Institutional Presentation Statement 

CCCB Auditorium, June 14th Session: Archives

Keywords: ISEA, International Symposium on Electronic Art, archive, symposium, preservation, electronic art, digital arts, research repository, new media

This institutional presentation focuses on how the ISEA Archive team was able to develop a comprehensive, robust archive of thousands of ISEA items, despite minimal funding and support. The archives were created and are still being developed by a large number of volunteers, students, interns and grant-funded assistants. Over the past few years, a huge amount of information has been added to the archives along with images and PDFs of the papers, publications and other artefacts. There have also been significant improvements in the functionality through the efforts of our volunteer programmers. This massive endeavor has been spearheaded by the four co-directors who are also volunteers. These invaluable archives are used by researchers, artists, educators, students, and the general public. It would not be possible without the dedicated efforts of all the volunteers and contributors involved. https://www.isea-archives.org

• Bonnie Mitchell is a digital artist, animator, archivist as well as a professor at Bowling Green State University in Digital Arts, Ohio, USA. Mitchell’s artworks explore spatial and experiential relationships to our physical, social, cultural and psychological environment through interaction and physical immersion. Her creative work includes interactive installation art, environmental data visualization art, experimental visual music animation, net-art, and new media art archive development. Mitchell is the co-director of the SIGGRAPH History and ISEA Symposium online Archives and also a member of the organizing team of the Summit on New Media Art Archiving (first held in 2021 online and again in 2022 in Barcelona). She is also a member of the ISEA International Advisory Committee, the ACM SIGGRAPH History and Digital Arts Committees and is the SIGGRAPH 2023 History Chair in charge of the 50th conference celebration.
• Wim van der Plas (Netherlands) studied Social & Cultural Sciences at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He was director of the Foundation for Creative Computer Applications (SCCA, Rotterdam), R&D staff of the Utrecht School of Arts, managing director of the National Institute for Computer Animation (SCAN, Groningen), and worked for 3 different departments of the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. He is co-founder of ISEA, organised the first, second and seventh ISEA symposium and served as ISEA HQ and on the ISEA board since its founding. Currently he is co-director of the ISEA symposium archives and member as well as honorary chair of the ISEA International Advisory Committee. In 2018 he received a Leonardo Pioneer Award.
• Jan Searleman (California, USA) taught Computer Science at Clarkson University for 37 years, retired in 2015, and since retirement has been an Adjunct Research Professor at Clarkson. Her research areas are Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interaction, and Artificial Intelligence. A senior member of the ACM, Jan is also on both the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Art Committee (DAC) and the ACM SIGGRAPH History Committee. Jan and Bonnie Mitchell coordinated the DAC Online Exhibition “The Earth, Our Home: Art, Technology and Critical Action”. She co-moderated SPARKS talks (Short Presentations of Artworks and Research for the Kindred Spirit) for DAC on “Robotics, Electronics, and Artificial Intelligence” with Hye Yeon Nam, and “Data: Visual Perception, Interpretation and Truth” with Everardo Reyes. Jan co-directs, along with Bonnie Mitchell, the ACM SIGGRAPH History Archive. She also co-directs the ISEA Symposium Archive with Bonnie Mitchell, Wim van der Plas and Terry Wong.
• Terry C. W. Wong has a bachelor’s degree from the Applied Science Department of the University of British Columbia and a Master’s degree in Fine Art at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Currently, he is working on his graduate degree in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is doing his research study on connecting new media art archiving worldwide. Terry is also an archivist and co-organizer for the ISEA Archives. He was also on the organizing team of ISEA2016 in Hong Kong.