makes a noise) Stops, and then the audience waits in the dark and then lights come on. So this thing was followed, to some extent, with the tape. But I actually had to add-go back to making this a sound film of a silent work by adding the projector sound at the end, and the film going through- You can hear the film going through the gate. And it finally comes out. The claws are no longer engaging the sprocket holes. And you just see white. In this case, the white light of this light bulb you're looking at, the video screen. And then finally it stops.

GARTENBERG: But that seems rather extraordinary, because it's as though you want us not to forget the environment, the projection environment.

JACOBS: Yes, I wanted people to be reminded of the machine. That video, it's strange. You know, it's really other worldly. And it departs from, you might say, a kind of physical source. Especially with the new screens that are coming about. I imagine at some point, we're just gonna have, like, floating rectangles of light, or floating everything. It's just becoming immaterial, right?

And there is something of a non-groundedness in physical substance for me about video. It's very, very engaging, it's very attractive; but I love the machines. And understand, the machines are being taken away, the motor's being taken away. (Sighs) Of course, we have a restaurant exhaust motor on our room; we're in the top floor. And I would like that to be taken away, (Laughter) ok. (Laughs) I'd rather have a video display up there than this motor working.

But I feel that physical things are really being taken away. And it's gonna be a very strange planet. You don't have to go to Mars; the planet you're on just changes under your feet, and it becomes other. You find yourself an alien.

GARTENBERG: The very last question just had to do, then, with your work, the issue about creating in digital form with Flo Rounds a Corner. Can you talk about that at all, in terms of the move from film to video but analog to digital?

JACOBS: Well, analog never engaged me. 'Cause you have to be determined to make just transient works. That's what it is; you're making something that's just gonna go. And it's kind of sloppy, it seemed to me. And I actually, oh, have a penchant for precision, so digital excites me. And the possibilities of recreating what I've done with the Nervous System physically in performance.

Flo and I work in these themes, and they become like children to us. We really love all these pieces. And they're transient. You don't do them in a while, you miss them. They take on a life of their own. We owe it to the pieces to preserve them as best we can.

And then also, I want to investigate what the computer makes possible. And Flo Rounds a Corner is a first venture that way, working with digital means.

GARTENBERG: We'll see more of that this afternoon.

JACOBS: We're seeing a two minute preview of a six minute work, because the whole work is going to play tomorrow at the Walter Reade Theater, and I promised them firsties. (Laughter)

GARTENBERG: And we'll talk about that more this afternoon in the performative aspect of your piece.

HANHARDT: Well, I'd just like to ask Ken, if you could speak a bit to the experience last evening, and the fact that in your performance, projected performance with the film, we videotaped it. And we then showed it.

Maybe while we're talking about it, we could actually just project it for a moment.

Just run it. Maybe you could just say something over it. I'd just like to hear your reaction considered, after sleeping over it, (Laughter) you know?

[Video begins]

JACOBS: Who slept?

We're watching some of my what I call my tuning up, the setting up. But here, we've got these two frames being held in the projector. How do I feel about it?

BRAND: Yeah, the difference-

JACOBS: I'm pained. (Laughs) It seems very course to me.

BRAND: What's removed in the video image?

JACOBS: Acuity. Detail. I'm crazy about detail. And my details are all mooshed over here. They don't seem... They seem lost in these kind of overall shapes. You don't see these little tiny dots struggling for their momentary existence. And so for me, much of the drama is gone.

BRAND: But I thought that a lot of the spatial effects, to my surprise, were reconstituted especially with the filter.

JACOBS: Yeah, the spatial effects, I saw that too. But what's interesting as well is that new ones were coming in. New things I hadn't seen, special effects I hadn't seen in the live film performance.

So I didn't know whether that was happening, that I was seeing different kinds of spatial events take place in the video projection, or it was just introducing other things.

BRAND: Well, the video recording increased the contrast, so you lost a lot of your middle values; but the other thing that happens is that the black levels are much higher in the video. You don't have as deep a black. And that, actually, I thought increased my ability to see some of the spatial effects.

JACOBS: Hm. Hm.

BRAND: Surprise.

JACOBS: Yeah.

BRAND: One thing I wonder, too that we're not thinking about, is the way that film is transmitted to screen, versus the way that video is transmitted; that when you're projecting film, you're either consciously or not conscious, or subconsciously aware of light moving across a theater; and here with video, like if it's being rear screen projected, but it's a very different transmission of light.

