Digital Art Works. The Challenges of Conservation

On October 28th, "Digital Art Works. The Challanges of Conservation" will start at ZKM. An exhibition of 10 case studies of conserving ZKM's collection and an accompanying series of symposia will address different approaches in archiving and preserving digital media art.

case studies:
http://www.digitalartconservation.org/index.php/en/case-studies.html

symposia including Alain Depocas, Antoni Muntadas, Herbert Franke, Siegfried Zielinski et al
http://www.digitalartconservation.org/index.php/en/symposium-i.html

taxonomedia project

A Taxonomedia (Consuelo Rozo and Vanina Hofman) interview by Raquel Herrera posted at the new media fix website can be found here.

We, in Taxonomedia, regard documentation as a privileged tool to explain an important artistic production which hardly could be conserved through other kinds of strategies. On the one hand, because of the essentially economic questions we have previously mentioned. The conservation projects that suggest solutions such as emulators and migrations are beyond the scope of most museums and media spaces, and probably their efforts in that direction are not sustainable in the medium or long run. On the other hand, there are expressions within art based on technologies that don’t “allow for their conservation”, and if presented with this situation, the artist’s intention must be respected. Finally, also, through their documentation and subsequent availability, the work might be able to survive as a concept and be recreated in other works. Projects like Variable Media delve into the conservation of the integrity of the work regardless of its medium, clearly considering media art within the field of conceptual art, emphasizing a perspective which many would find inadmissible, but is interesting to us.
(...)

To be able to access this material as it was in this day represents a huge time investment, a specific budget, provided also that the artist wants to work on that again. In some cases this might mean counting on programmers and developers to generate platforms that allow the piece to work seamlessly in current environments. We have translated a paradigmatic case undertaken for the exhibition Seeing Double (Guggenheim Museum) about the work The Erl King by Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren. Examples like these are feasible if there’s an institution like a museum, a specialized archive or a project that might take charge. It is also possible, if the artist was willing to undertake it herself, as could be in the example you mentioned. She might add some ideas to the piece she didn’t include in the past and the technology she might have to use might also alter the particularities of the work. So we can imagine The Intruder might be different if manipulated, although we leave this aspect at the hands of the artist.

Reinterpretation and documentation are ways of contact with many of the previous works, but unfortunately the experience is hardly repeatable.

Symposium: The Digital Oblivion - Substance and Ethics in the Conservation of Computer-Based Art

4. – 5. 11. 2010
10.00–18.00

ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst
und Medientechnologie
Karlsruhe, Germany

As part of the broader research project digital art conservation, this international symposium aims to investigate the future of our digital cultural memory, focusing in particular on the preservation of computer-based art. For a couple of decades now, digitalisation has allowed the content of cultural memory to be more easily processed and circulated. However, the preservation of digital contents is fundamentally conditioned by the need to conform to an ever more rapid sequence of new technical systems. This functional obsolescence presents a systemic threat to digital cultural memory. Again and again, the threat of obsolescence leads previous criteria of cultural memory – longevity and authenticity – ad absurdum. The practice and theory of art collecting and preservation has also seen a paradigm shift, presenting curators, collectors, scholars and conservators with a new set of as yet unsolved problems. Whereas traditional media and tools remained in the possession of artists and curators, new digital media have definitely reduced the autonomy of these cultural actors.
Parallel to day-to-day collecting and exhibition practice – necessarily pragmatic – conservation theory has recently seen a normative debate on the ethics of preservation, a discussion comparable to developments elsewhere in the humanities and natural sciences, as well as in bioethics and environmental ethics. The conference’s discussion of the ethics of conservation aims to overcome the current uncertainty surrounding the preservation of digital media art as part of our cultural heritage. This set of interconnected themes forms the context for the questions posed by the first international symposium of digital art conservation, a threeyear research project funded by the European Union: What consequences will the ongoing systemic change of cultural memory have for our consciousness of time and of history, and for our image of ourselves and the world? Are traditional criteria for conservation – a work of art’s originality, longevity and inherent economic value – at all applicable to new media art? Should standards of best practice be developed for the conservation and collection of digital media art?

