To Copy is …
Thoughts on the online conference series New Technologies and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage by The Art Newspaper, Factum Foundation, and Il Giornale Dell’Arte.
To Copy is … To Admire
First Edition: May 1
In collaboration with Factum Foundation and Il Giornale Dell’Arte, The Art Newspaper has produced a series of live-streamed conferences, occurring the weekend of 1-3 May, addressing issues central to the now-closed Factum exhibition in Bologna, The Materiality of the Aura: New Technologies for Preservation, and its accompanying publication, The Aura in the Age of Digital Materiality. Postponed due to the rapidly evolving circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition was poised to reintroduce to Bologna one of her masterpieces, the Polittico Griffoni altarpiece. The conference mini-series endeavours to replicate the collection of explorations of contemporary quandaries faced by the art community that would have been featured alongside the altarpiece. Speakers at the first conference, entitled The Future of Museums, Exhibitions and the Objects They Display, are Sir Mark Jones, András Szántó, Mari Lending, Marina Warner, and Neil Macgregor. Sir Charles Saumarez Smith chairs the discussion, Anna Somers Cocks and Adam Lowe provide the introduction.
Framed through the perspective of increased, indeed forced, digitisation of the museum, its exhibitions and objects resulting from COVID-19, much of this conversation focused on the idea of facsimile and replication. A logical focus given the trailblazing role of Factum Foundation in creating impeccable copies of everything from small-scale artworks to entire Egyptian tombs. Viewing artworks digitally, even high-resolution photos and videos of original works, introduces a degree of separation between the viewer and the object. Removed from shared physical space, the interactions between viewer and object are inherently different. The viewer is interacting with a copy of the work, albeit a high-resolution one, and the work itself is alone on a gallery wall. For some, the quality of these interactions increases- Neil Macgregor remarked that he and his friends were able to coordinate Zoom calls to view together a single object, reducing the white noise of other works and crowded museum galleries. Marina Warner was thrilled by the quality of viewing experience provided by a digital tour of the Linderism exhibition hosted by Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Photography, she noted, is especially well suited to what Mari Lending termed the “disembodied flatness of the screen.”
For others, interaction with the physical object itself is crucial to having an experience of any significant depth. Lending, quoting from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, created an inverse parallel between her own visit to the Veronese copy in Venice and Proust’s protagonist’s visit to the original statue of a copy in the Trocadero museum with which he had fallen in love. For Proust’s character, the original was deeply disappointing, shrouded in darkness and too far away to see well. For Lending, it was the original, intended environment of the work that failed to meet expectations, less than the copy in the original’s place. Though summarily negative experiences with facsimiles, it is the physical interaction itself with the object that facilitates such breadth of emotional engagement.
There seemed to be consensus among the contributors that a facsimile is not an inherently evil object. The discourse of the developing experience economy has entrenched the conception of increased value in original, authentic objects so much so that original and authentic have been fetishised in common consciousness. Such emphasis is not intrinsic to the object nor the intention of the original’s author, nor even to canonical art historical discourses; rather, it is an invention of the art market. For academia, copies provide additional material to analyse; for the art market, copies dilute the value of an object. The creation of facsimiles, historically, fulfilled the adage that to copy is to embark upon the highest form of flattery possible. As Sir Mark Jones stated, there is much of value in a copy, for it informs us as to how its creator saw the world, and to how people throughout history have viewed and interpreted the same objects. To copy formed the basis of fine arts educations up until the Impressionists introduced the radical idea of translating onto their canvases subjective impressions of the world around them, rather than replicating historical moments, stories, and ideas. Following the philosophical train of Jean Baudrillard and his simulacra, there is little in our world at this point that is truly, entirely authentic and original. Our increasingly digital world makes more obvious and more common these interactions outside of originality, ever more so in situations resulting from COVID-19. It seems, from the first instalment of this conference series, that this is not a bad thing, as to copy is to admire, and often, interactions with copies only increase the desire to see and interact with the “original,” whatever that may be.
To Copy is … To Facilitate Accessibility
Second Edition: May 2
The second conference, entitled The Circulation of Objects: The Politics of Recording, Training, Preserving and Sharing- creating a cultural economy based on sharing skills, technologies, and knowledge was indeed, as Anna Somers Cocks noted in her introduction, “the more politically charged side of things” compared to the first discussion. Presiding over the conversation was Simon Schaffer and the panelists were Anaïs Aguerre, Jerry Brotton, Hartwig Fischer, Bonnie Greer, and Richard Kurin.
While still in reference to the idea of the copy, the territory of this discussion was the less specified to the objects themselves, but rather creating an understanding of the contexts in which these copies/original objects exist. These contexts are as numerous and diverse as the objects themselves, ranging from the dirt out of which artefacts are unearthed, through the museum exhibitions that recontextualise their histories, to the digital environs in which their data will live and be shared, potentially with the entire world and potentially forever. Such statements are dramatic in tone and grand in scale, but they honestly reflect the reality of the circumstances in which objects and the communities around them are situated. The world is rapidly evolving, providing the opportunity to reevaluate processes and norms deeply entrenched and no longer relevant or well-suited to contemporary society. The panelists all conferred: we must not let this pass us idly.
