Imagining the Future of a Complex Mixed-media Work: The Case of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s The Floating Museum

Abstract

Over the last twenty years museums have systematically digitized the contents of their archives and, increasingly, the data and documents produced through these processes are used, alongside historic documents, to engage audiences on- and offline (see, for example, Tate’s Archives and Access project, 2012–2017).[1] For art museums, this has increasingly involved the digitization of materials related to performance and new media. When this has occurred, it has been found that museums often only have partial data pertaining to these kinds of works. This has to do with questions related to how museums originally documented performance and new media, as well as with the inherent complexity of capturing information about these specific genres.[2] Artists, too, nowadays often digitize historic documaentations of their work, frequently submitting existing documentations of their artworks that do not yet form part of museum collections to universities or national libraries and archives for preservation purposes. However, simply digitizing existing data pertaining to these works is often not sufficient to generate high-quality, future-facing documentations that could communicate the complexity of a work to generations to come. This is because, as Renée van de Vall, Anna Hölling, Tatja Scholte, and Sannike Stigter suggested, “The meaning of an object and the effects it has on people and events may change during its existence,” which means that we should construct the “lives” of these objects “as individual trajectories.”[3] Digitization projects, however, rarely cross-reference contextual documentation collected before, during, or after a given live event, which means that the relation between different versions of a work or different works that may form part of a wider body of work are often lost.