Anne Marie Duguet (University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) : An Anarchive Archive
Adam Lockhart (University of Dundee) : VR as an Archiving and Simulation Tool for Media Artworks
Emile Zile (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) : Wearing the Skin Suit: Interpretation and Reperformance of Historical Performance Art
Moderated by Serena Cangiano (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland)

The third session of the first day of Transformation Digital Art symposium 2019 at LIMA constituted a series of discussions and talks about new possibilities and strategies of preservation and re-presentation. The main theme of the session, moderated by Serena Cangiano, ​​reinterpretation, was examined by three speakers from different perspectives.

The session began with Anne Marie Duguet, Emeritus Professor at the University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, curator and art critic, who presented the project Anarchive. It consists of a series of interactive multimedia projects (17 published series so far) designed in various ways to explore the complete work of an artist with the help of archival material designed and produced in cooperation with the artists. Anarchive is an historical and critical research in which the main purpose is to constitute the memory and increase public awareness for contemporary art.

Slides from the presentation of Anne Marie Duguet.

Adam Lockhart, started his presentation with an introduction of the widespread phenomenon and problematic of technological obsolescence of media art installations. As a possible solution to this problem, Adam Lockhart suggests the use of VR technology, which could replicate audio visual art works and their original experience. Lockhart presented two projects in which he used two different approaches to interpret and represent two installations in VR by artist David Hall using VR; Situations Envisaged: The Rite II (1988 - 90) and TV Interruptions: The Installation (1971 – 2006).

Closing the session, artist Emile Zile spoke about his research on reperforming and reinterpreting historical performance art, as possibility to reassess and to generate contemporary encodings of art works. Zile explained his work methods and his involvement with past exhibitions and performances by taking his two network performances I Follow Yoko and Yoko Follow Me (2012) and Audience / Performance / Lens (2018) and recorded videos of the performances as examples.

All three presentations gave insight in various ways of documenting art through reinterpretation in non-conventional ways like Virtual Reality, re-performance and augmented reality. Central to all discussions was the importance of reinterpretation as an strategy, which can benefit the existence of different works of art over time, their meanings and access to them.

Anne Marie Duguet


Adam Lockhart


Emile Zile