"Presence" in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation

Jones, Amelia

doi:10.2307/777715

Cited by 43 publications

(32 citation statements)

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“…All respondents create and use digital objects as part of their practice. Professional practice, then, appears to be more in line with the arguments for the validity of digital representations of work as presented by Auslander [15], Jones [17] and others.…”

Section: Discussion Of Findings 51 Digital Object Creation and Usesupporting

confidence: 60%

“…Performing arts research is more prone to consider whether or how the live performance event can persist into another time or in another place. When documentation is created, this leads into considerations of the role or potential or appropriateness of accessing the live event via documentation as discussed, with various conclusions, by Auslander [15], Reason [16], Jones [17] and Phelan [18], inter alia.…”

Section: 'Documentation' and 'Preservation'mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Performances, Preservation, and Policy Implications: Digital Curation and Preservation Awareness and Strategy in the Performing Arts

Molloy

2015

New Review of Information Networking

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Digital assets in contemporary performing arts practice are vulnerable to damage and disappearance, eroding prospects of a coherent record of contemporary practice and its place in our wider digital cultural heritage. This paper summarises a study that seeks to understand and assess this threat so that appropriate solutions -if necessary -can be scoped and provided in a way accessible both to the practitioner and the research and academic/training communities. A series of case studies was developed examining the digital curation and preservation awareness and practice of a sample of UK-based performing arts professionals. This approach provides a 'practitioner's-eye view' of the types of digital objects used by this community; current curation strategies and activities; and the factors that influence digital curation and preservation decisions.This study establishes that digital objects are highly prized by the professional performance community.Accordingly, expectations of the survival of these digital objects are high, but investigation found that levels of sustainable digital curation and preservation practice are low. These findings support the argument that competent digital curation and preservation practice is relevant to the sustainability of a career in the performing arts, as well as of benefit to the arts researcher or student and cultural heritage more widely. These findings reveal the need for an effective response in order to mitigate the loss of digital cultural heritage in this professional sector.Preservation of the digital cultural objects that are created, shared and sought by performing arts practitioners is subject to the economic realities of professional practice and also constrained by current levels of practitioner digital curation awareness and competence. These skills are not yet routinely taught in practitioner training institutions. There is an urgent need i) to promulgate policies based on a sound knowledge of digital curation and preservation practices in the professional performing arts community; and ii) for a coherent strategy to develop practitioner knowledge and skills, and to deliver such training in language accessible to the community of practice. This paper describes the problem, my research approach, and my findings and recommendations, and is intended to be of interest to all those engaged in policy and skills development in communities of practice beyond the academy, particularly in the creative arts and cultural heritage domains.

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Section: Discussion Of Findings 51 Digital Object Creation and Usesupporting

confidence: 60%

Section: 'Documentation' and 'Preservation'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Performances, Preservation, and Policy Implications: Digital Curation and Preservation Awareness and Strategy in the Performing Arts

Molloy

2015

New Review of Information Networking

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“…Jones 1997;Auslander 2008) and of making a living as an performance arts practitioner; this impression is one that is further supported by the findings of Section 3. In this way, a gap becomes visible between practitioners' ambitions for the longevity and authenticity of their highly-valued digital objects and the likely result of their current digital preservation and curation-related decisions.…”

Section: Interview Questions: Section 2 -Preservation Of Your Workmentioning

confidence: 63%

Digital curation skills in the performing arts – an investigation of practitioner awareness and knowledge of digital object management and preservation

Molloy

2014

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media

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This study examines the digital curation awareness and practice of a sample of practitioners from the UK performing arts community. Twelve performance arts practitioners from across the UK were interviewed to establish understanding of whether, why and how they create and manage digital objects in the course of their creative work. Detailed qualitative data from this series of one-to-one interviews about the actual and intended digital curation practices of these performance arts practitioners establishes what they understand about sustainable management of digital objects, and also which digital curation activities they actually include in their working processes.This knowledge is supplemented with some preliminary exploration of the types of digital resources that are sought and used by performance arts practitioners, in order to understand whether there is a comparable appetite for the creation and for the reuse of digital objects in this field. Questions in the interview identify the sources used by practitioners when attempting to access digital objects created by others as part of research for their own creative work. This provides a 'practitioner's-eye view' of performance collections, that is to say the resources they use as collections for research, irrespective of the formal designation or intended purpose of such resources.Here, this enquiry is set into the broader context of digital curation and preservation. The approach to the interviewing is described, findings are discussed and the presence of possible skills and knowledge gaps is presented. Concluding remarks indicate the implications of these indicative findings for the representation of performance arts practice for current and future generations, and suggest useful future areas of enquiry. Bio Laura Molloy is a Preservation Researcher at the Humanities Advanced Technology andInformation Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow. Following an MA (Hons) Scottish Language and Literature at University of Glasgow, she returned to the University in March 2007 to join the Arts and Humanities Data Service ('AHDS') Performing Arts team. She has since worked on a number of European and UK-based digital preservation and curation projects and is specifically interested in articulating digital curation to all disciplines of research and practice, including those beyond the sciences.Her researcher profile is at http://glasgow.academia.edu/LauraMolloy/.2 A significant proportion of performing arts practitioners produce work outside institutional support structures such as those offered by academia or other large institution such as a national or regional theatre. The wide availability of affordable digital recording devices has allowed such practitioners to become active in the creation of digital objects in the course of researching, rehearsing and creating their work, and also in documenting rehearsals and staged presentations. Digital curation encompasses the processes and skills required for the sustainable management of digital assets thro...

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“…This assertion, also proposed by Amelia Jones (1997), is particularly interesting when addressing the type of performance-based art actions recounted in Margins and Institutions, a text that provides the vehicle to encounter the art event, which had very few witnesses in its non-mediated form. Auslander is primarily concerned with the more obvious technologies of reproduction (video and particularly sound recordings) yet in a later text he also explains that, even though it is important to make distinctions between different types of mediation, it is also possible to approach 'all forms of documentation, recording and reproduction as equivalent' The crucial relationship is not the one between the document and the performance but the one between the document and its audience.…”

Section: Encountering a Documentmentioning

confidence: 90%

Reception and Contingency in Recent Art from Chile

Vodanovic

2014

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

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The re-edition of the book Margins and Institutions by NellyRichard, a landmark in the study of Chilean art produced during the dictatorship of General Pinochet, reminds of how the original publication contributed to shape a particular reception of these ephemeral works that almost nobody witnessed. The images of the book appear removed from time and space and do not give much information about their original situations, yet this article discusses how, paradoxically, this has enabled an intimate reception of those works: the personal memories of the audience filled in the gaps left by the book, as attested by an ethnographic research project carried out to explore the constructed nature of this response.These ideas are discussed in relation to the recent process of internationalization of Chilean art, highlighting the differences between the contemporary context and the former one, and the importance of paying attention to the late receptor of these pieces.

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"Presence" in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation

Cited by 43 publications

References 0 publications

Performances, Preservation, and Policy Implications: Digital Curation and Preservation Awareness and Strategy in the Performing Arts

Performances, Preservation, and Policy Implications: Digital Curation and Preservation Awareness and Strategy in the Performing Arts

Digital curation skills in the performing arts – an investigation of practitioner awareness and knowledge of digital object management and preservation

Reception and Contingency in Recent Art from Chile

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