JACOBS: Oh, definitely. Could I just say one thing? as I watch this, I'm very, very, very frustrated, 'cause I see all the things I should be doing. And my hands are reaching - my poor little hands don't know that the machine is not at hand. I'm used to seeing this when they have the opportunity to actually do something about things. So for me, it's very frustrating to see these moments when these connections are not taking place as I want them.

BRAND: Can I pose a hypothetical? What I think we're seeing here is a fairly crude but not bad recording of a live performance.

JACOBS: Yeah.

BRAND: Suppose I could make for you a system where we took your film frames and we fed them through a set of da Vinci video colorizing-very highly sophisticated film to video transfer machines that-allowed a kind of simulation of the shutter effect, so that you could get onto video the full range of values that you're missing here, and we could simulate a kind of performance. And you could play this thing much the way that you play your performance, although it would be slightly different machines.

Of course; it would no longer be a recording of a live performance. Would that be something you'd be interested in, or something that would be an anathema to you?

JACOBS: Well, let me answer you this way: Is this hypothetical, or will you actually sign a contract with me? (Laughter)

BRAND: Ask Jon Ippolito at the other end. (Laughter) After the conference.

JACOBS: Yeah, I'm up for that.

IPPOLITO: Ok, we can shut that off, please. Switch to the Web site.

HANHARDT: Before we conclude this, this really raised a complex set of issues that Jon Gartenberg has identified with Ken's work, and the apparatus of the cinema, and the changes in it from the qualities of what nitrate film were, and the acetate prints, and the notion of the projector, and the very instrument that records the film, these are such a tactile experience, in terms of how we receive it in the theater or as film in an installation. The notion of transferring a film to video to project with sprocket hole sound effects, and this whole attempt to recreate something.

This is something that affects the entire history of the moving image of cinema. I mean, it goes right back to the beginning and, as Jon Gartenberg noted, with the classical Hollywood Cinema. Whether it's Technicolor or the sound on a Raoul Walsh film, it really touches every aspect of this medium as an art form, within the classical cinema, within the independent film, the art of film.

So it's a huge challenge that we face. And the beauty of Ken's being initially part of this process is that his work is so much about that very phenomenon, the very meta-cinematic.

What about migrating film stock-eight millimeter being transferred to sixteen?

BRAND: Well, Tom Tom should really be preserved as a paper print, of course. (Laughter)

GARTENBERG: But the interesting thing about the paper prints was that those were, in the fifties, recorded on sixteen millimeter; and they've gone back now and represerved them in 35 millimeter. So now you have all of these levels of the object Ken received, how that original object, was created, as you said, for copyright deposit, not for projection. What is extraordinary about Ken's work, is what is it that you're preserving? The physical element? Especially when he's working with these found materials?

Because those have gone through so many transmutations and migrations or duplications over time.

JACOBS: I must say that I like the audience to know that somebody's doing this. And so I always prefer to be inside the room with people. I want them to hear the sound of the machines. I wanna emphasize- it comes from CÈzanne. It comes from Abstract Expressionism; it comes from people showing the canvas.

This is really an interesting problem, though. Because I'm coming up at a time when there's an urge to be true to the medium. Ok? What is the medium? Figure out the medium. Do something radical - meaning get to the source character of the medium. And you're talking about moving it then into another medium. It's kind of painful.

The work within its medium, if it's done right, is an absolute formula. Artists vary in intelligence. They vary very much in intelligence, as I think you've already discovered. But whether they're intelligent or not so, they tend to be, for me, kind of idiot savants. The idiot savant can do, you know, something numerical, that you can't understand; that can work with numerical factors.

I think that the artist very often works with sensory factors that you can't even name. And the artist gets the right answer, the same way the idiot savant gets the right answer. And there's a right answer within a very particular medium. And when you change the medium, it makes it nonsense. And I'm very concerned about that.

I want things preserved. But preserved how? As a deception of the real thing? Which then becomes the thing that takes over and replaces the real thing. I really got things out of those Vermeer prints. I mentioned last night, you know, loving Vermeer in print, and then seeing an actual Vermeer and seeing, the juggling of nuances that was going on in that painting that never could possibly get across in the reproductions.

I'm grateful for the reproductions; and at the same time, I wasn't doing right by Vermeer.