Speakers:
Prof. Dr. Hans Belting
Professor emeritus for the science of art and media theory,
Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe
Prof. Dr. Edmond Couchot
Professor emeritus Université de Paris VIII
Alain Depocas
Director of the Centre for Research and Documentation,
Daniel Langlois Foundation, Montréal
Herbert W. Franke
Artist, scientist and writer, Egling
Rosina Gómez-Baeza Tinturé
Director, LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries, Gijon
Prof. Dr. Hans Dieter Huber
Head of degree programme conservation of new media and digital
information, Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart
Antoni Muntadas
Artist, New York
Daria Parkhomenko
Director, LABORATORIA Art & Science Space, Moscow
Dr. Ingrid Scheurmann
Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz, professorship
architectural heritage and applied historical
building research, Technische Universität Dresden
Prof. Dr. Bernhard Serexhe
Head curator, ZKM | Medienmuseum, Karlsruhe
Prof. Dr. h.c. Peter Weibel
CEO, ZKM | Karlsruhe
Dr. Klaus Weschenfelder
President ICOM Germany
Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski
Professor for media theory, Universität der Künste, Berlin

Entrance free, no booking required

Languages /Sprachen/ langues: EN, DE, FR
ZKM_Medientheater
Lorenzstraße 19
76135 Karlsruhe

Arte electrónico: ¿qué preservar y cómo preservarlo?

Conservación del Arte electrónico ¿Qué preservar y cómo preservarlo?
Apuntes [Media art conservation: what aspects should be preserved and how
can we address it?] compiles the proceedings of the homonymous
seminar that took place jointly at the “Espacio Fundación Telefónica” and
the “Centro Cultural de España”, in Buenos Aires.The publication is distributed
under Creative Commons license in Spanish http://taxonomedia.net

documentary collection on DLF web site

Paul Sermon, Telematic Vision (1993-)

Paul Sermon, Telematic Vision (1993-)

This documentary collection on Telematic Vision by Paul Sermon is based on an independent case study conducted by Rolf Wolfensberger in 2008 at the Museum of Communication (Berne, Switzerland), where the artwork has been part of the permanent exhibition since 2003. The case study documents this highly interactive work, not only from a technical perspective, but also by focusing on the particular audience experience in relation to the artist's intentions. Additionally, the study takes into account the technological changes undergone by the work since its creation in 1993. The present documentary collection is part of a series which includes that of The Giver of Names by David Rokeby and of Subtitled Public by Rafael Lozanno-Hemmer. [More...]

Modern Art: Who Cares? II MA:WC?II congress 2010

INCCA Update – June 5, 2009

News

Latest news on "Modern Art: Who Cares? II" congress

Preparations for the 2010 congress are in full swing. It will take place in Amsterdam from 9 - 11 June
2010. A pre-congress reception will take place on the evening of the 8th of June.

Registration will start in September 2009, so keep your eye out for updates per email or via the link on
the INCCA http://www.incca.org/modernartwhocares and SBMK websites http://www.sbmk.nl/

Tickets to the congress will cost:
€ 290
€ 160 for students

Included in the price of the ticket is a copy of the book Inside Installations (working title), which is due
for launch in March 2011.

The congress programme is being created in collaboration by a group of experts from 34 organisations
who are working together under the umbrella project PRACTICs. Most of these individuals worked
together during the EU project Inside Installations (2004-2007). For more information about PRACTICs
follow this link. http://www.incca.org/projects/64-current-projects/475-practics

Co-organisers of the congress would like to point out that there will be no call for papers, but there will
be a call for posters. This is expected to be sent out in September 2009.

MA:WC?II will feature plenary lectures as well as a choice of circa 10 parallel sessions per day;
discussions, workshops and site visits. There will also be time allocated to poster presentations and
networking sessions. The themes for the three day congress are as follows:
Day 1: Acquisition: production and collection building
Day 2: Articulation: care & conservation
Day 3: Access: presentation & the role of the public
More details on the programme will be posted alongside registration information in September.

If you have any questions about the Modern Art: Who Cares? II congress, please send an email to
modernartwhocares@gmail.com

Olia Lialina and New Media Art Histories of the (so-called) net.art, Net Art and Web Art moments

My colleague Bruce Jenkins (formerly the curator of the Harvard Film Archive and currently on faculty with me in the Film, Video & New Media department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) asked me to recommend Web Art that could be included in his upcoming "Presenting and Preserving Moving-Image Media" course. I suggested he include a discussion of the work of Olia Lialina. In particular, her Last Real Net Art Museum project:

http://myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru

which in part hosts remixes of her MY BOYFRIEND CAME BACK FROM THE WAR project from 1996. The remixes function as a form of archiving and preservation in that they extend the life of the work by reworking this now historical New Media Art project. As such, this series constitutes a significantly dynamic and vital artistic use of archives and archiving.