For Bonnie Greer, it is paramount that it is understood that the zeitgeist phenomena of democratisation supposedly hyper-facilitated by rapid advancements in technological capabilities, while full of potential for good, are not helpful in communities without access to basic resources, let alone the most current MacBook or SurfacePro. As Anaïs Aguerre pointed out, democratisation is not the new idea many perceive it to be; such philosophy was fundamental to Henry Cole’s endeavours in 1867 to create replicas “portable examples of global patrimony,” cultivating a sense of shared history and heritage amongst peoples who could never see such objects in person. Digital technologies offer an unprecedented opportunity to collect and share incredible amounts of data, creating not simply digital records and replicas of individual collections, but global collections, allowing access to “the whole world of what is knowable, seeable” as described by Hartwig Fischer.
Fischer, in agreement with Greer about the necessity of using information and technology to bridge gaps present in pre-existing societal hierarchies, proposes this unique set of circumstances as a possibility to “rewrite our shared, complicated history as members of the community of human beings in a new way and as equals.” For as Simon Schaeffer none too gently reminded, this is not a set of circumstances by which “we” are all treated equally. There are inherent inequalities systemic to human communities, inequalities exacerbated by this pandemic and glossed over by the notion that “we are all in this together.” For the panel, this idea is intrinsically linked to how data and digital technologies surrounding the arts are implemented. From places of isolation can come brilliant future collaborations. Richard Kurin suggests a new curatorial methodology, done in tandem with the communities out of which objects have previously come and by whom objects are surrounded, to “restore identity and history alongside restoring sites.” This is a “reinvestment in the historical art object,” noted Jerry Brotton, to the benefit of the object itself and those who interact with it in any capacity.
Encompassing all of these revisions, re-writes, and new initiatives, there must be an understanding of who is doing the “thinking,” the categorisation, and the re-writes, and who the objects serve. Greer
maintains that such endeavours are most successful, with the most enriching outcomes, when it is the objects and their communities who are given voice, while the academic community listens carefully to understand their needs. These may be dark times, with lockdowns favouring “a politics of wolves,” per Schaffer, but there is much hope, Fischer concluded, as “the movement we are in is going to transcend that…it is irreversible.”
To Copy is … To Preserve
In the third and final instalment of the conference mini-series New Technologies and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, panelists explored how it looks currently, and how it might look in the future, to use advancements in digital technology to better preserve global cultural heritage. Entitled An Intimacy with the Physical World: New Technologies for Generating Knowledge- compiling, analysing, and presenting information in an age of machine learning, topics unpacked in this conference ranged from the ethics of open-source data mining and privacy legislation to interactive museum installations showcasing exact replicas of closed or at-risk archaeological sites. The discussion was opened by Anna Somers Cocks and Adam Lowe, chaired by Sir Ian Blatchford, and included Frederic Kaplan, Sarah Kenderdine, Carol Mandel, William Owen, and Brian Cantwell Smith.
Central again to the discussion of this conference were ideas of knowledge creation and ownership previously debated by the panelists of the second conference. In a post-digital age, for Brian Cantwell Smith declared it time to host “a wake for the notion of the digital,” where knowledge is currency and power, the control of its categorisation, analyzation, and dissemination, and by whom, remains paramount to ensuring its good use. To better elucidate his point- no one refers to their homes as “electrical homes.” It is obvious and assumed. Smith feels that in our current age, to describe the world as “digital” is as redundant.
With such epistemological clarifications firmly in place, Smith also challenged what he feels are patently limited and outdated assumptions for the application of such technology. Why limit these advancements to screens and two dimensions? Sarah Kenderdine conferred, and took the conference through a virtual tour of an installation of the Dunhuang Caves she helped curate with the World Heritage Organisation. A stunning, fully immersive and interactive display, the caves represented in the installation took three months each to digitize, are closed to the public, and offer a glimpse into the future of museum-going experiences. Moving far beyond the primitive “slapping on of VR goggles” Kenderdine calls “Museum Sin #2,” these installations encourage visitor engagement in a social manner, allowing the preservation of community within museum walls.
Frederic Kaplan showcased a different facet of the future fast becoming reality; the Venice Time Machine, begun by Factum Foundation in 2012, transformed “kilometers of documents in endless corridors” into an easily manipulated database. Searches can be conducted visually, by selection of image sections, or by text. The Artificial Intelligence technology implemented by the Venice Time Machine makes use of sophisticated “deep learning” programming which allows the AI to search within documents of many kinds, growing its own knowledge of the documents and better extraction methods as it works. The technology creates the AI through replicating the structures and behaviours of neural networks, facilitating a flexibility of processing that allows these innumerable documents to be analysed in far less time than it would take a human brain to do the same.
Panelists William Owen and Carol Mandel agreed that much of the challenge facing future generations is less about the invention and application of advanced technologies, and more regarding changing mindsets that have been, as Owen emphasised, ingrained for over 250 years. This involves the integration in museums, guardians and disseminators of culture that they are, of a radically new set of priorities that will change the nature and form of their interactions. Such changes have already
disrupted the archivist and librarian’s roles, where Carol Mendel described “reader’s glee at being freed from the shackles of microfilm.” She also reminded the panel that “we are so concerned with digitising the past that we forget about or digital future,” a notion growing increasingly contested for the boundaries crossed by preserving a digital future are numerous and blurred. There are laws for privacy, says Mandel, but not laws for remembering, so how will history be remembered when the postcards and love notes earnestly exchanged have grown obsolete in tangible form?
Such thoughts, she notes, keep her up at night. Owen, in contrast, suggests everyone relax a bit and be generous with their fidelity.
It is a new age, indeed.
Thank you.
Rebecca Howard,
Contributor, MADE IN BED