JIMENEZ: Can I just ask one question, Ken? 'Cause I don't know if things might've changed since we did the workshop. But two critical questions are: Do you see anyone else doing the film performance after you're not able to, one? And two, do you see the PAL version of Tom Tom the Pipers Son as being the same work, or a different version of the performance work.

JACOBS: Well, that the crux of it, isn't it? I stand by it.

GARTENBERG: You've answered my original question, when you emphasized the sensory experience, that preserving your work is not just the physicality of the film, and it's not just the projection environment, which is why I was posing those questions earlier on. I think what you're talking about is communicating in that work, however it is shown or preserved, the sensory experience of what you're creating, and also the audience's act of sensory experience.

And when you add that level to this, it puts it into this whole other realm, which is why I was talking about another dimension, because it's really about something, feeling, emotive, experiential.

JACOBS: Looking at the tape, I have a feeling that what enters into this is this thing called compromise. I'm afraid it's like everything else in life, our daily experience of compromise of living with gravity.

STEVEN VITIELLO: Can I make a transition to Nam June? I was staring at this quote from an article he wrote in 1980, called Random Access Information, in which he said, "In the future, the only artwork that will survive will have no gravity at all."

HANHARDT: As we transition to video, I just have to make one other comment about this discussion we just had, and that is, thinking about Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho, which is the Hitchcock film on video, projected two frames per second. But the notion of the capturing of a film on video and the other experience of presenting it...in contemporary art practice, these issues are continuing to play out. The relationship of video to film.

CASE STUDY: NAM JUNE PAIK

But we're now going to talk about Nam June Paik's TV Garden. In 1982, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where I was curator of film and video, I organized a Nam June Paik retrospective, and last year curated The Worlds of Nam June Paik, here at the Guggenheim. So I've been privileged to know this artist for many years. And in organizing these exhibitions, became very close to him, conversant with his thinking, ideas, and ways of working.

And I cite this because we've been talking about the artist. But it's also, throughout this history, curators, people who have been identified with or worked with a number of artists, who have had first-hand experience with realizing it and seeing it installed. So how do we preserve those experiences in a way to inform future exhibition and presentation of work?

At the Whitney Museum, I brought into the permanent collection Magnet TV and V-yramid, among other works of Nam June's. And here, I'm very pleased that we have brought TV Garden into the collection, along with TV Crown and Random Access. And this is part of an ongoing and continuing commitment to this artist's work.

Now, we're going to focus on TV Garden, and certainly, one of the great works of this artist, a seminal piece that conveys his transformation of video and commentary and poetic rethinking of the very notion, the idea of television, as these monitors are located in this garden of plants. Jon, if we could go through a sequence of images of past installation of the work.

This is the installation of TV Garden on the ramps of the Guggenheim, a Frank Lloyd Wright space, in the context of The Worlds of Nam June Paik. The installation was developed with the artist, Blair Thurman, the artist's studio worked with him to create this installation that unlike previous ones, was installed all the ramps, a space that one walked through.

And here we see the distinctive elements of the piece: The monitors, which are showing Global Groove, often presented as one channel or two channels - we'll talk about this - and these plants that surround the piece. We have a series of additional images of this work. This is a good one. This is in 1982 at the Whitney. And I think this is a contrast we could make of these two instances. In this case, it was presented in a rectangular gallery space, where upon entering the room, one could walk up a ramp and around this piece, and looking down into, from the point of view of being on the ramp, into the garden; where the space was filled with these plants and, in this case, about 40 televisions of different sizes and makes on their backsides, distributed among the plants, in a semi-darkened environment. So the glow of the light from the monitors was creating this light around each of the pieces, in a sense illuminating the garden itself.

So these are two installations, meaning dimensions variable, if you will. I mean, the space. I would like to go through the vulnerable aspects of this work, its source of medium, of video; its mechanisms, the monitors, which the tapes have seen; and the variability of the installation, in terms of the site. And this is a conversation with Steve Vitiello, who as I mentioned in my introduction, has worked a lot with Nam June. And Steve and I have worked together for many years on issues of preservation and issues around Paik's work in audio and in video.

So Stephen, let's begin with the issue of video source. The original videotape is Global Groove, a tape that was produced 1973. And the best way to conserve the source material, do you have some thoughts?

