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Introduction

Oliver Grau, Janina Hoth and Eveline Wandl-Vogt

Digital Art & Digital Humanities

Compared to traditional art forms—such as painting or sculpture—digital art has a diverse potential for imaging and visualizing digital cultures; being as it consists of and discusses various (digital) technologies and tools. With digitisation influencing our everyday lives through telecommunication, social media and mobile applications, digital technologies document, organise and shape contemporary societies. By creating with the same technologies, artists investigate our digitised cultures and circumvent the black-boxing thereof. They investigate and mediate the technological influence on socio-cultural development and transformation.

Through transdisciplinary methods at the intersection of art, science and technology, digital art combines artistic creation with innovative research and technological development and thereby bridges art history to digital methods and contemporary socio-cultural phenomena. As such, digital art’s development often goes in accordance with the academic field of digital humanities. Digital artists have contributed to the development of computational analysis through the aesthetic and experimental art-science-technology dispositions of their art form. Their artistic creations are developed in parallel with digital methods and tools in the humanities and sciences, which have been applied in art and academia for over half a century now.

While technology is becoming increasingly important in research, the connections between digital art, digital humanities and (digital) art history are often neglected, or only marginally recognized and digital artworks are rarely investigated as research subject. Media and digital art theory was developed as an independent research field and, in consequence, these connections are often not reflected within a transdisciplinary approach (Paul 2013).

In digital humanities (DH), with the TEI initiative, data mining and visualisation tools, most analytical methods so far have emphasized text encryption and digitisation efforts in fields such as archaeology, art history, linguistics, history and numismatics. Visual born digital objects often remain on the margin of research even though they mark a vast amount of online data. Additionally, they are still not incorporated into the art historical canon or exist only as a niche phenomenon rather than a main contemporary art movement.

From text encoding to virtualisation methods to interactive storytelling—digital artists contribute to digital culture with arts-based research and novel approaches to digital technologies through artistic processes. In 2009, Tamiko Thiel began her series of augmented reality installations, bringing her virtual reality compositions from web interfaces into reality through the lens of portable devices (smart phones, tablets) (Fig. 1).¹ Using a Layar augmented reality app, she portrayed “hidden” historic and thematic layers of public spaces—a tool now applied in museums for interactive explorations by seemingly “bringing objects to life.” This technology became widely popular through the Pokémon GO gaming app in 2016. Yet, this connection between art-science-technology projects, digital technologies and the commercialisation thereof is rarely reflected in research, which could support computational analysis of this contemporary art form and, in a broader sense, digital cultures.

With regard to their influence on the Digital Age and its technologies, we may regard digital art as “the art of our time” in terms of sociopolitical and cultural relevance (Grau 2013a): thematising complex challenges for our life and societies, such as genetic engineering, the rise of post human bodies, climate, the image and media revolution (Hauser 2008; Borries 2011); and with it the explosion of communication, the change towards virtual financial economies, the processes of globalization and surveillance (Vesna 2007; Mitchell 2011). In Pic-me (2014)², Marc Lee wrote an Instagram app, which users can install on Google earth, to locate randomly chosen Instagram posts via GPS data. By connecting social media accounts with the real-life identities through the location, Lee highlighted surveillance through user data on social media accounts.

Figure 1. Tamiko Thiel, Transformation, 2012. ©Tamiko Thiel

As response to the rising industrial waste generation and resulting environmental issues, Gilberto Esparza created robots, or Plantas Autofotosintéticas (2016),³ which are powered with toxic waste. As hybrid work between art, scientific innovation and anthropocene research, his work challenges common methods of managing air and water pollution.

In 1997, I/O/D’s Web Stalker foreshadowed domain crawling and colink analysis through the artistic and technological development of an alternative web browser (Fig. 2).⁴ At that time, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape‘s Navigator were the two most commonly used browsers and I/O/D aesthetically explored alternative ways of browsing through the web. Their method of highlighting connections between webpages and hypertexts are now common in computational analysis.

Digital artists today are shaping highly disparate and complex areas, like time-based installation art, telepresence art, genetic and bio art, robotics, net art and space art. They are experimenting with nanotechnology, artificial or A-life art; creating virtual agents and avatars, mixed realities, and database-supported art. Digital art often addresses many senses—visual, aural and beyond. It thereby technically explores and transforms creative process within and outside of art. In a humanist tradition, digital art frequently addresses controversial contemporary discussions, challenges and dangers, and proposes socio-cultural transformations. Thus, it is an art form with a deeply comprehensive potential in the reflection of our information societies regarding the digital revolution. Because it utilizes new technologies, a large number of innovative visual expressions have been developed and artists increasingly operate transculturally as well as transdisciplinary.

