Roundtable Statement

Keywords: Memory, Digital Museums, Digital Heritage, Open Source, Digital Art, Digital preservation.

For this roundtable, we propose a debate about public policies of memory preservation based on the specificities of digital media culture. The ephemerality of these kinds of technologies and the intensification of personal and non-professional process of digital documentation bring unprecedented ways of understanding the collections and cultural heritage of our times. We are experiencing not only an overproduction of data, which proliferates in new formats of storage in the networks but also a documentary overdose. Nevertheless, this not performs a cumulative system. Due to the speed with which technologies are discarded in shorter and shorter periods of time, loss, change, and even replacement will be more and more part of our conservation practice. For all these reasons, it seems particularly important to discuss how to deal with the cultural ambivalence of this very moment. In our debate, we will concentrate in three main axes: the online counter-collector, the open-source heritage and the digital museum as the museum of the unfinished.

• Giselle Beiguelman is an artist and professor of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, Brazil (FAU-USP). Her work includes networking projects and interventions in public spaces. She has been involved in the creation and development of digital applications since 1994 and in the area of preservation of media works. She is the leader of the Research Group CNPq / FAUUSP Aesthetics of Memory in the 21st Century, member of the Laboratory for Other Urbanisms (FAUUSP) and the Interdisciplinary Laboratory Image Knowledge of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. She is the author of The Book after Book (2003), Technological Nomadismos (with Jorge La Ferla, 2011) and Possible Futures: Art, Museums and Digital Archives (with Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, 2014). In 2016, she held the individual Cinema Lascado, Caixa Cultural (São Paulo) and How Much Does a Cloud ?, VB Galpão (São Paulo). Participated in the collective exhibitions Unplace, Fundação Calouste Gulbekian (Lisbon, 2015); 3rd Biennial of Bahia (Salvador, 2014); 25th Bienal de S. Paulo (2002); The Algorithmic Revolution, ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany, 2004-2008) and, in the same institution, NET_Condition (1999-2000). She was curator of Tecnofagias (3rd 3M Digital Art Show, Instituto Tomie Othake) and Memory of Amnesia (Historical Archive of São Paulo, 2015).
• Giovanna Casimiro is a PhD student at the Architecture and Urbanism College, University of São Paulo with research on the City as a Museological Interface. Coordinator of the Research Laboratory in Interactive Environments (LPAI) and Lecturer in the baccalaureate degree in Digital Design, by the University Center SENAC. Curator and project consultant for the interaction design studio, LILO. Master in Visual Arts by the Postgraduate Program in Visual Arts (PPGART / UFSM), Bachelor in Drawing and Plastic, Federal University of Santa Maria – RS (UFSM). Coordinator of the Art [in] Muzz project and with research focused on the use of Mixed Reality in the exhibition media. Resident of RedBull Basement 2016 (Sao Paulo) and AIR Resident 2017 (Vienna). Member of LABART – Research Laboratory in Contemporary Art, Technology and Digital Media and Research Group Art and Technology / CNPq. FIPE / UFSM Fellow (2010), FAPERGS / UFSM (2011) and PIBIC / CNPq (2012). Areas of interest: art history, curatorship, art and technology, interface design. Nathalia Lavigne is a PhD student at Architecture and Urbanism College, University of São Paulo, researching virtual collections of on Instagram and the circulation of artworks as images on this platform. Holding a Master’s degree in Cultural and Critical Studies from Birkbeck, University of London (2014) and a degree in Journalism from PUC-RJ (2004), she is currently an art critic, researcher and curator, after a ten-year career as a journalist in vehicles such as O Estado de S. Paulo and Folha de São Paulo. As a researcher, she took part of the the “Observatório do Sul” project, a platform for discussions promoted in 2015 by Sesc São Paulo, the Goethe-Institut and the Associação Cultural Videobrasil, which brought together professionals from different fields to discuss the Global South in the field of culture. Among the exhibitions she curated are Imagemovement (2016) and (Im)material present (2017), at Zipper Galeria. She is also a member of the research project Aesthetics of Memory of the 21st Century, coordinated by Giselle Beiguelman.
• Nathalia Lavigne is a PhD student at Architecture and Urbanism College, University of São Paulo, Brazil, researching virtual collections on Instagram and the circulation of artworks as images on this platform. Holding a Master’s degree in Cultural and Critical Studies from Birkbeck, University of London (2014) and a degree in Journalism from PUC-RJ (2004), she is currently an art critic, researcher and curator, after a ten-year career as a journalist in vehicles such as O Estado de S. Paulo and Folha de São Paulo. As a researcher, she took part of the the “Observatório do Sul” project, a platform for discussions promoted in 2015 by Sesc São Paulo, the Goethe-Institut and the Associação Cultural Videobrasil, which brought together professionals from different fields to discuss the Global South in the field of culture. Among the exhibitions she curated are Image-movement (2016) and (Im)material present (2017), at Zipper Galeria. She is a also a member of the research project Aesthetics of Memory of the 21st Century, coordinated by Giselle Beiguelman, and a contributor to Artforum International Magazine.

Full text (PDF) p. 821-830