CHArt TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Digital Archive Fever
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Janis Jefferies, Goldsmiths Digital Studios, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
Curation in the Digital Age - How are Digital Media Changing the Way we Preserve and Curate Work, and What are the Implications for Audience Experience and Audience Development?
Works of digital and Internet art, performance, installation, conceptual, and other variable media art represent some of the most compelling and significant artistic creations of our time. These works constitute a history of alternative artistic practice, but because of their ephemeral, technical, or otherwise variable natures, they also present significant obstacles to accurate documentation, access, and preservation.
Without strategies for preservation many of these vital works - and possibly whole new genres such as early Internet art - will be lost to future generations. Long term strategies must closely examine the nature of ephemeral art and identify core aspects of these works to preserve. Will the future experience these works as physical traces and documentation? Emulated media artifacts? Dynamic cultural events re-performed? All of these?
On the other hand, with digital content there is almost no cost to keeping absolutely everything for ever and ever. Aside from artist-generated media art works, people downloading images or music have a problem of searching and finding what may be of value and significance within all the stuff that can now be stored.
The web makes us rethink what we mean by ‘preserve’ and ‘archive’. In the digital world information is preserved only through interaction. For instance, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology in Montreal has established projects which aim to preserve new media artworks through documentation, metadata and contextualisation to guarantee long-term access to research.
This paper will examine the kinds of tools needed to help us decide what to save and how new approaches such as social networked curation might help. We will examine three collaborative case studies of computer-based art projects selected from the range of active projects by those now involved with the Arts and Business project, including Tate and also the Victoria and Albert Museum, which now holds some of the early British Computer Arts Society projects in its Prints and Drawings department.