Assembling Traces

NetArt: Links (in alphabetical order)  by Thomas Dreher

Dekker, Annet: Assembling Traces, or the Conservation of Net Art.
In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies. Spring 2014. Dekker pleas for a not only backward-looking conservation of net art. On the one hand works with a source code not functioning in contemporary net conditions (new browsers for new operating systems) provoke the question if the code can be rewritten. On the other hand contributions should be integrated produced by users acting as participants of the work (“input from visitors”) and as agents in the ‘context’ of a work.
Since 1996 the website mouchette.org is organised by Martine Naddam. This site is used by Dekker as an example to outline her understanding of a ‘context’: When the widow of the film director Robert Bresson tried to prohibit references of any sort to his movie «Mouchette» then the participants reacted with mirror sites (see ann.25). These mirror sites documented a specific state in the development of the site mouchette.org.
According to Dekker the results of preservations or reconstructions of net art are caused by the ways chosen by participants of a net community to archive several states of a project as well as to care for continuations or resumptions of the possibilities for participations (as interactions with the net project). A net project’s context can be constituted and cultivated by the net activities of the participants (blogs, websites, etc.): “Such a process does not exclude conservation but incorporates future thinking in its practice while guarding or making documentation as traces of a past…” (4/2015).