Bytes, Data, Backups, Uploads, Reviews, Photographs: The Role of Documentation and Preservation in Contemporary Art
We might say, exaggerating just a little and using this as a provocation to open the article, that all contemporary art is, ultimately, documentation. This is not a mere semantic shift but an observation rooted in the very nature of artistic languages, which arise and evolve with a specific function beyond communication: to record, to fix, to transfer, in other words, to preserve traces of what would otherwise dissolve in the flow of experience (in our case, artistic experience).
Whether it is a plein air painting, a conceptual text, a Super8 film recording, or a casually captured smartphone image later reshared in Instagram stories, perhaps after multiple compressions and resaves, what unites these gestures is their primary function: to freeze, at least partially, the instability of reality, to fix and communicate the artistic idea.
It is crucial to remember, however, that the medium is never a neutral container. Every form of recording is structurally mediated, and with it change the conditions of perception, reception, and interpretation. The same narrative shifts radically depending on whether it is conveyed through cinema, painting, Polaroids, or an Instagram slideshow. Each language carries with it a specific set of technical and semiotic affordances, formal qualities, operative constraints, expressive strengths, and technological limits.
Yet the technical or communicative dimension of the medium is not our main concern here. The critical point emerges elsewhere, precisely when contemporary art itself consciously, or sometimes latently, assumes the function of documenting as an integral part of its structure. Too often today, the artwork is no longer merely documented, it becomes documentation itself, a media agent, an active node within a system of recording, memory, online sharing, and online persistence.
In this sense, the image, not as an object but as an epistemic status, reveals its transformative nature more than ever. It does not simply represent something, it performs a translation: altering the meaning, form, and context of whatever it intercepts. The logic of photography, for instance, is not exhausted by visually recording an event, but reframes that event through a technical and cultural apparatus that reshapes its perceptual and narrative parameters.
Photography, like other visual languages, does not preserve reality but constructs an operative version of it, which in turn becomes material for further documentation, circulation, remixing, speculation, anticipation, and expectation. Within this spiral of rewritings, the contemporary artwork, in its documented condition, positions itself as an interface between aesthetic production and dynamic memory, between experience and archive, between artistic gesture and media protocol.
The medium as co-author: formal constraints and technological agency
Years ago, almost by chance and in the company of old friends, each of us held a different device: an old digital reflex camera, a MiniDV camcorder, and a newly released iPhone. We were all looking at the same landscape, a field cut by the late afternoon light, with a power line in the background and a dog running free. Each of us recorded that moment, each in our own way, each convinced that we had “captured it.”
Reviewing the material later that evening, the sharp and dense photograph from the reflex, the grainy and flickering footage from the MiniDV, and the hyper-saturated, unstable clip from the iPhone, we realized that we did not have three versions of the same event but three different events, three visual gestures with distinct structures and temporalities, three implicit interpretations of the same reality.
We did not yet know it, but we were experiencing firsthand the proof of a theoretical fact: there is no document that is not also structure. There is no medium that does not transform, that does not inscribe its own logic into the image it produces.
If every language documents, then every medium, by extension, structures. We never use a device as if it were a transparent window onto reality, every medium acts as an implicit co-author, embedding within the content an invisible yet binding grammar.
Taking a photo with an iPhone, filming on Super8, or saving a compressed GIF in a cloud drive are not merely technical variations of the same act, they are ontologically different gestures, because each medium imposes a specific form of agency on the image, determining its perceptual quality, temporality, portability, and above all its cultural legibility.
The contemporary artist, whether aware of it or not, never interacts with a “pure” language but with a stratified set of constraints and affordances: limits of resolution, algorithmic rules of distribution (such as Instagram’s visibility algorithm), compression formats, metadata, watermarks. Every media choice becomes an implicit statement, a semiotic act structured as much as the work itself.
This logic becomes particularly evident when the artist does not attempt to bypass the medium but instead foregrounds it, making it visible as part of the process. Think of works where the aesthetics of low resolution, visible interface, pixelation, or rendering errors are deliberately adopted as a conscious language.