Figure 2. I/O/D, Web stalker, 1997. ©I/O/D

As a research subject, however, digital artworks are still rarely investigated (with digital methods) despite the fact that they are most often born-digital works, generate digital data or document user interaction. Unlike digitized artworks, from illuminated books to ancient architecture to modern paintings, they are rarely collected and analysed in digital humanities projects.

Compared to other born-digital cultural heritage, e.g. websites that can be crawled and documented or online events that are screen recorded, digital artworks are even more elusive in their object hood. With digital technologies as intrinsic part of their medium and subject, they require constant updating. Their collection and preservation is a much discussed topic involving several stakeholders from artists to technicians at collecting institutions. In their modularity, one cannot only document the website of an artwork; in their processuality, one cannot fixate the work, or artefactualize it, in one state of being. Additionally, digital artworks often remediate data generated live from social media and other online sources. In other words, these artworks challenge traditional archive, collection and preservation methods and, consequently, museums and other memory institutions both online and offline still struggle with archiving this “art of our time” for future generations.

The aim of this collection is to focus on how we need to redefine preservation methods for digital art by creating a transdisciplinary dialogue between all the involved stakeholders and how we can archive digital artworks by acknowledging their authenticity and mediality. The discussion goes beyond preservation as such and questions how digital artworks can be further re-used for curatorial and dissemination projects, and as research data. How can we utilize digital art databases and collections for research purposes and which infrastructures do we need for these purposes? Authors discuss ideas of collecting in- and outside of traditional memory institutions, within online databases and for purposes of exhibiting, researching and disseminating digital art presently and for long-term preservation. Archiving in theory and in practice-based approaches are juxtaposed to bring together experts from all academic disciplines and memory institutions involved in preserving digital art as digital cultural heritage. We retrace the discourses and disciplines intrinsic for digital art preservation towards a transdisciplinary theory which combines art history, media art theory, conservation, computer studies, media studies and collection studies.

Digital Art & Preservation

To preserve a digital artwork for future generations—or even beyond software updates and changing system requirements—, many factors theoretically, technically and institutionally need to be considered and combined. As interconnected, “living” entities, digital artworks have surpassed the concept of object-oriented art and necessitate a rethinking of preservation strategies. Through their various technological and cocreative components, documenting and disseminating these artworks exceeds the concept of artefactualisation and restoration towards an archival strategy as continuing process. So far, most museum projects and other initiatives have developed intransitive preservation forms, e.g. emulation and web archiving. They successfully document an artwork’s iteration—usually at a stage when it was originally published or exhibited, but negate digital art’s mediality in its intrinsically intertwined technology, design and methodology. For example, while web archiving can document the interface design of an artwork’s homepage and enable users to continue to access and interact with it, this does not automatically archive the entire artwork, let alone its creative process and technology. Preservation material, then, has to adopt more fluid forms with alternations and (re)iterations and update procedures while still being based upon concepts of artistic intention and authenticity. New strategies on archiving, collecting and preserving require a deeper understanding of the mediality of digital art and its components, adaption to its co-creative process and be re-usable as archival data to create multiple narratives about the histories and futures of digital art.

The discourse on preserving digital art indicates how archival procedures imply underlying questions of authenticity, artistic intentionality and archive theory, to name only a few concepts (Dekker 2018; Rinehart/Ippolito 2014; Fauconnier 2003), and highlights how digital art has put these concepts into question. Simultaneously, technicians need to solve the issue of technical obsolescence in regard to long term archiving. Digital art preservation necessitates a network of collaborations: between the artists and technicians that developed and constructed the work, the institutional staff responsible for collection and preservation, scholars and conservationists. A theory of digital art preservation is therefore transdisciplinary not only due to the collaborative nature of this art’s production, but in the necessity of combining theoretical writing with practice-based research by all of the professions involved.

The Roundtable—a DARIAH event at the 2017 Re: Trace Conference, held at the Academy of Sciences, Vienna⁵—introduces the current issues in digital art preservation with special regard to how museums have thus far responded to the challenge and how new infrastructures both off- and online can be established for the future. Renowned scholars pinpointed the main research questions today in regard to digital art theory and preservation strategies in museums and other memory institutions.

