A while back I read this quote from web artist Dene Grigar:
My current topic of interest is ephemera..that is, I am fascinated with objects that are made in the moment without the goal of archiving or sustaining them in any way.
and have been ruminating on it off and on for a while; I’m really interested in this notion as well.
It ties into a lot of other things that interest me, in some very tantalizing ways.
The problem of perfect infinite copyability has made certain types of product a challenge to sell. Take music for example. I’m sure you’re are of the core meltdown going on in that industry due to the fact of perfect infinite copyability of digital music files. Prince did something very interesting, I thought–and it pissed off his label (which leads me to believe he’s onto something). He made a deal with a UK newspaper. They paid him millions of dollars to put a copy of his latest CD in every copy of a certain Sunday’s paper. What makes this lovely is it recognizes the fact that the CD itself isn’t what has value anymore, it’s the right to be the SEED, the first instance after which all the copies are made. OK, so there’s that.
Then there’s this issue of the problem of selling digital art in a gallery setting. What is being sold if there’s infinite perfect copyability? Here’s a fun response to that. There’s a guy who writes short stories. After he has one finished he destroys all drafts, prints out one copy, deletes the file, puts the one copy in a bottle and seals the bottle. He then sells them as art objects with a full explanation of the provenance of the object that indicates that the story enclosed is the One and Only copy in existence. To read it, you have to break the seal, and thus the object that indicates that the story enclosed is the One and Only copy in existence. To read it, you have to break the seal, and thus create another copy (in the readers mind) and the CHANCE for infinite copies to be made. The chain of provenance is broken. So as the purchaser of the art, you can EITHER possess the unique object, or, read the story, but not both.
William Gibson supposedly issued a short story on floppy that when the file was executed it scrolled the story by on a screen once, and once only, and then deleted itself from the floppy.
In a way, all performance art is ephemeral, and, it may also be true that all ephemeral art is performance art.
I do a lot of mail art. Mail art is wild. Anything is possible. No rules, anyone can play, what you get may be outstanding or total shite. Often I get back in the mail things that have taken something I sent and cut it up and re-worked it into something else. Talk about forcing you to lose your sense of ownership of your own art, wow. But, it also is a freeing thing, you send it out there, and let it go, and it lives its own life absolutely out of your control.
So, with all that backstory in mind, what that statement makes me think of is a digital installation in which nothing is archived. Every time you visit it’s different, and there’s NO way to see what came previously, and, no way to see what is happening right after your visit…no repeated refreshing, you have to wait a day, maybe. A lot of search engine art is dynamic enough, certainly. Jim Andrews’s dbcinema has a lot of the features I can imagine. Ideally, in my mind, it would be like a set of wind chimes that a visitor can brush with their hands to affect, and can maybe get a hint of the hand that brushed before them and a whisper of the hand after, but no more. I’ve seen the value of pi converted to a melody. What if viewers could modulate tempo of it in a way that was elastic, rubber bandy.
What’s that line–you can never step into the same river twice? Like that. Make the river, let people feel it on their calves. That’s a piece I’d love to be involved with making.
