MAPS workshop 3

Please note the workshops are acess with conference pass and workshop pass only.

Collecting, presenting, and preserving media art brings with it new questions and challenges. These artworks rely on their technological environment, which is constantly changing. Equipment grows obsolete and software develop. Artworks adapt, otherwise they perish and continue their lifecycle in memory and documentation. Most of today’s digital works of art are processual, ephemeral, interactive, multimedia-based, and are fundamentally context-dependent. From a conceptual point of view, preservation experts have been forced to “develop a keen understanding of the context in which non-object based information is used, in order to ensure capture of all the vital data necessary to meaningful retrieval.”[1]

Museums and other collections in the Netherlands follow a cooperative approach in the long-term preservation of media artworks. In her lecture, Gaby Wijers will highlight this collaborative approach and will give insight into the workflow of a digital artwork in LIMA’s repository. On the base of case studies, she will take you on a trip, following a digital artwork from its acquisition with its related forms and contracts, to its documentation for access, presentation, and preservation. From here the adaptation (ingest) in the digital repository, including backups, derivation and monitoring starts, leading to emulation and migration when needed for access and (future) presentation.

However, much of these questions have been centered on technical responses to a rapid technological obsolescence, the deterioration of materials or the varied installation requirements. And therefore, with the necessity to preserve long-term custody of all forms of recorded material, it is still necessary to continue researching beyond the object to the medium, and more urgently, beyond the medium to the creator and the user.

[1] Abby Smith, Preservation in the Future Tense, 1998: §6.