VITIELLO: Luckily, in this case, the tape has actually been taken care of, and Nam June produced Global Groove at the TV Lab at WNET, which is Channel 13 here in New York. And I guess it was about the early nineties, he told me that I had to contact WNET and get a copy of the original two-inch master. And we called them, and they said they never heard of it; they never heard of him. And- (Laughter)

We started to try to find ways to-

HANHARDT: Television memory.

VITIELLO: Exactly. To track down the information. And he told me that if I looked on the old three-quarter-inch screening copies, I'd find some numbers; I should copy down those numbers, call up WNET again, give them that number. So I found one very, very deteriorated three quarter inch box with this orange and green peeling label, and I said, "Do you have-" something, you know, V6357? And they said, "Oh, yeah, Global Groove, Nam June Paik. We have four two-inch copies." (Laughter) So-

HANHARDT: The artists know.

VITIELLO: Exactly. He always knows. So we had the tapes brought into Electronic Arts Intermix, and I talked to John Godfrey, who was the codirector of the tape, who was then running a post production facility in Connecticut, and had some of the original two-inch machines - I think even some of the same from WNET, but if not, very similar.

Brought those tapes out to him, and we had the tapes, the two-inch tapes, with a kind of supervised transfer, put to Beta SP, and - at that time it was D2 - and copies of both put into archival storage, where it was temperature and humidity controlled, with the purchase by the Guggenheim, I would say, to get sort of equal copies to what are in the holdings of Electronic Arts Intermix, the best possible form that we know of.

HANHARDT: So we should have the sub-masters?

VITIELLO: The two-inch really belongs to either Nam June or WNET; but you would get the first generation copy off of that two-inch, which would be probably a digital copy from the D2, and either an analog copy from the Beta, or analog copy from the two-inch.

KURANKO: I think we've been trying with these collections, as works that come on an analog format, we try and keep that original format, if it's still available, and then create subsequent masters in digital, as well.

VITIELLO: In Nam June's case, I think towards convenience and towards the best quality copy, at this point. He would either tell you laserdisc or DVD. Laserdisc is becoming obsolete, but some people-I think Paul-might even argue in certain ways, it's more reliable than DVD.

HANHARDT: Does it change it, in bringing it up to date? We're here focusing on the moving image, the tape element of the installation.

IPPOLITO: I think this is a good contrast with Ken's work. Ken was very conscious, as was Bill, of the changes in tone and detail of the video version of the film performance we saw last night, yet in my conversations with Nam June in his studio, given that his visual style is so different, with rapid-fire editing and bright colors, where minute changes in detail maybe aren't as important as the way the piece is edited, he hasn't been as worried about migration and the kind of compression and changes that happen when you go to DVD from tape and so forth for exhibition copies.

So again, had there been gathering of industry experts, they might have recommended one option or the other. And I think we have a case where we see two artists who clearly have different investments, and might choose different paths.

KURANKO: Although if I remember the Paik studio was pretty adamant about wanting to see DVD dubs made of a couple of the artworks - I think the first one we did was Global Groove - 'Cause they weren't really familiar with what, like, MPEG-2 encoding would look like for this work.

And in fact, I remember the studio -Jon Hoffman and Blair Thurman- saying how pleased they were with some of the earlier footage that you put together, the black and white footage. They were really concerned about how that would look, both in DVD, as well as shown on a large plasma screen for single-channel works, so something very different from what he originally conceived of, and they seemed to be quite pleased with it. I was surprised as well.

VITIELLO: Yeah. Just one other footnote, as we're looking at these photographs, to keep in mind is that as Global Groove is played in the installation, Nam June likes it to be played very loud. And so something that we haven't mentioned yet is that it's also an audiovisual piece, in that, in many case, the sound is as present as the image.

HANHARDT: That's a very important point. Another issue I want to raise is the number of channels. Now, when this was presented at the Whitney and here, it was a single channel, Global Groove. There have been instances of its installation with two channels. When it was done in New Zealand, was that?

VITIELLO: That's right.

HANHARDT: Beginning to answer that question, I think it has a lot to do with - and this is Nam June's always expressed thinking - is the impact of the work. Stephen has mentioned sound. The sound has to be present in Global Groove. I mean, it's a celebration of a future of television growing and spreading in a garden, surrounded by plants. So nature and technology and spread and growth are all suffused in the piece. And what makes it such a seminal work, and why I very much wanted to try to get this work into the collection of the Whitey, and I was thrilled to be able to bring it here, if that it's such a key work to the ideas that have shaped Nam June's response to the medium, and have been so seminal and influential to other artists who are thinking about the medium as an art form.