Her FIRST AND THE ONLY REAL NET ART GALLERY:

http://art.teleportacia.org/

directly addresses web-based exhibition of New Media Art as well as the legendary death or historical status of net.art. In particular, this issues are addressed through the online exhibition MINIATURES OF THE HEROIC PERIOD from 1998:

http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/miniatures/


Her collection of texts in the "Texts on net.art, new media and digital folklore" section:

http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/

provides important views into these histories. From that section, her text "Vernacular Web" originally from 2005:


http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/

which was then updated and reversioned in 2007:


http://www.contemporary-home-computing.org/vernacular-web-2/

also considers New Media Art Histories and issues of historicity by unlocking ways in which artists and those who do not identify as artists have used the internet and the web over the last 15 or so years...

// jonCates

IASA 2009 conference in Athens

IASA 2009 conference in Athens

Deadline for receipt abstracts: 20 February 2009

When IASA was founded 40 years ago few could imagine the realities with which today’s audiovisual archives are confronted. As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the digital age for archives, libraries and museums is not an option, but a reality. Huge digitisation projects have been or are being implemented while at the same time the production and distribution of the new content is mostly digital.

What is the role of the audiovisual archives in this new technological environment? How distinct are the roles of the various cultural heritage institutions? What methods and techniques will ensure the accountability and continuity of the audiovisual content? How have users’ expectations been changed and what strategies have been employed to meet them? Which is the role of international organizations and of the IASA in this new environment? How can the National Archives of big and smallest countries can cope with this new environment?

Conference Themes

• Archives, Libraries and Museums. Moment of Truth - Time to Converge?
• The disappearing Archive I: the loss of physical substance through digitisation
• The disappearing Archive II: aging and physical deterioration of analogue media
• The disappearing Archive III: obsolete carriers but no replay equipment
• Born to die? Selection policies in the 21st century
• Between archivists and users, taking advantage of the archive
• Digital preservation and audiovisual preservation: Is there a divide?
• 40 years of IASA
• The role of the National Audiovisual Archives
• Archiving the web and the new media audiovisual content
• Ethics of digital archives

useful linklist published by DOCAM (20090122)

GLOSSARIES AND THESAURI

Variable Media Glossary. Depocas, A., Ippolito, J., and Jones, C. (eds) (2003). Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art Science and Technology.
http://www.variablemedia.net/e/preserving/html/var_pub_index.html

Capturing Unstable Media Glossary, V2
http://capturing.projects.v2.nl/glossary.html

UNESCO Thesaurus
http://www2.ulcc.ac.uk/unesco/

Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP), Glossary
http://www.imappreserve.org/cat_proj/glossary.html

Dictionnaire des arts médiatiques. 1996, Groupe de recherche en arts médiatiques, Université du Québec à Montréal.
http://132.208.118.245/Accueil.html

Inside Installations Glossary
http://glossary.inside-installations.org

Bay Area Video Coalition - Glossary
http://www.bavc.org/preservation/dvd/resources/gloss.htm

Digital Curation Centre Glossary
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resource/glossary/

AMIA Glossary
http://www.amianet.org

Besser, Howard. Introduction to imaging : issues in constructing an image database : revised edition. Los Angeles : Getty Research Institute, 2003.
http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/introimages/glossary.html
[includes Glossary]

InterPARES Glossary (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems)
http://www.interpares.org/display_file.cfm?doc=ip1_glossary.pdf
[archival context]

Grand dictionnaire terminologique, Office québecois de la langue française
http://www.granddictionnaire.ca

Kodak Glossary of Film/Video Terms.
http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/Education/Film_Video_Glossary/index.htm

Lexical and Classification Resources from CoOl
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/lex/
[With links to glossaries and thesauri, this CoOl site offers information specific to magnetic media preservation as well as other areas of archival research.]

Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science (ODLIS), Joan M. Reitz.
http://lu.com/odlis/odlis_r.cfm

WordNet
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Glossaries
http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/format/gloss.html

Recording institute of Detroit, Audio Recording Terms Glossary
http://recordingeq.com/glossary/glospt.htm

Structured Glossary from the Technology Assessment Advisory Committee of the Commission on Preservation and Access
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/lynn/
[This extensive glossary breaks terms down by document medium, format, properties, content, and condition. It also includes storage terms, specific preservation terms, methodology, and more].

Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)
http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/aat/

Tech Terms Dictionary
http://www.techterms.com

Technical Glossary of Common Audiovisual Terms (developed by National Film and Sound Archive - Australia)
http://www.nfsa.afc.gov.au/preservation/audiovisual_terms/

Universal Preservation Format Glossary
http://info.wgbh.org/upf/glossary.html
[Developed in conjunction with the Universal Preservation Format, this glossary has cross-domain definitions of preservation terms and provides links to glossaries that have additional source information.]

