THEATRE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
SYMPOSIUM
The Straw That Broke the Museum's Back? Documenting and Preserving Digital Art for the Next Century
Richard Rinehart of Berkeley Art Museum will discuss works of variable media art, such as performance, installation, conceptual, and digital art, which represent some of the most compelling and significant artistic creation of our time. These works are key to understanding contemporary art practice and scholarship, but because of their ephemeral, technical, multimedia, or otherwise variable natures, they also present significant obstacles to accurate documentation, access, and preservation.
The works were in many cases created to challenge traditional methods of art description and preservation, but now, lacking such description, they often comprise the more obscure aspects of institutional collections, virtually inaccessible to present day researchers. Without strategies for cataloging and preservation, many of these vital works will eventually be lost to art history.
Description of and access to art collections promote new scholarship and artistic production. By developing ways to catalog and preserve these collections, we will both provide current and future generations the opportunity to learn from and be inspired by the works and ensure the perpetuation and accuracy of historical records.
This presentation will focus on digital art and introduce new consortium projects, such as Archiving the Avant Garde, and some of the early thinking in this area, including treating variable media art as performance rather than artifact, turning variability from preservation obstacle to preservation strategy, and identifying what exact aspects of media art we can preserve.
To view the program handout, click here
