CHArt TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL CONFERENCE
|
|
Digital Archive Fever
|
Douglas Dodds, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK
Computer Art Then and Now: Evaluating the V&A’s Collections in the Digital Age
Until recently, the Victoria and Albert Museum held relatively few works that illustrated the early years of computer-generated art and design. However, with the recent acquisition of the Patric Prince Collection and the archives of the Computer Arts Society, the V&A now holds an internationally significant collection of computer art. Pioneers represented in the Museum’s holdings include Harold Cohen, Charles Csuri, Jean-Pierre Hébert, Ken Knowlton, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, Frieder Nake, George Nees, Lillian Schwartz, Roman Verostko and Mark Wilson, among many others. We also intend to acquire additional contemporary works that complement the earlier material in the collection.
The paper will describe the V&A’s collecting policy in this area, and highlight issues involved in acquiring, preserving and displaying early works, many of which only survive on paper. The bulk of the artworks consist of line plotter drawings, screen prints, inkjet prints, posters and photographs, but there are also examples in other media, including 3D images and computer files. The Patric Prince Collection in particular also contains a huge quantity of books, archival material and ephemera. We will need to find ways of making all of this accessible to the widest possible audience. The paper will outline plans to digitise key works from the collections and to make the information available online, building on earlier work undertaken by the CACHe project at Birkbeck. We also expect to include key works in future V&A exhibitions, displays and publications. One of the challenges will be to ensure that the collections can be framed in an academic context and presented to a technologically and aesthetically advanced audience that now takes computer-generated images for granted.