Recording & Fixed Media

How does fixed medium documentation change artistic practices?

- new art forms emerge: film, recording, video/TV and digitally based new media

- there is a range of approaches to the use of fixed media, along the continuum:

Documented performance <------> Document as performance

- “documented performance” implies a certain neutrality to the capture, but in fact is influenced by every aspect of the documentary medium:

(e.g. microphones, cameras, formats, placement, fidelity) and whether it provides a single modality (e.g. audio only) or multiple

- note that early anthropological field practice "documented" (and distorted) folk music with notation, then recordings

- “document as performance” is often team produced, and based on standardized production values and practices;

- gives the illusion or image of an actual performance, ranging from the pseudo-real, idealized, hyper-real, to completely artificial, imaginary (“virtual”), constructed realities

- preferred placement along the continuum differs by genre; e.g.

classical music traditionally identifies the live performance as the norm and reproductions an image of it (as challenged by Gould, Culshaw et al.);
pop music tends to view the recording as the “real” document, and any live performance strives to simulate it for promotional purposes (cf. Théberge)
electroacoustic music traditionally treats the fixed work in terms of its "master" format, with mixdown reductions or translations, and the commercial recording formats (LPs, CDs, 5.1, mp3 etc) as a distribution format (with exceptions, such as Morton Subotnick's LP commissions)

- the historical development of each of these formats parallels changes in listening habits and preferences (Thompson, Sterne, Simes, Katz, et al.) and perhaps performance practice as well

- recordings in turn influence future generations of live performers, particularly those involved with improvisation, aural tradition and so on

Contemporary art music practice today

- acoustic – mixed (live + electronics) – electroacoustic (fixed medium and live performance) – new media (cf. Manovitch)

- note archival problems associated with each of these: succession of formats (e.g. vinyl, tape, DAT, CD, digital files) all of which need machines to read them

- with improvisatory forms, the choice of “fixing” a live performance vs maintaining the machines required to produce the live work (can the latter “migrate”?)

- multi-media/new media works multiply the problems of documentation

- some works may be fixed; others indeterminate, algorithmic, stochastic, interactive, distributed (i.e. internet based), conceptual, etc.

- fixed medium works, however, can lead back to live performance (diffusion) interpretations

- physical survival of art works vs their cultural survival when marginalized

- does digital data and software make cultural artifacts more ephemeral or give potential longevity?