Reenactment and Enactivity no.1

Arns is discussing in the context of authenticity of artistic archives, or reproduction, the invariant that makes possible any attribution of a 'work' to a specific individual, versus the ever-changing context of experiences. Although the performative (or structural) aspect can be preserved by documentation, the worldly 'context' is irreversibly changing. Self-referential expression of this mere fact can be found in Heath Bunting's work:

[Own, be Owned Or Remain Invisible], Heath Bunting

As each word constituting the text is turned into a domain name and a link to it, the text initially (1999) must have appeared as a body of dead (or unborn) links: today, a large number of them are actually bought by some domain name resellers.

What Arns is trying to convey is the radical difficulty that haunts the preservation - or recording - of such mutating processes. What emerges from this problem setting is the importance of reenactment as a methodology, not to reproduce as a copy, but to revive these processes in the current context virtually equal to the original time.

This idea leads to think about what constitutes an ideal design of any expressed form of art: a truly 'rich' media or tool or interface that allows records of expressive acts to be 'reenactable' archive of itself simultaneously.