That said then, if the space is larger, other channels can be added. And I think that, again, for the multiplicity of points of view and the impact that would be created.

VITIELLO: I had the experience in '96. I introduced Nam June to two curators from Brazil, who were asking him to do his first kind of major exhibition in Brazil. And he said that they could do TV Garden, TV Fish, and TV Buddha, and basically explained to me that those are all pieces that could be done working, really, with him from a distance, where they could get their own plants, their own fish, their own Brazilian Buddha.

And when I started trying to pin him down on how to construct these pieces, his favorite thing is, "Use your judgment." But there's always (Laughter) something very fixed, and there's something variable with these pieces. And with TV Garden, he told me that they had to have at least 30 TVs of variable sizes, otherwise they couldn't do it. If they had 30, then it had to be Global Groove. If they could get 40, then to get an additional tape from his studio called Oriental Paintings, which I don't think he had used; in other cases, in New Zealand, it was a different piece.

And so there's always that flexibility. But there's some very specific thing. I mean, it's like a score in a performance; there're some things that have to be done, and then there's room for improvisation. And very often, he lets some of us be the improvisers, as long as we keep that basic point.

HANHARDT: There's something that Stephen's identifying here with an artist who was coming out of Fluxus. And we have to look at the nature of his aesthetic and how it developed, and how he created, and how he viewed the material. And when I was recently talking to him about this work coming into the collection, it was important that we were projecting additional tapes coming into our holdings to use with TV Garden - in addition to drawings and plans that are related to it; and interview with Nam June that would be part of the resource that we would have available to future generations to hear that experience of how he talks about it.

These are very pressing issues with the artist. Some of you may know he suffered a stroke a number of years ago, and is physically impaired, certainly not intellectually; he's very engaged in work. But he gets tired and it's an effort, and he's a different person, in terms of not being physically mobile. And so this is another issue of urgency, that we bring these experiences, these stories, into the memory of the piece, and part of the narrative of it.

But as we go through it, I wanna look at the equipment issue and the actual installation, as we sort of refine our approach to the piece. One issue that has been raised is about the television sets themselves. What should we have? And how should we look to the future, with the changes in the technology? In speaking to Nam June about it, "Maximum decontrol" were his words. In terms that he really saw it as a work, as an idea that could change with technology, with the threat of no longer having cathode ray tubes, television sets as we know them.

So I think the question that Jon raised last night in his remarks about the embedding of the flat screen inside the television- What do you think of that, as we begin to unpack this issue of the television casings to emulate the original look?

VITIELLO: I love quotes from Nam June. (Laughter) This is from 1974, where he says, "I don't like to have complete control; that would be boring. What I learned from John Cage is to enjoy every second by decontrol. Surprises and disappointments are built in the machine."

I really see TV Garden as a conceptual work. And I don't know that he ever wrote it down, but there's basically an implied score, which is: Place Global Groove on multiple monitors in a room; monitors are facing up and there's plants surrounding, and there's sound.

And that is what's key. Beyond that, I would say that he would be fairly flexible, that flat screens inside casings would be fine; that it doesn't have to be the same casings that were installed at the Everson Museum in 1974, or the same ones that were at the Whitney in '82. I do think it's important especially with the Guggenheim acquiring this piece that you're tracing the history of the work, and have it available to be presented; that if people come in, they understand that it's a work originally conceived of in 1974. It has a history of different ways of being presented.

HANHARDT: I think that's a complex set of points that you've raised here. As a conceptual work, I think you're right, that it can respond to the changes in the media. At the same time, I think there's also flexibility in terms of it being installed in different places, and what televisions look like in the different places. So there's that kind of flexibility. But it's important to have historical examples of the variety of monitors, televisions, so that for example, if we are presenting this now, we could use televisions as we have them now, or as they may be in the future, in future installations.

But let's say what if we were doing an historical show, exhibition? What if we were doing a show of video from 1970 to 1975, 1980, or whatever. Where we would want to perhaps represent it as it was seen then. Then I think it would be very important to have as a resource those televisions.

So I think the storage of television casings is something that we should pursue. At the same time, when we do a show in the contemporary way, having photographic documentation of other installations shows the variety of ways, as Jon is taking us through here, that the work has been installed.

