Angela Grauerholz
www.atworkandplay

atworkandplay—the document

ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ

www.atworkandplay was specifically conceived for the Internet and modelled on the idea of a memory palace¹. It offers a new way to navigate within an archive of more than 4,000 documents about the history of modernism, as well as the ability to visualize, in real time, the path created and to generate a different “memory palace” with every visit. Originally put online in 2009 and produced in collaboration with VOX, the website was deactivated when the animation software called Flash (Adobe) was taken off the market. As a result, and because the programmer for the website was not able to find the source code, there was no hope to recuperate or transfer the site to another.

While the data remained online and the archive essentially stayed intact, visits to the site are now impossible. It seems, that a lot of money is accessible from funding agencies for creating new digital works, but none are available to maintain and save earlier examples of a well-researched and constructed works such as this one. This lack of funding for the conservation of digital art works will have long-term repercussions for artists thinking about and working with new technologies. A defunct artwork is a dead artwork and despite the undisputed advantages of working in the digital realm, we are creating and will continue to create vulnerable works, the loss or obsolesce of which is potentially built in.

In researching and trying to find solutions, the idea for a video documenting a visit to the website was born. Recordings of earlier visits to the sites were very scarce and of poor quality, but we were determined to produce something that could give an idea of what the work looked and felt like. During one of many conversations, we started to speculate on what would happen if we tried playing the site on an old computer. I happened to have an old model of an iMac that had not been used nor updated for several years, and low and behold when opening the site everything was there in perfect working order. We set about to document many visits, long ones, short ones, good ones and bad ones, and with more recent software we were able to make fairly good copies of each and every visit. Over many weeks we edited these visits into one cohesive video that would demonstrate, or one could say, recount the many potential stories (pathways) collapsed into one long one.

The film collage could be considered the basic architectural structure for the memory palace–a circular outside wall of the archive–but it is also meant to serve as a perpetual motion machine that one could imagine to be looping around its perimeter. The nine entry points into the inner world of the archive are structural devices used to classify fields of knowledge, each named after different activities (collect, construct, create, write, sense, dying, think, live, tame).

Once inside the elastic interface, a grid of nine spaces, some filled and some empty, animates the progression while the visitor simply chooses which of the images or texts offered he/she wants to look at or read. Each item corresponds to a number or code and each caption is available on the upper right-hand corner. Each journey through the archive is visualized by a drawing that unfolds within a green square on the bottom of the screen. It tells the visitor how their exploration is progressing in time and space. At any time, one can always return to the film collage, abandon the animated interface and by the same token, reenter the archive through one of the entry points. At the end of each visit, the visitor has a choice to either break off, start over, or create their own personalized memory palace. An isometric structure, which has every one of the images and texts viewed imbedded in, can be revisited at the viewer’s leisure. One can call up every image or text by choosing one of the codes lining up on top of the screen or by clicking on the points in the architectural structure mimicking what we call today ‘cookies.’

In fact, the tracing of visited data has become so much easier today than it was in 2009. One of my main motivations for creating this work was to find an architecture that reflected the idea of a memory palace and also served as a model for the Internet: a means to understand how we do research, how our minds guide us to discover new information and at the same time classify our experiences. [2024]

www.atworkandplay is no longer accessible due to the obsolescence of Flash Player, which is no longer supported by web browsers. In 2024, Angela Grauerholz created a filmic document to preserve a record of the work. Visit the artist’s website

atworkandplay–A Web Experimentation

VINCENT BONIN

Angela Grauerholz’s 1980s work involved subtle shifts of a repertoire of common motifs in modern visual culture. The blurring of codes resulting from the photographic act represented an attempt to postpone their obsolescence. In Eglogue or Filling the Landscape (1995) and Sententia I to LXII (1996), these loci were grasped through the logic of the document and the archival system. The latter installation was both the end of a cycle and a harbinger of the artist’s more recent practice, characterized by another intellectual process pertaining to the organization of artefacts in space. Having momentarily abandoned the manufactured image, Grauerholz now intercepts heterogeneous documentary materials (e.g., pages from exhibition catalogues, magazines articles, text fragments, manuscripts) and conveys them into the space allotted to artworks.

With Reading Room for the Working Artist (2003-2004)², she created twelve volumes to serve as the repository for that archive. Each book contains one or more themed headings under which Grauerholz collates contiguous objects. Far from reproducing encyclopedic categories, these headings derive from a subjective mapping of all the accumulated documents. Read more

This project is a production of VOX in association with Sylvain Allard, graphic designer, and Clenche Inc. and was made possible thanks to financial assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as the Hexagram Fund.