Staging the Studio: Enacting Suave Realities by way of Digital Pictures (Chapter 12) – Hiding Making

INTRODUCTION

As half of a bigger mission on visible realizing round databases of photos on the net, this essay discusses outcomes from fieldwork on the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, the post-graduate academy for visible arts in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The Rijksakademie runs an esteemed two-year residency for 50 artists from all around the world. The following addresses the transformation of those artists’ studios into exhibition areas through the “RijksakademieOPEN,” an annual occasion in November when the academy opens its doorways to a bigger viewers. What do these transformations from studio to “white cube” entail? What do the artists placed on show, and what do they disguise from view? My contribution subsequently focuses on the photographic documentation of the Open Studios by artists and academy workers. What function does documentation play within the structure of information about artworks for the academy and the artists themselves? How does images mediate this documentation course of? Lastly, I’ll deal with the function of artists’ web sites as “spaces of display.” What function do photographic representations of studios and artworks play for resident artists? Should the images they current on-line be seen as a part of a web-based portfolio, as a PR-tool, or as an (maybe incomplete) archive of completed work?

The fieldwork on the Rijksakademie was undertaken in 2009–10 and consisted of systematic participant remark; open-ended interviews with workers and artists; an in depth scrutiny of recent initiatives across the artists’ visible documentation practices and that of the academy; and an examination of official coverage paperwork, archival materials and funding purposes referring to documentation and knowledge administration.

Conceptually, I draw on three our bodies of labor: new media research, science and know-how research (STS), and empirical ontology. I take advantage of new media research to investigate the co-existence of various frameworks of mediated interactions with photos. New media research additionally supply an consciousness of how “ways of knowing” are intertwined with media storage and retrieval applied sciences. STS allows an understanding of photos as located, embodied apply, emphasizes the significance of treating quite a lot of actors symmetrically, and highlights materials and institutional features within the embedding of recent types of information. Finally, I draw on empirical ontological analyses to problematize the epistemological dominance of illustration in capturing the advanced empirical world.