So choice of monitor brands, types, varying according to availability and locale, where the exhibition's taking place, is part of, I think, the flexibility and dimensionality of the work. And that also extends to the issue of installation. Is there an ideal space? Is there only one way that it should be shown? And from my experience, I think there has to be this flexibility, and maybe from your experience with the work.

VITIELLO: I was thinking about a sort of negative thing that I've experienced, because Nam June allows this flexibility: there have been a lot of people - especially when it's outside of the country, where he can't be-where I've found that people wanna take advantage of that. So that when we were setting up a different piece in Brazil, I said that there had to be black pedestals. And they wrote and said, "Ok, everything's ready, and we got these beautiful white pedestals." (Laughter)

And I said, "But no-" And they thought: Well, but he allowed us to get Brazilian plants, and to leave this up to judgment, so we have very good white pedestals. And then I had to call on Jon Huffman of Nam June's studio to call and say, as a closer representative, basically, "The show is cancelled unless you follow these instructions."

I do think that the piece has been flexible, and will probably continue to be flexible, and that he'd be very happy with it. But just as long as we're always aware of those key points that he set in stone.

HANHARDT: We're also talking about a work that can expand to the dimensions of a space, if it were to be in a larger room. The conditions are important. We want to maintain the work as we've experienced it and as we know the artist has created it and speaks to it. And that is part of what we will do as we loan this work and as we show it in our own institution, and to maintain it, and also to have the records so the registrarial office has all this material easily available to do that.

Now, the issue of the plants themselves, and what plants should be used, green plants.

VITIELLO: Office plants.

HANHARDT: Office plants. This is Nam June's term for it. This kind of generic, international style of office plant. (Laughter) And he's absolutely right; that's exactly what it should be, those green fronds that you see when you go into an office, that is the green that creates the environment. And responding to that, with some differences that happen with that in different locations and different climates, so to speak.

JACOBS: So you can have this enormous gamut of different kinds of artists, that are very allowing and really want to collaborate with you, and others that are going to be very strict, sticklers, and be impossible to work with. And I guess the solution is they die off, and then you're free. (Laughter)

IPPOLITO: No, that's not the solution. (Laughter)

HANHARDT: Thank you, Jon, that's not the solution. Everything that we're saying about the works in terms of whether it's the mulch or the earth that goes at the base of the installation, the type of plants, the nature of the monitors - all this, we're working very hard with the artist to describe and to represent all the versions that he has done and all of the thoughts and conditions and issues that informed it for him when he first made it, and have continued to inform it as he's recreated it.

So it's absolutely within the dimensions, that are fairly precise, of variability to realize the work. And I wanna stress that it comes from these conversations that we have directly with the artist and also the artist's studio, the people who have worked with him over time, and the kind of quality of appreciation and analysis that we have with Stephen, and his close association with the artist in having worked to restore the works.

JACOBS: Does Paik actually want the old TV sets?

HANHARDT: In the...?

JACOBS: In the garden.

HANHARDT: We have used televisions of the time to install it. Those are televisions from 1982. And we used more recent televisions in our acquisition. As I was trying to say, is I think there is an effort to maintain the idea of the television as a set historical moment; but it's a fairly broad historical moment. I mean, if the television is entirely eliminated, then we might consider emulating it by embedding flat screens inside the casings.

But also it was a historical piece that also has this dimension of variability in terms of responding to changes.

JACOBS: What an area of big flexibility. Like, when you're talking about putting new TV sets in old TV sets. And I can imagine, Jon bringing his little boy to this exhibition, and that would be the most striking thing: Gee, Mommy, they put old TV sets in new TV sets; what a weird thing.

HANHARDT: Well, in his TV robots, he used antique television casings, and inserted new television tubes inside them. And also inside the radios, he would put TVs.

JACOBS: But that's a specific gesture that he made...I remember years ago, I saw a radio, a cathedral type radio, with a little TV set where the dial was. I mean, that's a very special thing. In a case like Paik, I think about Karl Marx saying, "I'm not a Marxist." I could see somebody saying, "Paik did it this way; we have to do it absolutely this way." And Paik would've said, "That's ridiculous."

VITIELLO: Right, exactly. That's the experience I've had, as well.

