In analogy to generic research processes consisting of the collection, processing, and reorganization of data, we distinguish the three following forms of action in performative research:
1. accumulating
2. processing
3. synthesizing
The starting point for this particular process is methods of knowledge organization1 developed in the early twentieth century by practitioners and theoreticians such as Aby Warburg, Niklas Luhmann, or Walter Benjamin. With more than 2,000 images in his pictorial atlas “Mnemosyne”, the art historian Aby Warburg attempted to combine a collection of reproduced visual materials with philosophy and thereby illustrate historical developments. Niklas Luhmann’s library of roughly 120,000 index cards served the sociologist as an archive of notes, text passages, and snippets, which he could draw upon and refer to at any time. In his “Arcades Project” the philosopher Walter Benjamin used descriptive categories to arrange a montage of quotations from hundreds of published sources. All three developed an archival approach to knowledge, based on either visual or textual contingency.
In this historical dimension but also in the post-digital context of originalcopy we understand the archive as not just “a passive store, but an active generator. Seen in this way the ‘data’, whether they are texts or images, are not just what is ‘given’, but something that is made, produced—they are ‘facts’.”2 These notions serve as a guiding thread through the accumulative research processes, in which we collect photographic copies of artworks, artworks themselves, theoretical texts and terminologies as well as everyday cultural props from the Internet. Each element added to the collection is interconnected with others via browsable keywords, ensuring that all elements remain viewable/readable and replicable. Through linking the keywords the hyper-structurally organized material can be navigated in ever-new ways, meaning that “the discursivity of multimedia and how it can be associated with a dialectical aesthetic is characterized by the ways in which montage-like spatial juxtaposition—achieved through hyperlink structures and searchability—is drawn upon for narrative effect.”3 The functionality of links and databases transcends conventional tabular, classificatory forms, such as the collection archive, catalog, and methods of spatial arrangement in galleries.
Similar to the way in which Warburg’s illustrations and Luhmann’s index cards were adapted to the changing formats and needs of exhibitions, lectures, or different text types, we constantly reconfigure the collected visual and textual material of originalcopy. This act of processing draws upon the concept of translation borrowed from Walter Benjamin. As early as the 1920s the philosopher had objected to the binary nature of traditional translation methods and promoted the idea of transparency between an original and its translation: “It [the translation] does not cover the original, does not black its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.”4 Analogously, in originalcopy we regard contemporary copying practices as transformative, interpretative, and thus translative to the original.
While the acts of accumulation and processing affect the inner structure of the research, synthesizing as a third party accompanies the other two with methodological analysis. Keeping in mind the main research question of how post-digital copying techniques can be rendered artistically productive for the investigation of the same, with synthesizing we develop a meta-methodology of today’s copying practices. The aim is to shed light on the in/visibility of the copy and to visualize its status as a historically, culturally, and technically embedded phenomenon by classifying actual copying strategies and by being responsive to them in a reciprocal and therefore performative manner.
In contrast to familiar research methods, there is not a temporal sequence of individual processes that stipulates the development of the research, rather the focus is on the permanent flow and return between its individual constituents. To become effective within the framework of the project originalcopy and its underlying methodology of performative research it is decisive that accumulation, processing, and synthesizing are not performed separately from one another; they must constantly remain present in the respective other. Only through maintaining the balance between these processes can the performative research feed back into the research field and at the same time constitute it.
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1 Cf. Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer, “Zettelkastens Traum,” in Wissensprozesse in der Netzwerkgesellschaft, ed. Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer (Bielefeld: Transcipt, 2005), 7–27.
2 Rudolf Frieling, “Mapping and Text (Editorial),” Medien Kunst Netz (2004), accessed August 22, 2016, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/mapping_and_text/editorial/1/.
3 Vince Dziekan, “Beyond the Museum Walls: Situating Art in Virtual Space (Polemic Overlay and Three Movements),” FibreCulture Journal, Distributed Aesthetics issue, 7 (2007), accessed August 22, 2016, http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue7/issue7_ver2_Beyond%20the%20Museum%20Walls.pdf.
4 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Routledge, 2004), 81.