Institutional Presentation Statement

Keywords: ISEA, archive, symposium, preservation, electronic arts, digital arts, new media, research repository, nomadic event

This institutional presentation focuses on the ISEA Archives team’s efforts in creating its online repositories to preserve the records of the ISEA Symposium series, a nomadic international cultural exchange experience over the last four decades: archiving the contributors and their works, including the documentation of the papers, artistic creations, presentations, exhibitions, performances, concerts, workshops, cultural events, and the symposium organisation itself. Moreover, the international volunteer team working on it has created one of the world’s largest archives of new media art documentation and theory. Over the last few years, the ISEA Archives have actively initiated worldwide connections among stakeholders in the new media art archiving community.

• Terry C. W. Wong (HK/CA) is an archivist and co-organizer for the ISEA Archives. He has a bachelor’s degree from the Applied Science Department of the University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in fine art from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Currently, he is working on his graduate research study on connecting new media art archiving worldwide in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. Terry has been involved with the New Media Art Archiving Summit that takes place at a few editions of ISEA. He is currently a member of the organizing committee for the Summit. Before working in new media art archiving, he was also an engineer, artist, and member of the ISEA2016 organizing team.
• Wim van der Plas (NL) is co-founder of ISEA and organiser of the three ISEA symposia held in the Netherlands. He led ISEA HQ in the first 8 years of its existence and was a board member of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts and ISEA International (both of which he also was co-founder) until 2017. Since then, he is Honorary Chair of the ISEA International Advisory Committee and ISEA Symposium archivist. He received a Leonardo Pioneer Award in 2018.
• Bonnie Mitchell (US) is a new media artist and Professor at Bowling Green State University in Digital Arts, in Bowling Green, Ohio, USA. Mitchell is a member of the ISEA International Advisory Committee and ACM SIGGRAPH History and Digital Arts Committee where she focuses on the development of their online archives. She is currently the SIGGRAPH 2023 conference History Chair in charge of the immersive Time Tunnel, history displays and retrospective talks. Her current creative practice focuses on development of physically immersive data visualization environments that showcase climate change over time. Mitchell’s artworks explore spatial and experiential relationships to our physical, social, cultural and psychological environment through interaction, abstraction and audio. She has created numerous abstract visual music installations and animations that have been shown in hundreds of venues world-wide.
• Jan Searleman (US)( 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 two ACM SIGGRAPH Committees: Digital Art (DAC) and History. Jan and Bonnie Mitchell coordinated a DAC Online Exhibition “The Earth, Our Home: Art, Technology and Critical Action”. She is co-director of the ACM SIGGRAPH History Archive with Bonnie Mitchell. Jan also co-directs the ISEA Symposium Archive with Bonnie Mitchell, Wim van der Plas, and Terry C.W. Wong.