Thomas Oberender
To experience art is usually to experience an encounter with works. But often we do not encounter the works directly, but rather mediated by formats. As a form of organisation, formats mediate works—whether exhibitions or performances—as a means of transmission. Formats are always containers for diverse works, and the sum of the different formats results in a programme. A structure becomes a format when it accommodates different works, either in combination or successively. Formats therefore have a constitutive relationship to works as well as to institutions. Since formats are the form of encounter between the work and the audience, they have often become synonyms for the art forms themselves, for example when people say “I’m going to the theatre”, or “to an exhibition” or “to a concert”, by which they mean the event rather than the building. Formats can therefore merge with institutions and become almost invisible, but they can also break away from their habits and form temporary alternatives. These creations are often given their own names, as if they were works in themselves. They develop their own narration which links them to their title and their inventors. Institutionalised formats, on the other hand, have ostensibly become neutral over time because they have become the habitual form of our traditional art encounters. In contrast to institutionalised formats, new formats create originals, but they are always forms of presentation of works. Formats are by no means universal categories, but are culturally and historically specific. What distinguishes them is that you can play within formats, but not with formats. But that is what the following is about.
The word “format” triggers multiples associations. On the one hand, it brings to mind standardised sizes or conditions. Formatting makes data and data carriers usable in the field of digital technologies. In this context formatting means overwriting. Colloquially, we recognise different book formats—which usually have to do with sizes, and book types such as paperback or hardcover. In the media industry, formats are certain types of products—a talk show as distinct from a news programme, for instance. What all these uses of the word have in common is that formats create a type of container, a standardised, predefined frame which can accommodate a multiplicity of works. Generally, it is the work that is seen rather than the format. But it is the format that largely determines how the work is “read”—is it a performance or perhaps an installation? Formats are principles of order which themselves assume form. They generate a display which makes a basic statement: they implicitly convey that a programme is a news bulletin or a casting show, for instance, solely through the form in which the content is produced. By contrast, the content itself—all the various contributions, film clips, segments, texts—is not fixed by the format; instead, the format must remain as flexible as possible to accommodate content variation without revealing its own premises. Because while the content assembled within formats can change at
