Everything that is represented in the Museum of Ordure is subject to the vagaries of an uncontrolled internal process which slowly deforms and disables all information held in the museum. This is comparable to the decaying processes which affect all artifacts in museums, regardless of all attempts at preservation: the retouching, repainting, cleaning, etc, which are incorporated risks to the purity of artifacts when first acquired by museums. Even ‘successful’ renovations are subject to periodic changes resulting from shifts in conservation policies. Eventually (and in accordance with the fallibility of memory) artifacts are institutionally, progressively, determinedly and inadvertently altered by acts of conservation (sometimes unintentional acts of institutional vandalism) until they cease to be recognisable as the objects first acquired. Of course in both cases – in the virtual environment and in the material world – the processes of generation, decay, and entropy are paramount. Museums are by this definition charged with achieving the impossible.

The online collection subject to the preservation policy was exhibited online, and as part of The Suicide of Objects, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, and as part of Trackers, Pitshanger Manor Gallery and House, London (both 2004).

installation view:

sample: