Without addresses (variant 4)

Overview

In 2024 Zentrum für Netzkunst has applied for their first full scale reconstruction project. Even though in the past the initative has aquired project budget to pay artists to reconstruct their work, this was the first time a conceptual approach and a methodology was developed for a reconstruction project. The reconstruction project was founded by Digis "Förderprogramm zur Digitalisierung von Kulturgut des Landes Berlin" as the very first project on digital-born artwork.

Data inventory assessment

The artist Karl Heinz Jeron posessed a copy of the original files on an external hard drive. However, as the team later found out, the f.hmtl (index page) of variant 1 was no longer available.

Later in the proccess through a photography found in the documenta archive, we discovered that there was a blue menu in the variant 1, which was however slightly different to the menu used in variant 3. Unfortunately, the menu pages concept.html, context.html, and credits.html were no longer available because they were part of the f.html original index page.

In general it was often difficult to prove the age or the version of the archived files.

Variants

Following the data model by Rhozime's Artbase the reconstruction team decided to adopt the concept of variants as the Rhizome preservation team understands it.

At the begining of our research there were only two known variants - the original v1 and the CD v3. However, while searching through the screenshots that documanted the work we found out two additional URLs on sero.org and klondike.icf.de. Unfortunatelly, the artists do not remeber the exact nature of these two variants. Nor is there enough evidence based on the secondary documantation to judge the exact form nor the exact dates of these variants. Likely, the artists moved everything there was from the original HP-UX server to their own server.

Technical Narrative

In 2009 SFMoMa proposed new method for documentation of software based artworks called "technical narrative", which they published in The Electronic Media Review by Electronic Media Group. Based on this method the reconstruction team has created technical diagrams for each variant of the work without addresses. Those are saved in wikibase as PDF in documentation section under each variant. This way it's possible to see the shift of functionality of the work as well as platform specific characteristics. A functional description of the work as a platform-neutral description is also part of the wiki documentation.

Simulation

User entries

In variant 1 of without addresses the users were able to generate new html pages. Those are commonly called 'user entries' in the documentation and the wiki texts. In variant 1 total of 37.843 documents and 684 MB data were generated over the course of documenta x. After the end of documenta no other variant was able to generate new entries.

The generated pages were created by an algorithmus which searched online and created a new page. The images found were very difirent in nature - from photographs, logos of companies, parts of webdesign (such as parts of menus, division lines, simple background images which were used as 'tiles',

The reconstruction team has decided to select only a portion of the original user entries. Devided into 4 groups the team has reviewed the original entries and decided to include 946 entries. There were selected in a way to represent the deversity of the generated pages. The selection should allow the viewer to understand the general nature of the pages. For work on such a big database of data an automatic data analysis might be an interesting tool.

For the variant 4 the reconstruction team faced a new challenge - the protection of copyrights and private data in the user generated pages.