Editor’s Note

Issue 13 of VoCA Journal explores this threshold. Presenting the voices of artists, curators, archivists and conservation specialists, the issue reflects on the ways visual art responds to the social and political conditions of mediating contemporary life and how the resulting digital artefacts iterate and live on in various forms with differing levels of public visibility. Contributors draw from their own deep experience thinking about the ways digital affordances including search functionality impact how contemporary art circulates both as unique works and simultaneously as endlessly reproducible artefacts. Each text countenances the mechanisms of marginality that condition not only the adoption of digital tools and access to digital resources, but also the more nuanced and subtle ways that this inequality reinforces hierarchies of value. And instead of simply asking “who gets represented?” the authors, in their own incisive ways, press on the more disquieting questions: “who is heard, and to what ends?” 

Rather than subscribing to the fallacy of universality, the artworks, archives, and online exchanges highlighted here encourage us to recognize the partiality of knowledge produced by these fragmentary and provisional connections. Each contribution is grounded by the material of its own making and its own moment in history, offering something akin to what artist Sharon Hayes refers to as the “production of a reality or a truth that the camera does not just capture but facilitates or makes possible.” In conversation with ICA Boston Barbara Lee Chief Curator, Ruth Erickson, Hayes reflects on her ongoing video series “Ricerche” which “steps off” Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 film Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings) as a structure and means of researching and speaking to an intergenerational range of collective subjects presented as individual subjects in sociality or community. Hayes’s “Ricerche” series researches by interviewing and recording students at an all-women’s college (Ricerche: three, 2013); children in LGBTQ+ families (Ricerche: one, 2015); women’s tackle football teams (Ricerche: two, 2020) and a current iteration focused on queer elders (Ricerche: four). By testing whether the interview format itself is “capable of holding the conversation,” Hayes and Erickson ask us to consider “what are the things that shape collective understandings of who and how they can be.”  

Curators Howie Chen and Alex Ito take stock of their efforts to generate a responsive space to hold conversations both through the Brooklyn-based gallery Chen’s and its pivot to online programming during the height of COVID-19. Taking an approach that remains “site agnostic,” they share in vivid detail the desire to create an “intentional space”, whether it was in person or via Zoom gatherings with artists including Renée Green, Maia Ruth Lee, Guadalupe Rosales, Tiffany Sia, and other pressing and powerful voices who have forged a new documentary vernacular in the digital age. In this way, the pragmatic transition from IRL to virtual Chen’s [Remote] during the summer of 2020 is framed as an “arc that moved through community activism and political protest, fugitive media and ontologies, radical feminism and landing on a capacious assessment of America through historically conscious image making.” Now openly accessible through Library Stack, Chen’s [Remote]’s video documentation provides a media archaeology of this transient but profoundly influential period and models how a “healthy mix of ideas and conversation” can exist online both in its initial form and as well as its archival format. As Chen notes, “Zoom ‘space’ was a channel to screen films, see artworks, present lectures, and to assemble people,” compressing the simultaneity of seemingly “live” cultural programming with the weight of its own online historical record.

It is within the collective digital “publicness” shaped by post 1989 network culture and 2020s corporate platform capitalism that Library Stack considers the practical and theoretical propositions imposed by the exponentially growing area of long-term digital storage. The creators of the not-for-profit Library Stack depict how the growth and privatization of long-term digital storage management, whose promise to “back up humanity,” is also simultaneously destroying the environment humans need to survive. Drawing from its own practice of “creating a legibility bridge between the regulated taxonomies of library science and the unregulated modes of digital publication now common to the art and design fields,” the authors provide a cultural history of how the data storage market plays on the very human fear of obsolesce offering a clear view of what they term the “new uncanny valley: the chronological dislocation of seeing one’s own present as if from someone else’s future.” 

Taking a more procedural turn on the question of what it means to conserve a work of art that no longer maps onto its current location, Karen Cheung, Joshua Churchill, and Shu-Wen Lin offer a detailed study of recasting The Telephone Call, one of artist Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s signature walking pieces. Initially commissioned in 2001 for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition 010101: Art in Technological Times, The Telephone Call’s walking route and sonic references no longer corresponded to the newly configured spatial layout after SFMOMA’s 2016 building renovation. The authors explicate the technical and conceptual challenges offering a generative case study of what it means to iterate a work of time-based media that also remains uniquely collectable. Detailing how Cardiff and Bures Miller recorded new narrative and sound components, and also re-worked the entire interface, the SFMOMA team share how the experience offered an opportunity to expand The Telephone Call to become more accessible to a wider museum audience by acknowledging the impediments of staircases and needs of users with various sensory disabilities. 

Overall, the issue models the ways that all forms of media are never fully discrete but, always remain conditioned by the larger social and political forces that engender them. Doing so foregrounds the connection between visual media and identity, and reminds us that digital media—like data itself—is never neutral, or objective, but remains deeply conditioned by human behaviors and habits.