Nearly All Types of Honey Crystallize: Documenting in Artistic Research

Documentation brings some “things” and details to the stage and allows others to vanish. Documentation’s specific authority —crystallization—becomes apparent by examining the operations that record, transform, and code. Elements of image, text, and sound are arranged so as to define and guide the documentation’s legibility, meaning, distribution, and impacts. Thus, experimental apparatuses are connected to documentation, which, as powerfully effective techniques, make it possible to see, hear, and touch ways of shaping information, while also creating “forms of presence,” defined by different institutions, discourses, and practices.

When documenting, which is also described here as a process of crystallization, the process and result of the operations work together. And the question of what is actually recorded, and how it is recorded, is becoming acute.

Documentation today has become a self-evident and nearly inflationary practice. Everything is documented without any selectivity or judgment, often automatically, using technological apparatuses such as sensors, which take over the work of immediate documentation (self-tracking). These days, the process of documenting is mainly not an institutionally regulated, intentional, or artfully organized act, but part of the “forms of presence” themselves. This changes the setting of documentation and its role in “artistic research,” with its various kinds of specifications that always find themselves on the threshold to institutionalization.

In the context of this exhibition, Nearly All Types of Honey Crystallizes, which documents a series of artist residencies at the GAK, the artists show, repeat, and perform ways in which different acts of authentication and testimony, registering and recording, are reflected in the context of each artist’s specific research practice. Here, documentary operations irritate or undermine declared evidence by revealing their conditions and examining rules and practices for documentary credibility and esthetics. The primary question is not “What is a document,” but “Which practices, procedures, and apparatuses can turn something into a document?”

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1. Hito Steyerl, die Farbe der Wahrheit, Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld, Wien Berlin, Turia Kant, 2009, 8ff
2. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaften (ZfM), Einleitung,  Nr. 11, 2014 (Bielefeld: Transcript) , p. 10. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/1189.
3.  Graduiertenkolleg: Das Dokumentarische, Uni Bochum, https://das-dokumentarische.blogs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/en/

Curated by Prof. Dr. Andrea Sick, Binational Artistic PhD Programm/HfK Bremen, in collaboration with GAK.