Abstract

Summit on New Media Art Archiving

Keywords: Digital Art, Digital Humanities, Archive, Museum, Preservation, Media Art Histories, Museums & democratic Problem, Image Science

In the past five decades, Media Art has evolved into a critical field at the intersection of art, science and technology, however, a significant loss threatens this art form due to rapid technological obsolescence and static documentation strategies. This talk will give an outline for research, documentation and preservation of digital art by: a) developing international archive-research infrastructures, similar to those already available in the natural sciences, b) contributing to the development of infrastructures with museums, which are interested in bringing the art of our time into their collections through concerted networks of scholarly and mostly technological expertise. In this way relatively small units, museums, can also deal with the very demanding challenge. The Archive of Digital Art (ADA) www.digitalartarchive.at addresses these issues through an innovative strategy of ‘collaborative archiving’, social Web 2.0, 3.0 features foster the engagement of the international Media Art community, web 3.0 elements are integrated through a ‘bridging thesaurus’ linking the extended documentation of ADA with other ‘traditional’ art history databases to facilitate interdisciplinary and trans-historical comparative analyses. ADA informs a needed concerted museum network, to collect, exhibit and preserve digital art forms.

• Oliver Grau & Wendy Jo Coones, Danube University, Krems, Austria digitalartarchive.at/database/scholar-detail/artist/grau.html

Full text [PDF] p. 690-695