Gallery9/Walker Art Center announces "The Unreliable Archivist," a project
by Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito.

Commissioned on the occasion of the official archiving at the Walker of the
influential art site ada'web, "The Unreliable Archivist" allows the user to
recombine aspects of ada'web according to a somewhat questionable--but not
wholly unreasonable--set of categories, from "plain" to "preposterous." As
unreliable archivists, Cohen, Frank, and Ippolito question what it means to
archive or "fix" such a dynamic medium. There is also an implicit warning
about the possibility that our mad rush to database all known facts may be
as likely to engender lunacy as illumination.

In an interview published in conjunction with the project, I asked the
artistic trio how this "authorized hack" of ada'web reflects their interest
in the adversarial aspects of collaboration:

JC: In our nondigital work the adversarial aspect of our collaboration
often entails fighting with each other. In our online work and in the few
group shows we've been in, you could say that we take on other artists as
our adversaries.

KF: So it takes a strong group with confidence in themselves and their work
to deal with us successfully....äda'web had the advantage of being one of
the first structured art Web sites, and it featured many works that were
inextricably tied to the medium.

JI: The Unreliable Archivist proposes a particularly irreverent approach to
re-presenting äda'web: an archivist who has preserved the pieces but has
mixed up which pages they belong to. In a curious way, this scrambling may
be more faithful to the dynamic of the Web than preserving the integrity of
each page....raising the question of whether äda'web is more or less than
the sum of its parts.

The project itself (and the rest of the interview) can be found at
http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/three/.

**    **   Steve Dietz                     || YProductions
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