In these cases, the work is not simply mediated, it is built as a commentary on, or as a by-product of, the mediation itself. The medium does not record external content, it generates its own content through its form. As Marshall McLuhan once suggested, “the medium is the message,” but in today’s digital condition we could go further and say, the medium is the operational model of the world.
Within the context of artistic documentation, this means that the visual trace does not merely record the work, it transforms it, encodes it, at times even replaces it. Here the active role of the medium fully manifests itself as co-author, as an implicit agent constantly rewriting the relationship between art, memory, and perception.
Compressions, Errors, Glitches: Aesthetics Of Digital Imperfection
Let us imagine a simple experiment, something not far from what happens every day on our smartphones. We take an ordinary photograph. We save it as a JPEG with maximum compression. Then we reopen it, re-save it. Again, and again, one hundred times. The image deteriorates: pixels collapse, colors blur and smear.
What remains is not just an error, but the memory of its passage, a compressed relic of itself.
If documentation today is a native component of the artwork, we must acknowledge that its form is never neutral, nor ever perfect. In the digital transmission of images, error is no longer an anomaly to be corrected, but often an aesthetic element to be embraced, an involuntary signature of the medium that exposes its infrastructure.
Compressions, visual artifacts, glitches, digital noise, resolution loss, everything that was once read as a decline in quality now emerges as a language in its own right. Contemporary art has recognized this reversal and adopted it as creative material: imperfection becomes style, error becomes method.
This shift is not accidental, but stems from a new awareness: the digital medium does not archive without interfering, it actively shapes the document, even in ways that remain invisible. A JPEG saved and re-saved repeatedly does not merely lose fidelity to its original image, it gains a temporal stratification, a kind of digital age that transforms it into a compressed relic of itself.
The glitch, an internal rupture in encoding, appears as the visible trace of a conflict between intention and system, between what the author designs and what the medium allows. And it is precisely in this friction that many artists find access to the real, in a way more honest than any high-definition simulation. The real, insofar as it is unstable, fragmented, irreproducible, cannot be compressed without side effects. The glitch, in this sense, is the collateral trace of reality resisting capture.
Compression, on the other hand, is not merely a technical issue: it is an epistemic metaphor. To understand what happens to an image when it is reduced, trimmed, simplified, so that it can be uploaded, shared, monetized, means to question our relationship with memory, with transmissibility, with truth.
The Time Of The Image: Duration, Loop, And Obsolescence
In the digital regime, the time of the image no longer coincides with the time of experience. The documentary image, far from being a mere snapshot, constructs autonomous temporalities, often misaligned with the linear time of narration, of viewing, or of memory.
Analog photography, in its original format, marked a point: a before and an after. Digital imagery, by contrast, no longer marks an event, but a cycle. The file does not testify to a presence, but to a recursivity: it is uploaded, saved, shared, duplicated, converted, reused. And in each of these iterations, the image loses something and gains something else: compression, metadata, traceability, accessibility, but also saturation, exhaustion, obsolescence.
It is within this scenario that the paradigm of the loop emerges: not only as an aesthetic form (from the GIF to the video installation), but as the existential condition of the contemporary image. The document no longer has a beginning and an end, but persists in a circular condition, exposing itself to minimal variations, imperceptible reiterations, forms of resistance or algorithmic evaporation.
Meanwhile, in the background, the question of technical fragility advances. Supports are updated, formats go extinct, platforms cease to exist. Entire archives become inaccessible because they are incompatible with current software or corrupted in the transfer from one device to another. Unlike the myth of eternal digital memory, obsolescence is structural and unavoidable: every file is already, potentially, a ghost of itself.
And yet, it is precisely within this temporal instability that one of the most significant challenges for contemporary art is played out. The artwork, aware of its own transience, begins to include its own decay within the project itself: the deterioration of a codec, the failure of a synchronization, the non-linearity of a playback become semantic components. They are not errors, but choreographic elements of the time that the work inhabits.
In the shift from the document as memory to the document as duration, a new form of critical attention opens up: one that reads the image not for what it shows, but for how long it remains visible, accessible, readable, shareable. And, above all, for how long it will continue to resist the oblivion of its own support.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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