ArtDoc - an Experimental Archive and a Tool for Artistic Research

Henrik Frisk, Docent and Associate Professor

What is it to document a musical work?

Record it?
Describe it?
Represent it?
Given the method:
- what is lost?
- what is gained?
A documentation is a transformation.

I'm very honored to be part of this seminar and I wish to thank Roberto for inviting me.

Perhaps the most obvious way is to record a performance of the work, but what is gained, or lost, in the transformation from the work's material reality to its recorded representation?

I attempt to approach this question indirectly by presenting a method for documenting the both the result as well as the processes behind the creation of a musical work.

particular challenges in the genres I work in (improv, electronic music) has guided the choices made.

What is lost/gained in the transfromation?

An assumption made here is that the process that leads up to a finished version of a work of music contains information that is valuable both for the musician performing the work and the listener that approaches the result. This assumption has been a guiding principle in much of the developments of artistic research in the last couple of decades.

There is a general lack of stable solutions that work both as tools for documenting artistic processes and work for documenting the results.

RC
CASPAR
EMDoku
The Catalog (Hugh Davies): shaped the way electro acoustic music is thought of.

Methods for documentation

An archived score is relatively easy to represent accurately but is a poor representation of the actual music.
A recording of a performance is an accurate representation of the sound but a poor representation of the material performance.
How may a sustainable archive for artistic research and artistic practice be structured such that it avoids the risk that the archiving force hides important aspects of the data?

In artistic research the material basis of the artistic practice may be both data and result

Unsatisfying in this context: both aspects are difficult to represent.
It is necessary to critically examine the relations between artistic practice in music and its possible representations in various forms for archives

Work models

A work centered view

The work is the result and the result is the work. In music this can be the sounding trace, or sometimes just the score, or the media.
In this case a recording may be a decent documentation.

A process oriented view

The putting together of the material is an integral part of the identity of the work.
A recording of the result misses out on some of the important aspects.

Open works

The open work as a concept is part of an aesthetic movement since the 60s (See Umberto Eco, The Open Work)
The more radical version is the work-in-movement:

``It invites us to identify inside the category of `open' works a further, more restricted classification of works which can be defined as `works in movement', because they characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units.'' (Eco, 1968)

The problem

Repetition Repeats all Other Repetitions

Commisioned by and developed in collaboration with Swedish guitarist Stefan Östersjö.

Repetition Repeats all Other Repetitions

Has seen at least three distinct versions
Has been performed > 15 times in America, Europe and Asia
Has appeared on two different CDs
Yet, it has not found its definite form

Symphonie Diagonale

https://youtu.be/zyoXQuCQn1s

The work's identity?

no such thing as an ultimate performance, or rendering of the work
the work is a realizable potential
each performance makes possible a new work and this development is the true nature of the work's identity

Its documentation?

How can this incremental process be documented to allow the work-in-movement to continue to move and not just repeat itself?
Is an archive that archives in order to allow for change possible or even desirable?
Usually, the point of the archive is to preserve.

Documentation classes

The structure of the archive is a set of classes that represent different kinds of resources and it is a feature of the system that classes can easily be added and extend the basic classes. There are a number of general, abstract, classes that serve as templates for further specialized classes. For example, the two base classes that most other classes inherit from are the Class and Document classes. As a consequence a reference of the type Document can point to almost any kind of resource in the archive, and all instances of any type that are children of these classes will have the same basic set of attributes. Similarly, an OrganizationalUnit is the base class for all kinds of references to Persons, Users or Authors.

A Collection is a means for grouping resources together, and a View is a presentation of a list of one or more such collections.

One of the fundamental properties of this experimental documentation archive is the Connection class. It defines a connection between two instances and the principle is that it should be possible to connect anything to anything – that is any Document may be connected to any other Document. In this way connected objects can create a semantic web where the kinds of connections, as well as the number of connections, gives the user information about the documented data. Hence, connections give meaning to instances, and instances can further be understood through the number of connections they have. In this way, even after the raw data has been entered and connections have been made, the archive becomes a method in its own right. Furthermore, connections of the type TimedConnection can point to a specific point in time, or a range, in an instance that documents some kind of time based data such as an audio or video file.

The Archive - The connection class

<Class xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
    <cname>Connection</cname>
    <parent>Class</parent>
    <description>A child class to Document describing 
    any kind of connection between two nodes within the system. 
    The id of the connected classes are the references
    </description>
    <documentation>Documentation for this class</documentation>
    <attributes>
        <connection-from type="Ref" 
                         refclass="Document" 
                         desc="Connection from" 
                         edit="1" required="1"/>
        <connection-to type="Ref" 
                       refclass="Document" 
                       desc="Connection to" 
                       edit="1" required="1"/>
        <connection-type type="select" 
                         desc="Type of connection" 
                         edit="1" required="1"/>
    </attributes>
</Class>

Application

Documenting works composed for, or adapted to, the Klangkupolen at KMH in a sustainable manner:

A scratch on the surface

The question of how to best document the intense creative forces that digital technology allows for is without doubt one of the important ones in the upcoming decades.
The question of the archiving force of the archive needs to be taken into account.
The need to archive can be personal, institutional, political, economical, etc. These different needs are often not in sync.

The question of how to best document the creative forces that digital technology allows for is without doubt one of the important challenges in the near future. Though this is a question that has bearing on almost all aspects of social life in the 21st century, in the case of artistic practice in music there are a few important considerations that are of particular interest.

there is the risk that the nearly ubiquitous digital domain negatively influences the willingness to invest in an active listening process. Though there is little that actually points in this direction the convenience of online music services that delivers exactly the music it thinks we want to hear is intimidating at times. The materiality of music production in the widest sense is not necessarily encoded into the digital representation of music.
the incredible digital tools that we have at hand may make visible aspects of musical composition and performance in new and interesting ways. Collecting audio and video documentation, for example, has never been easier, but the massive amounts of data that it generates can be daunting without a structured method.

These are only two of many facets of the changes that digitization affords, but if these are addressed in a way that bring forth the conditions of musical practice they may provide interesting opportunities for the development of artistic practices. When the focus moves from the result to the processes prior to the result, the view on the musical work is likely to also change.

Future work

Make a stable implementation
Test it in a number of different configurations and for different purposes
Much more…

If it proves effective there are a number of ways in which it can be expanded. For example, currently ArtDoc is largely a single user application that offers musicians and composers to document their own work. However, its real strength will show when users can interact on projects together. The driving force in the development has been my own need for a tool to both document my work, but also to allow for a more efficient way to interact with my colleagues on projects. The basic ability to control access to individual items in the archive through permissions is already in place. Furthermore, the functionality that the classes \emph{Collection} and \emph{View} offer can with some modification turn the archive into a proper presentation tool, or even a tool for performance, in its own right.

In this short overview I have tried to argue for the need for new strategies for the documentation of artistic practice, as well as presented an experimental tool to meet these demands. A modular system with a hierarchy of documentation classes, an archive and a user client to enter and access data is under development and preliminary tests have been carried out. The primary purpose of ArtDoc, however, is to explore the various ways in which a documentation of an artistic practice can be carried out that provides meaningful information to both the artist and the listener.

Thank you!

Questions?