OTHER TERMINOLOGY SOURCES / RESSOURCES

Documentation and capturing methods for unstable media arts, V2
http://archive.v2.nl/v2_archive/projects/capturing/1_2_capturing.pdf

Description models for unstable media art. V2.
http://archive.v2.nl/v2_archive/projects/capturing/1_3_metadata.pdf

Class Hierarchy for cmcm_final Project, V2
http://archive.v2.nl/v2_archive/projects/capturing/cmcm/html/

CIDOC CRM – Conceptual Reference Model
http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/

Audio and Video Carriers, TAPE (Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe)
www.tape-online.net/docs/audio_and_video_carriers.pdf

JISC Techwatch A-Z Technologies
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/services/techwatch/aztechnologies.aspx

Computer Forensics Tools Testing Website
http://www.cftt.nist.gov/

Disk Imaging Specification Comments and Responses
http://www.cftt.nist.gov/DI-SPEC-COMMENTS-AND-RESPONSES-5.doc

Sustainability of Digital Formats, Library of Congress
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/intro/intro.shtml

UK Archival Thesaurus
http://www.ukat.org.uk/
[SKOS implementation]

Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) Home Page
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/

Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) Reference
http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)
http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/

DCC Curation Lifecycle Model
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/docs/publications/DCCLifecycle.pdf

Plazaville - G.H. Hovagimyan with Christina McPhee & Artists Meeting (2009)

"Plazaville is a new media video art work. It is based on the classic 1965 movie Alphaville by Jean Luc Godard. It is set in 21st century New York City. The scenes from the original Alphaville are being re-enacted, interpreted and improvised upon by the artists, actors and videographers. The piece uses the internet as one means of distributing the short video clips. This is somewhat like a serialized program but is not in any order. Viewers can download new scenes as they become available on the Turbulence website as well as iTunes and youTube. The videos can be viewed on computers, iPhones and large screen HD televisions (using AppleTV). The final presentation of the work is a video projection/ installation work at Pace Digital Gallery scheduled for April 2009. Plazaville is a 2009 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Produced by G.H. Hovagimyan with Christina McPhee & Artists Meeting."

Plazaville - G.H. Hovagimyan with Christina McPhee & Artists Meeting (2009)

The Media Art Notation System

Documenting and Preserving Digital / Media Art

Abstract
This paper proposes a new approach to conceptualizing digital and media art forms. This
theoretical approach will be explored through issues raised in the process of creating a
formal declarative model (alternately known as a metadata framework, notation system,
or ontology) for digital and media art. The approach presented and explored here is
intended to inform a better understanding of media art forms and to provide a practical
descriptive framework that supports their creation, re-creation, documentation and
preservation.


Richard Rinehart
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
2625 Durant Ave., Berkeley, CA, 94720
University of California, Berkeley
rinehart@berkeley.edu




http://www.coyoteyip.com/rinehart_leonardo.pdf

Uncompressed Symposium

Symposium
Uncompressed
11 December 2008
Symposium about the preservation of video art focussing on technologies and the possibilities for a new fase in the developments.
Dutch spoken.
More information:www.nimk.nl/nl

Bruce Nauman, MAPPING THE STUDIO II with color shift, flip, flop, & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage)

among tate's research projects one can find a few about media/installation art and preservation strategies..The case study for Bruce Nauman's MAPPING THE STUDIO II with color shift, flip, flop, & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage) is quite interesting.

http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/nauman/home_1.htm

Preservation Insanity blog - Mark Toscano (2008)

Preservation Insanity blog - Mark Toscano (2008)

Preservation Insanity is a blog by Mark Toscano that includes "random tidbits of potential interest about film preservation." This may be of interest to those interested in Media Art Histories as it intersects with preservation, archiving and conservation of Media Art, in this case Film. - jonCates

@ DOCAM's International Summit + Media In Motion conference

3 of the Media Art Histories bloggers, Rolf Wolfensberger, Nina Wenhart and myself will be in Montreal this week @ DOCAM's Media In Motion + their fourth International Summit @ McGill University. Rolf presents in the International Summit:

http://www.docam.ca/en/?p=355

+ Nina + i present in the MEDIA IN MOTION: The Challenge of Preservation in the Digital Age conference:

http://www.docam.ca/en/?p=361

we're all be presenting our Media Art Histories research, in abbreviated forms.

MEDIA IN MOTION is a project of DOCAM and Media@McGill. DOCAM is "an international research alliance on the documentation and the conservation of the media arts heritage, initiated by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology." DOCAM and the Daniel Langlois Foundation are world leaders in the conservation and preservation of Media Art. Media@McGill is "a hub of research, scholarship, and public outreach on issues and controversies in media, technology, and culture" and is based in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.

i'm rly looking fwd to the discussions + developments that follow. - jonCates

http://www.docam.ca

http://media.mcgill.ca

http://www.fondation-langlois.org

"Net.art Preservation" on Rhizome.org

Last month, during September 2008, a discussion developed on Rhizome.org about "Net.art Preservation" the discussion is archived and viewable as well as extendable here:

http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/40319

- jonCates

Digital Humanities 2009 Call for papers

Digital Humanities 2009–the annual joint meeting of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs–will be hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland in College Park, USA.

