CHArt Twenty-Second Annual Conference

Preservation of Net Art in Museums
Anne Laforet, University of Avignon, France

Artists appropriated the Internet as soon as it became public in order to experiment with new artistic, social and technical practices that have been gathered under the term Net art. The museums and cultural institutions that are interested by those works have to reconsider the way they commission, exhibit, collect and preserve artworks, just as they have already done with other forms of ephemeral or process-based art.

Within the museum, the balance between documentation and preservation is shifting in favour of documentation, owing to artworks that do not have a fixed or stable form but exist in different states. A rich, diverse and precise documentation is crucial to support preservation strategies that accept artworks as being variable, mutable and not static.

New or updated preservation models need to be explored. After an overview of current models being developed (especially those within museums or national libraries), this paper will focus on the concept of the archaeological museum as a potential model for Net art preservation.

By combining museum and archival approaches, it is possible to keep track of the context of Net-based artworks by taking into account their interrelations within a dynamic environment. Net archiving tools allow close observation of how an art work evolves, although this does not necessarily mean that the captured works function in the same way as the originals. By emphasising the dialogue between Net art works and their environment, the institution would become a living archive, a research space, with fragments of artworks which could be updated and re-activated in multiple ways. Moreover, it could take the form of a partnership of organisations with different scopes, methods and goals, a meta-institution composed of the many actors involved in preserving Internet art.

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