De evolutie van toegang tot informatie

AD: Can you describe your background?
CJ: My background is in Art History and Archival Studies. As a student in Art History I was primarily interested in Contemporary Art, film and photography. From my interest in film grew an interest in preservation and archival strategies for film and video. After working in a number of small galleries and artist run centers in Canada, I was offered the Daniel Langlois Fellowship in Variable Media Preservation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which is what put me on my current path.

AD: What got you interested in documentation strategies?
CJ: My interest in documentation strategies grew from my work with the Variable Media Network. Something that kept coming up over and over again when we talked about the conservation of ephemeral art forms was the need to document all the different iterations of a work. From the differences and similarities that could be seen in different versions of the same work, we could help to identify core elements of an art work.
How these documents were created then became an important part of my research: what documents should we collect, from whom, for what purpose, how (and who) do we access them, and who's perspective (documents) should we priviledge, are the research questions I'm interested in now.

AD: How did the research you attended (inside movement knowledge) fit into this?
CJ: It was incredibly interesting to see another field grappling with the same issues, but more interesting were the differences. For example, the way that dancers and choreographers describe their field, is by it's very nature, a more physical description than in contemporary art. Often an important point would be illustrated with a physical action (that made the point much more clear) -- and this should be captured in any dance documentation process.
My attendance at IMK gave me a lot to think about - both about my previous work, and the work I hope to do in the future.

AD: With ever new (media) technologies methods for archiving and documentation become more important, how do you see this field evolving in the future?
CJ: Hopefully we will see an evolution in terms of access to information. I recognize that a lot of issues of access are currently due to privacy, copy right and other digital rights management issues, but it would be nice to have increased access to information. And along the same vein, it would be great to develop a system that could link a number of existing projects together. One of the main problems that I see is that there are numerous different documentation projects going on around the world, and despite best attempts, they all exist independently of each other. It would be a huge development in the field to have a way to access information from all of these projects from a central location.

AD: Could new communication structures, for example web2.0 strategies, play a role in documentation (influence of oral history / visualisation techniques)?
CJ: I think that Web 2.0 can offer a lot to the field of documentation. For my case-study (with Lizzie Muller and the Daniel Langlois Foundation) on David Rokeby's "Giver of Names", we created a widget that automatically searched sites like Flickr and YouTube for keywords related to this specific work. This way, you are getting a wide variety of perspectives (museum, curator, viewer, etc) of a work. The main problem with this however is that you then are reliant upon people tagging their photographs and videos appropriately.