Coinciding with MITH’s 10th anniversary as a working digital humanities center, we look forward to welcoming this distinguished international community to a campus that has fostered numerous early adopter projects in the field and which continues to innovate with new work on tools, text analysis, electronic editing, virtual worlds, digital preservation, and cyberinfrastructure. As a setting for digital humanities research, MITH also enjoys unusually close relationships with the campus’s iSchool or Information School, the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (the oldest of its kind), and the University Libraries, all of whom are co-sponsors of the conference.

For full information about the conference: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/

Call for Papers

September 11th, 2008

We are happy to announce the Call for Papers has been sent out and is available on our website with detailed information about submission and formatting. Translations of the call are also available.

The joint international conference is the oldest established meeting of scholars working at the intersection of advanced information technologies and the humanities, annually attracting a distinguished international community at the forefront of their fields. Submissions are invited on all topics concerning digital humanities, e.g.

* text analysis, corpora, corpus linguistics, language processing, language learning
* libraries, archives and the creation, delivery, management and preservation of humanities digital resources
* computer-based research and computing applications in all areas of literary, linguistic, cultural, and historical studies, including electronic literature and interdisciplinary aspects of modern scholarship
* use of computation in such areas as the arts, architecture, music, film, theatre, new media, and other areas reflecting our cultural heritage
* research issues such as: information design and modelling; the cultural impact of the new media; software studies; Human-Computer interaction
* the role of digital humanities in academic curricula
* digital humanities and diversity

Submissions may be for papers, posters, or sessions. Potential participants may also read ADHO’s reviewer guidelines for assessment criteria.

All proposals should be submitted by uploading them to the ConfTool. The deadline for submitting paper, session and poster proposals to the Programme Committee is October 31, 2008. All submissions will be refereed. Presenters will be notified of acceptance February 13, 2009.

the collection and preservation of MMOs @ The University of Texas at Austin

Megan Winget (in World of Warcraft)

a recent post on kotaku reports that The School of Information and project partner The Videogame Archive @ The Center for American History (both @ The University of Texas at Austin) have received funding for and are beginning to study the collection and preservation of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games including World of Warcraft (WoW), EverQuest (EQ) and Ultima Online (UO)

the methods discussed include interviews w/the developers, documenting oral histories from the players and in game documentation (i.e. screen recordings) of 'epochal moments'

Library Journal has an interview w/the the project head Assistant Professor Megan Winget. Winget says that this study is in the context of her primary research interest, which is in "the preservation of new media artifacts, specifically new media art, of which videogames are a major exemplar."

Media, Memory and the Archive

Conference on Media Art Archiving, organized by Argos (January 2007)
http://www.argosarts.org/articles.do?id=374

From the website:
"How will generations after us look back on artistic production of the 20th and 21st centuries? Media formats, operating systems, software and hardware, browsers and the internet as we know it today will have evolved beyond recognition, both in shape and in use. What strategies might be used to transpose technology-based works, variable, hybrid and ephemeral by nature, to an unknown and unpredictable future? How can intent, context and experience be recorded and permanently interpreted? The archiving process does not merely represent an attempt to preserve some notions, it also implicates that others will be forgotten. What is relevant for preservation? What is the impact of used models, technical structures and tools on the construction of cultural memory? How does information travel through time, now that the world is being (re)presented and organised more and more as a database, dynamic and networked? How will museums and other memory institutions cope with these new paradigms and what is the role media artists and we ourselves might have in the structuring of public memory?"

participants include Charlie Gere, Josephine Bosma, Oliver Grau, Wolfgang Ernst, Jean-Francois Blanchette, Richard Rinehart and Steve Dietz

The conference took place at Argos in January 2007.
Unfortuantely, there are no audio- or videofiles available on the net.

DOCAM : Technology Resources Directory

"The Technology Resource Directory provides links to on-line chronologies, histories, and overviews of various media technologies. The technical specifications and user manuals for selected audiovisual technologies are provided as well. It is hoped that these sites will aid researchers in both understanding the artistic possibilities of each medium and evaluating and implementing preservation techniques and technologies."

DOCAM : Technology Resources Directory:

http://www.docam.ca/Repertoire_Technologies/tech_index.html