Editorial

 

 

Welcome to the first edition of the e-journal
MAP - Media | Archive | Performance

 

MAP #1  Fluid Access™ - Opened



Recent works and exhibitions on the history of performance art have given new momentum to the concept of archives for the performing arts. As time passes and interest in art performances continues, the question of preserving materials and documents, remains and recordings, and their medial nature, becomes increasingly relevant. What can we base our continued knowledge of art, science and popular culture on today and in the future? This is one of the central questions we ask.

We propose fluidity, fluid access, as a basic prerequisite for a more open kind of knowledge acquisition which could link up the scattered potential of protagonists in different fields, and ask: How can we put the idea of fluid access into practice?

The following contributions to the first edition of MAP approach these questions from different perspectives of subject and method and attempt to give particular consideration to individual aspects. For this launch edition we have divided the contributing articles into four sections:

 

I. Movement + Archive

The contributions in this section question the composition and working methods of dance archives in view of the ephemeral nature of the object they document (F. A. Cramer); they deal with movements in artistic work on the archive (B. Mangolte) and they create a link with a media-archaeological-based concept of movement (W. Ernst).

II. Archive_Practice

shows by means of various examples how relevant ways of reading archive+(hi)stories can be developed, in the context of questions of aesthetic politics (B. Clausen), media  theory (B. Büscher) and sociology (B. v. Bismarck), by precisely observing and contextualising artefacts. Also in this section, a current archive project and its performative presentation are profiled (F. Feigl/O. Wagner).

III. Artistic Practice as Research

puts together contributions in different media formats which take an artistic look at the archive; examining historical landmarks (Vaslav Nijinski, Allan Kaprow, Pupilija Ferkeverk) and investigating the possibility of archival portrayal of individual artistic projects (deufert+plischke).

IV. Digital archive scenarios

shows new aspects of archiving in the context of game scenarios and the everyday use of Youtube (M. Wagner) as well as strategies for constructing data bases and archives on the Internet (G. Blome).

Finally, the consideration of performative writing in an electronic environment should spark discussion of the status and future progress of this project (W.D. Ernst).

 

This edition is a work in progress – in the sense that we will continue to expand upon and re-order contributions in the coming weeks so that new correlations can be made other than those suggested by the current arrangement into sections.

Lastly, we wish to point out two problems of which we are aware but have not yet been able to solve:

We too have come up against the problem of copyright in Internet publications. For this reason, at least two articles will appear without their intended illustrations (B. Clausen, B. v.Bismarck). We hope that cooperation with similarly positioned projects will enable us to work on a solution.

We do not have a standard ruling for the use of male and female pronouns – this being the case, where authors have used the male pronoun only, the female pronoun should be read as implicit.

A pdf version of articles to be downloaded will be available by 20 March 09.

We intend to continue to report here on the project’s development and current editions of the e-Journal.

If you would like to receive regular updates on our work, please send us a short eMail under the ref “Newsletter” to >>

mail(at)perfomap.de

 

We look forward to your reactions, suggestions
and further ideas.

Barbara Büscher, Franz Anton Cramer, Thomas Bitterlich, René Damm

 

January 2009  | www.perfomap.de
Translation: Charlotte Kreutzmüller