The rolling hills and bucolic landscape of upstate New York belie a long history of engagement with contemporary artistic work. The “birth” of video art took place around here in the late 1960s and early 1970s with artists like Bill Viola and Nam June Paik, at institutions like Syracuse University, University of Buffalo, and Alfred University, and media art centers like Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo and the Experimental Television Center in Owego. As video art has become commonplace within galleries and museums around the world, there has been a parallel explosion over the past 15 years in other types of new media art, things like interactive CD-ROMs, Internet art, and interactive electronic installations.
Creating a record of this profusion of artistic activity has been a pressing concern for a while, with the need becoming readily apparent every time there is a massive change in computer technology. Luckily there is such an initiative here in Ithaca at Cornell: the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art.
In development since 2002, the Goldsen Archive was begun by Tim Murray, Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell, and long-time curator of new media art events and installations. In addition to Murray, graduate student in Comparative Literature Madeleine Casad acts as Associate Curator and has been with the archive since nearly the beginning.
The archive is one of the biggest collections of new media art in North America, cementing Cornell and Ithaca as a locus for this type of work. It was recently introduced to the public through a day-long workshop entitled “New Media Art and Archival Ambitions” that brought together a wide variety of artists, curators, and historians who all spoke of the importance of the archive for scholarly work.
“The workshop was a celebration of five years of development,” Murray said. Creating the archive has been much more than simply saving a net.art website to disk. While we might initially think of these works as ephemeral pieces, just bits of data that can simply be transferred from one place to another with ease, the reality is vastly different.
In fact, much of the work has a physical basis through being saved on CD-ROM or DVD. As Murray explained, the artworks are “physical objects and they also require physical interfaces. And they don’t require just any physical interface, they’re now requiring more and more antiquated physical interfaces that is putting them in peril. There is a need for their physical storage and preservation, even though it’s data preservation.”
For Murray, the crisis in preservation, coupled with a lack of action, was palatable. “This could have been the first time in history when 15 intense years of artistic production will be simply inaccessible forever. There’s not a single other medium that I can think of where that could have happened. Especially within such a short window of time. Within 15 years of its production — poof!”
There was additionally the work of creating the tools that would allow the archive to be used by the public and integrating this with an existing library system. “It also entailed the development of a library infrastructure that there were no rules for,” Murray said.
“How do you catalog multimedia, how do you describe it, what do you describe, what are the limits.” There were special needs that were specific to the desires of Murray and Casad as curators. “We wanted to provide users with one or two paragraph descriptions of the works,” said Murray. “Libraries don’t have one or two paragraph descriptions of their works. It’s a different paradigm. We work in a critical paradigm, a critical interventionist paradigm.”
The holdings of the archive are incredibly varried and contain materials that are both available online and physically in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Kroch Library at Cornell. Any member of the public can come to Kroch library and view the artworks and associated materials. The archive consists first of a general collection, consisting of original interactive CD-ROMs, documentation of important exhibitions and installations, and records of online mailing lists and journals.
Additionally, there are a series of special collections that are unique to the Goldsen Archive, such as the Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese avant-garde art, one of the largest collections of its type in North America. One of the other special collections of great import is that of the Renew Media and the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in New Media Art. As part of the application process for this award, invited artists create a dossier, portfolio, and audio/visual documentation of prior artworks.
The Goldsen Archive has been able to make public the files of around 70 percent of the artists who are asked to apply for this prestigious fellowship, giving visitors to the archive access to a prominent slice of contemporary new media art in North America. Many of these dossiers are also available online as downloadable documents on the Goldsen website.
As can be expected, there is an undeniable influence of the archive on scholarship and student work. As Murray described, “students don’t have that much opportunity to integrate the wide variety of new media interfaces into their classes. That’s slowly going to change. And oftentimes what changes things like this are the availability and pressure from library collections, access to information.”
Indeed, for Casad there has been a direct impact on her dissertation that is about the shifting relationships between media, narrative, identity, and cultural memory. “I think that being in the institutional position of curating, preserving, documenting this work, and making it findable and accessible, has given me a much more pragmatic and material perspective on information storage, preservation, and retrieval than I would have otherwise. Maybe I wouldn’t even think about the relationships between media, aesthetics, and memory systems if I hadn’t spent so much time simultaneously playing around with these artworks and talking to library archivists about developing a cataloging system that would help our eventual users locate and enjoy them. I certainly wouldn’t think so much about the material urgency of preserving digital information.”
The Rockefeller New Media collection is especially important in this regard. For many artists landing a Rockefeller grant is an undeniable statement of the importance of one’s work to the new media art world. And the archive of these artist portfolios and dossiers is a significant source of material for study. “To me it’s one of the most significant things we’ve done, in relationship to its contributions to the community,” Murray said. “I’ve been really touched by the willingness to participate on the part of artists.”
But this also reflects a certain quality shared by many in new media art. Approximately 70 percent of the works in the archive have been donated by independent artists. Murray and the archive have been careful to ensure that artists retain full rights to their work and to prevent copying of materials on-site. But there is a “kind of combination between recognition of artistic rights with dedication to open source,” described Murray. “In the sense that we’re doing this so that as many people as possible can have access to the material.” He characterizes this willing to share as “an artistic social movement.”
At first glance it might appear strange to be placing a collection of artwork in a library instead of a museum. But for Murray the difference between the two types of institutions could not be starker. “We’re not bringing these things in so that they will accrue value and so that we can capitalize on speculation. It’s not the museum structure. We’re not bringing it in so that we can occasionally bring one out and exhibit it on a wall and keep everything else stashed.” Libraries everywhere are changing, updating themselves as institutions to address changing perceptions of access to information. “We have it in the library for open access as much as possible,” said Murray. “That’s why I went, as a curator, to the library and not the museum.”
Other institutions are attempting archiving projects of their own, sometimes based on selecting a single artist for preservation. This type of archival process is the opposite of what Murray and Casad want for the Goldsen Archive. “We don’t do canons. This isn’t about the canon, this is about open sourcing, and I think that the more information we can archive the better.” Thus, in terms of what gets archived, there is very little attention to standard hierarchies and the notion of an “establishment.”
“We have a very open notion of an attempt to bring together a critical mass of the developments of new media in the first 15 years,” said Murray. “So, there’s very little interest in maintaining hierarchies of power and proper name, and we’re just as likely to have the most famous artists as the youngest ones.”
Since its inception the archive has developed in a very organic way. “I really started the archive with very small ambitions, mainly to bring together these two different venues of Internet art and CD-ROM art. And what happened is I started doing it and both of these areas just took off.” As other organizations have learned about the Goldsen Archive, they have wanted to create partnerships.Indeed, the Experimental Television Center in Owego is digitizing all of their own vast collection of tapes, and the eventual repository is going to be the Goldsen Archive. For Murray this is key, the keeping of the history of this work locally, when it could have just as easily been sent to an institution overseas.
Murray is quite optimistic about the future of the Goldsen Archive. “It’s an explosion of hunger, because people want to one, prove that this is an unusual presentation of a critical mass of materials in North America, that’s also available to the public, which is very unusual, so people want to partner with that, and on the other hand, it’s also provides artists with the possibility to get involved in issues of migration, of preservation.”
The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art is housed in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Kroch Library on the Cornell campus. Physical access to the archive is open to the public during reading room hours. Additionally, parts of the collection are available anytime online.
