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- Callahan, Sara, 1975-
(författare)
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The Archive Art Phenomenon : History and Critique at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation investigates the relationship between art and archive at the turn of the twenty-first century. The object of study is the phenomenon of archive art, understood as a combination of theories of the archive, artworks, and different kinds of texts (catalogues, scholarly articles, critical essays, etc.) delineating the art here called archive art. The study has been conducted by cross-reading the different elements that make up the phenomenon of archive art with various discourses and developments both within and outside the artworld. It investigates how the archive became a ubiquitous reference in art discourse and the functions and implications the notion has within an art context.Each of the dissertation’s six chapters adds to and builds on the previous, thereby examining an increasingly thickening web of conceptual relations. Chapter I examines five texts about archive art written between 1995 and 2008. Chapter II outlines writings about archives from other disciplines frequently referenced in art discourse, and shows how this “archive theory” (including works by Foucault, Derrida and others) overlaps in many ways with the Institutional Theory of Art. Chapter III analyses the archive art phenomenon by juxtaposing three different aspects of the tension between materiality and immateriality: the artwork as object or idea; connotations of analogue and digital technology; and different notions of traditional and poststructural forms of history writing. Chapter IV is concerned with the role of the artist as historian, archivist and researcher, and examines how the discourse around studio-based research overlaps with the different modes of historical truth-claims outlined in the previous chapter. This chapter also analyses references to research as process and form in archive art discourse. Chapter V examines different kinds of critique of institutions and shows how the archive art phenomenon intersects with a critical paradigm in the academy and beyond. Chapter VI ties together many results of the previous discussions by analysing the archive art phenomenon within a broader historical context. The chapter shows that history, the presumed subject of much archive art, can also be considered indicative of a shift away from a grounding of the art object within a teleological art history, toward an institutionally defined concept of art as an archival structure. In that sense the archive art phenomenon is analysed both as a resistance to, and a symptom of, what some have called the presentism of the current era. The archive is an example of what Mieke Bal terms a “travelling concept”, as it moves between and within disciplines and contexts. The ubiquity of the concept in art discourse is part of a broader “turn” to the archive, however, this study shows that the archive takes on meaning specific to the contemporary artworld. The notion of the archive here functions as a short-cut for theorizing artists’ interest in the material traces of the past (the concrete, “dusty” archive) as well as their critical investigation of the post-1960s artworld (the archive as metaphor and structure). What may seem like a mere trend within contemporary art discourse, is thus shown to have functions and implications that interlock with the conceptual grounding of contemporary art.
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| 2. |
- Cuartielles Ruiz, David Joaquin
(författare)
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Platform Design : Creating Meaningful Toolboxes When People Meet
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Platform Design is a study of different viewpoints on the creation of digital systems, and how they converge in platforms designed, built, and managed by communities. As sociotechnical constructs in which features emerge through the interaction of different stakeholders, platforms are understood as both means and outcomes—the ‘things’ or boundary objects in a design process—generating the spaces where communities of practice can form. Utilizing two strongly interwoven timelines in education and research (both in academia and industry), the thesis shifts the centre of balance in actor–networks by iteratively recalibrating from a techno-deterministic analysis towards a community-driven one. The theoretical background in the fields of cybernetics, critical theory, design, and the sociology of technology frames the empirical work, which consists of academic publications, design reports, and the publicly available documentation of realized projects. In the space between theory and praxis, a methodological toolbox is developed, a posteriori revisiting experiences gathered over a decade Drawing on a series of functional concepts, the thesis proposes an alternative co-design framework, termed inclusive multiple prototyping. Meant to augment new sensibilities that are pertinent to the design process of platforms, this framework addresses the inherent complexity of actor–networks and human–machine communities. In practical terms, the thesis describes a series of projects, some of which can be considered platforms, while others would be better categorized as tools, toolboxes, kits, or infrastructure. These include co-creating the Arduino community, repurposing kitchen appliances for connection to the cloud, designing a modular prototyping platform involving programming and electronics, deploying an indoor location system, creating educational kits for upper secondary school teachers, and inventing new haptic interactive interfaces. Some of the projects required the long-term involvement of the researcher in intimate communities of practice; others were temporal interventions, yet reached thousands of users. Practice-based and transdisciplinary, the thesis contributes to the field of interaction design by bringing in elements of a sociotechnical discourse, while problematizing notions such as democracy and governance, openness of tools and outcomes, modularity, generalizability, and transferability—the three latter terms further fuelling the research questions. The research shows that these are properties that enable the creation of platforms, although the question remains whether there is such a thing as a standardized platform. While this thesis touches upon the potentials of state-of-the-art platform technology, it also points to the fact that there is work to be done, socially, ethically, and politically, when considering the augmentation of platforms for everyday use as pervasive and artificial intelligence agents.
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