Name

Ariane Noël de Tilly

Title of research project / research interests

Living Through Instantiations: The Re-exhibition of Video and Film Installations

Affiliation(s)

Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

Supervisor(s)

Dr. Julia Noordegraaf and Prof.dr. José van Dijck

Estimated date of completion

2011

Previous education and/or work experience

Studies:

M.A. in Art History (2005), Université de Montréal

International Summer Seminar in Museology, École du Louvre (Summer 2004)

B.A. in Art History (2003), Université de Montréal

Work:

- Research Assistant, DOCAM Alliance (Documentation and Conservation of the Media Arts Heritage), Fondation Daniel Langlois pour l’art, la science et la technologie & National Gallery of Canada (July 2006 - August 2007), www.docam.ca

- Internship in Collection Management, National Gallery of Canada (January - June 2006)

- Teaching assistant, Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques, Université de Montréal (September 2003 - December 2005)

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on intersecting events occurring in the life cycle of editioned video and film installations: the inaugural exhibition, the artwork’s distribution, its preservation, and the subsequent re-exhibitions. These events are crucial phases in the formation of the work’s identity and behaviour. The aim of my dissertation is to understand how these phases influence the identity of editioned media artworks and to develop a model for describing these works. The main research questions of the dissertation are: Who are the mediators involved in the life cycle of an editioned video or film installation? What are their influence(s) on the life cycle of editioned works of art? How do these mediators shape the identity and the authenticity of these works? And finally, how do they affect their display, distribution and preservation? In order to answer these questions, the dissertation proposes to develop the notion of script as a methodological tool. The script as used in my doctoral dissertation has been influenced by the definition proposed by Madeleine Akrich in the field of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). Akrich argues that “like a film script, technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act.” Whereas for Akrich the script is a set of instructions implicit in the technical object, I propose an active theoretical standpoint: scripting artworks, which I define as a process to seize the necessary conditions for time-based artworks’ instantiations. Scripting an artwork is writing a set of actions allowing the definition of its identity; it is a way to acknowledge all the mediators making its existence possible. In my dissertation, I studied the scripting of editioned media artworks by tracing the life cycles of three case studies: Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time (2003), Mike Kelley’s Day is Done (2005) and John Massey’s As the Hammer Strikes (A Partial Illustration) (1982). The case studies showed that in order to understand the identity of editioned media artworks, taking their exhibition history into account is of the outmost importance, since the identity of these works takes shape over time, changing with each public manifestation. Therewith, the research showed that it is crucial to approach the scripting of editioned media artworks as a dynamic process.

E-mail

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it