IPPOLITO: We don't have to say it's black or white; we don't have to say, "Well, you either emulate the exact look of the original, say, 1982 installation, or you have total leeway." It's more like the case of the colored pedestals. And then the problem is that in collecting institutions and cultural heritage in general, we don't have ways of accounting for variability.

I don't think, however, that means that there aren't any. One of the ways we've tried to do it in the questionnaire, say under the category of installation, when an artwork needs to be installed in some site-specific way, is not just to give them an option like: "Well, it should be as dark as code allows" - often in video installations, you want it as dark as possible - but to say, "Well, that can vary somewhat." And the artist can also address sounds spilling over from other works; Nam June Paik would probably say that could vary a lot.

In terms of security, if someone said, "I wanna put a stanchion," he might say, "I'm not gonna budge on that at all. I don't want a stanchion across the garden to keep people away from the work." So the questionnaire is our attempt to create a way to capture a matrix of preferences, so that there are things the artist can demonstrate a lotta leeway on, and other things that they can be really sticklers for.

I'm reminded of an anecdote that came out in one of our workshops from John Cage scholar, Branden Joseph. Someone had recreated one of Cage's scores that was deliberately indeterminate, where for example, a performer had a certain amount of time between, say, one minute and one minute thirty seconds into a piece, to begin a note, and then had to end it by a certain time; but that the instrument that was used was very flexible; it could be clarinet or an oboe, whatever.

And when the performer said, "Well, how am I doing here with the piece?" Cage got out the score and went item by item and said, "Well, let's see, you got this right, and ok, this was right." (Laughter) In other words, as fluid as his conception of the work was, it was still based on nailing certain things down.

STRINGARI: This brings up the issue of the museum's responsibility as a historical institution, as well as a living, breathing institution - if those words go together. (Laughs) Anyway, what we do now with a new acquisition. Do we store the televisions we used in our recent version? Or because we own the piece, do we have a responsibility to go out and find 50 of the 1960s TVs, or the 1980s TVs and also store those?

This comes up not only with Nam June Paik, but many artists whose work is ephemeral, or whose objects are going to become obsolete, or we're not gonna be able to find them. For example, Dan Flavin: we're now storing tubes, bulbs, because there're certain ones that are not made any longer, so we have to store. I'm not sure what the answer is.

VITIELLO: It's case by case to the artist.

STRINGARI: But in this case, do you have a feeling about whether we run around trying to find old TVs or not?

VITIELLO: Trying to think from Nam June's point of view, I think you don't have to; I believe it was John Hanhardt who said in one of the variable media workshop meetings, that if you're gonna do an historic show of video art, 1974, it would be fantastic to have them. I think your first responsibility is to the tape, to the notes, to the photographs, video documentations. And emulation is a next level, if you can do it. But personally, I don't believe it's the most critical part of acquiring the work.

GARTENBERG: It is extremely important, and from the point of view of preserving film, not necessarily stressed enough, to really record the entire history of the preservation of the work. And there's a very simple guiding light for that. It's the responsibility of the curator or the archivist to understand the evolution of the creative process of the artist, because when you begin to understand that, then you can make the better decisions about the preservation.

In one sense, it makes the institution more responsive; but it another sense, it also pays more tribute to the artist in how those works have shifted over time. For example with John Hanhardt, one discovery we had in working on Warren Sonbert was there is his most famous film, Carriage Trade, which is 61 minutes long, of which he had exhibited in numerous places and sold copies. But what we discovered in doing this is that there was a 20 minute version that he had showed at the Jewish Museum in 1969, that was in the London Filmmakers Coop, unrented. There's a 75 minute version, which is sitting in Anthology Film Archives, which was shown at the Whitney.

So when I think about preserving that film, I first have to understand what the artist did to create it; what were the instances in which it was shown? Because I have to understand what his process was as he was going through, moving to fix this film in a certain form. And when I understand that more, then I'm better able to make the decision about how to preserve.

JIMENEZ: I think that's a great point. It's interesting to see how an artist's intention, or an understanding of their own work will change over time. Even in a split second. When we were doing TechArcheology, and again, trying to figure out how do you record artists' intent, Gary Hill was there talking about Circular Breathing. And one minute we were trying to say, "Well, what do you need a certain kind of projector? Do you need a certain kind of bulb?" He would say, "Well, we don't want this kind of bulb; we want it to be, you know, this kinda projector." And then the next thing, he says, "Well," he said, "But in the future, maybe bodies will be able to be light bodies, and we can project it right on bodies, and-" (Laughter)

In this process of trying to capture his intent for the piece, he's changing to this really futuristic new thing. So I think that actually as I was hearing you talk, Jon, and also from hearing you talk at the workshop, there's the artist's intent; and there's also the curator's interpretation. You know so much about this work that that also informs, I think, the preservation.

