Abstract

Summit on New Media Art Archiving

A case study proposal is summarized in two ongoing actions. The first refers to the database of the FAD festival, one of the pioneer festivals in Brazil that has been taking place since 2007 in Belo Horizonte and together with File in São Paulo (since 2001) are the two largest and most important festivals in Brazil. Both have a non-integrated database. Especially the FAD currently has 2,000 entries of works ranging from performances and installations to internet-based projects. Documentation includes everything from manuals to videos, images. The archive to be developed has mainly Brazilian and South American works that participated or were evaluated by the curator in the 8 editions of the festival.
This collection was invited to become “a public collection” in the city of Belo Horizonte through the MIS (Image and Sound Municipal Museum), an entity that is still being developed by the local government. The same collection is a constant basis for research studies at local Universities (UFMG, UEMG, and others). It has already generated some thematic seminars in the city like SAD (from which the proponent idealized the first 3 years), and articles with publications in some events, including ISEA.
The second ongoing action refers to the Information Science thesis in progress by Tadeus Mucelli who is building the possibility of this file becoming “alive” through a peer-to-peer network and through machine learning that allows for the dimension (Memory & Heritage). This Archive and its maintenance of existence. This work in partnership with UFMG through the departments of computer science and information science. The result of this experiment, being positive, could be applied to festivals like File (in conversations that Tadeus Mucelli had with curators) and other South American festivals in constructing a Southern Cone narrative of these archival models.

Essentially this proposal intends to bring together the largest number of experiences and professionals in the conformation or not of peer-to-peer and machine learning networks as new structural dimensions of preservation and documentation of art and media. A series of interviews have already been conducted with ZKM, Artists and Regional Festivals (South America) about developments or developments from the perspective of cooperative work using metadata, data, information (in a curated form) and information management for model building. We believe other actions are also under development in other countries and initiatives.
From this perspective, we must inevitably build a big justification with the big companies that support us (Google, for example, cannot be an enemy but an ally). In our small dimension, we are using the LABCult laboratory of the school of information science at UFMG and we are looking for reinforcement in information retrieval (IR) in the computer science department. A background job is needed as building dictionaries and R vocabularies.

Based on the two previous proposals we move on to the third category on intercontinental support platforms. We understand that as a social and political “bloc”, Southern Cone narratives are unique, and unique from character to structures and weaknesses as well. Building a memory of the arts by technological means in South America is a complex challenge due to the absence of a tradition found in other countries such as Europeans. We are able to develop the above projects on a broader local scale and co-undertake with neighboring countries. The same goes for resource sharing. But it is well known that international support is always a mirror. In short, we want to develop a HUB structure with other neighboring countries and other continents to take charge of the actions and goals for the development of more effective archiving, registration and documentation that will inevitably use from a new Internet perspective, the support of large players and companies and the legal discussion about copyright. Starting from Brazil from the first two proposals, we believe that models can be replicated with countries in which the entities involved here are already in dialogue. In this sense, we will have in the 2nd semester of 2020 the second edition of the Digital Art Biennial, which takes place in Rio. We had a good first symposium held in 2018. At the biennial, the symposium opens the event’s schedule. We can develop a task force (with goals and objectives) and gather diverse festivals and archives at this opportunity in Brazil, calling the location where some other international representatives may be.

• Tadeus Mucelli is a curator, researcher and project manager in technological art and digital culture in Brazil. PhD Student in Information Sciences (UFMG). In recent years he has devoted himself to research on “digital instability” and heritage in the field of digital humanities and information studies in technological arts. He is the founder of the Digital Art Festival – FAD in Belo Horizonte (since 2007) and the Biennale of Digital Art (2018) in Rio de Janeiro. tadeusmucelli.net