And then the history of the work, as Jon was saying, and as it's been seen, also I think informs it. And so I'm all for artists' intent; but I don't think it's the absolute, only thing that we're looking at.

BRAND: Yeah, I also warn, as I did in the workshops that the notion of artists' intention itself is fluid and dynamic; that artists lie. And that those lies (Laughter) themselves are part of the dynamics of the work. And so the intention at one point is different than the intention at another point, and how you track that changing intention, and how you interact with it is a very complicated process.

IPPOLITO: Amendments to the aesthetic constitution. (Laughter)

HANHARDT: On that note, I'd just like to say that what you're seeing is a process. And we're working our way around and through these issues through these issues, to get to ways of really seriously coming to terms and grips with this. And this is going to be, as I said in my introduction, an ongoing experience that Jon Ippolito will be leading here, and we'll be regrouping as workshops and regathering as conferences like this.

Now, Jon told me to keep this on schedule, which I didn't, because everybody was so fantastic and so many points were being raised. We have a couple questions? We have two microphones at the front of this.

JACOBS: No, I just realized that it's been going on, or just about to begin, that artists now should be designing works for curators. You people are insanely conscientious. (Laughter) Just, why do this stuff, just- I got a work, and give it to them; let them-you're really part of the instrument of making stuff now. That's all.

MAN IN AUDIENCE: Actually, the question or remark I wanted to make is exactly apropos of that. In experimental music, of course, the concept of the notation realization relation evolved in this relationship between Cage and David Tudor. And Nam June Paik, of course, was very much a part of that whole experiment. And what strikes me here is what this questionnaire is, in a sense, is an attempt to generate an indeterminate score, a score for potential realization; and that the real problem here is not to make a questionnaire like this, but to realize and recognize that media are ephemeral, and that that which we think of as a making is actually performance - particularly with new media, with the electronic media.

And consequently, the idea that there could be a sustained investigation of the possibility of notation realization as part of current artistic practice in new media is a huge missing element. And it's precisely that; that in reality, that these pieces will shift and will change, and that one of things that is very striking if you look in detail at Cage's work is the way in which it went to a distilled abstraction of something like Variations II, suddenly had this stop, where he basically, in a sense, hit a dead end, and then returned to a much more specific kind of composition for performers in the early seventies and beyond, in the very beautiful late career.

This problem of abstracting your work to the point that it can morph with changes in media - It's not like that can be a person's life's work; but it is a central and essential element in even beginning to conceive of this. You have to get it from the artists.

And maybe a way of thinking of this is a distinction between preservation, which to me suggests formaldehyde, and conservation, which suggests an ecology. In the work of Paik in particular, we could think of the TV Garden- there's this question of preserving difference. In describing the issue of what monitor to use, if it were Cage or if it were Tudor, I would immediately say, "Oh, the question is to maximize difference." I'm not sure if that really applies in this case, but the idea of formulations like that that can be activated, I think will be essential to the conservation of this work.

JACOBS: See, that's ok for the artist that wants to instigate something and is ready to be amused by whatever comes of it, ok? But what about the artist that steps back from the painting and says "Do I have it right?" You know, have they pulled it off? Is this what I was reaching for?

MAN IN AUDIENCE: I think it's a distinction between works that are conceived of in the tradition of musical performance, where there is a complementary realization, and works that are conceived of as being, like a painting or a sculpture, a fixed and determined thing. And I think what I'm arguing is that in the case of new media - I'm not sure about film, but certainly with new media - there is no stable media. And that that is the problem with Web art; the problem with our thinking there, is that in fact, we're involved in something that's entirely performative, because the extent to which what that medium is is controlled by interests of capital, far beyond the ability of any arts institution to stabilize.

It's moving so quickly and constantly, and so involved with encoding that you can't get there, in the same way that we could in the sixties, and even in the seventies and early eighties.

HANHARDT: Thank you very much. Well, if there are no more questions, I want to thank our panelists for a terrific morning, and look forward to all of you returning this afternoon with a session on performative artworks. (Applause)

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