Both the histories and futures of digital art in museums are debated with a presentation on curatorial strategies by Francesca Franco, who describes the concept for exhibiting computer art from the 1970s. Alcalá/Escribano demonstrate the institutional history of the MIDE collection with a case study on an artwork’s versioning. They argue for the integral relationship between the general, industrial development of digital technologies and early “primitive” media art projects both in terms of their production and preservation. These research-based projects are juxtaposed with practice-based preservation methods from Diego Mellado and Patricia Falcão. From a technician’s point of view, Mellado proposes a new documentation method as demo artwork descriptions, which can be reinterpreted without relying on specific software or hardware. Combining documentation and preservation strategies, Mellado codeveloped a method which aims at documenting an artwork’s functionality and aesthetics to enable the preservation and exhibition of an artwork after the technology has become outdated. Having supported many artists on the creation and re-installment of their works, Mellado writes from a practice-based research perspective to conserve media art in its originality as aesthetic while allowing for technological changes. Patricia Falcão introduces strategies in the time-based media preservation projects at Tate. As conservator in a well-established institution for contemporary art, she describes main challenges and best practices for collecting and preserving artworks in this infrastructure.

Digital Art & Archive Theory

Online storage methods enable us to gather more data than ever before. By 2020, our digital universe will grow by a factor of 300, from 130 exabytes in 2005 to 40,000 exabytes and will double every two years, driven largely by the increase in machine-generated digital images and their metadata.⁶ The internet is often described as an archive, or archival in the metaphorical definition of the term, due to the (seemingly) easy access for every user to data—from images and videos, sound and music to articles, journals and books.

This has also caused a renewed interest in archive theory and archival practices online and offline. With digital technologies and online data storage, a new archival dynamic has emerged due to the processuality of these technologies in combination with their seeming “archive-ability.” In media studies and media archaeology, the necessity for more dynamic archive infrastructures which question the search for origin inherent in traditional archives have been addressed for digital data (Ernst 2003; Zielinski 2014). At the same time, theorists analysed the essential memory functionality in computer hardware (Chun 2008). With input from other disciplines, e.g. gender and queer studies, the debate on the archive as power dynamic was debated for digital data, where the inherent categorization in databases and the appearing objectivity of data analysis is investigated (Wyatt 2008).

In the early 2000s, many scholars celebrated the ability to not only store large amounts of data/knowledge, but to distribute them globally and democratically to anyone interested and with Web access (Galloway 2011). In digital humanities, databases are one of the most important research tools for collecting and re-using data. However, the largest servers today belong to governments and the industry, e.g. social media platforms, online distributors, and are therefore “dark archives” largely inaccessible.⁷ While web technologies function by storing hypertexts and interconnected data, this function is always temporary or cannot be accessed by users without sufficient knowledge and tools. Therefore, the internet as archive relates to the metaphorical meaning rather than the functionality (and usability) of an archive.

For digital art, its accessibility and preservation for future generations remain to be an open question. Do we embrace the ephemerality of digital technologies or do we acknowledge the mediality of Web technology as based on memory techniques, when debating its documentation and archiving? While conservation in museums and other institutions affects financing, technological expertise and collaborations, online archiving was established as an open, easily usable and accessible method to document artworks within a database environment, similar to other digital cultural heritage projects.

Artists engage contemporary digital technologies, leading to the production of artworks that are necessarily processual, ephemeral, interactive, multimedia-based, and context-dependent (Paul 2016). Following academic standards, the preservation of a digital artwork demands the ‘recording’ of these various aspects, including specific appearances, production processes, exhibitions, distribution, institutional contexts, observer response, publications, and research (Grau 2003a). Since the beginning of the Third Millennium, there has certainly been evident promotion of digital art conferences, lexicons, and platforms for the purpose of documenting MediaArtHistories. But even with such progress, as a post-industrial information society in the digital sphere, we continue to be threatened with a significant loss of this critical art form, both in art archives and databases, and for the accessibility of future scholarship and the general public. As recently expressed in an international declaration⁸, signed as of 2019 by more than 500 scholars and leading artists from over 40 countries, there is an urgent need to create a stable international platform of interoperable archives.

Therefore, for digital art, database projects have been developed that went beyond traditional art historical archival methods, e.g. scientific-based (Archive of Digital Art, the Variable Media Questionnaire), collaborative (Artelectronicmedia.com), institutional (V2, Rhizome Artbase, Media Art Festival Archives) and commercial (Sedition, Niio). Most archives document textual and visual data: biographical, bibliographical, indexical, descriptive and often develop tools for recording and re-using archive material. First and foremost, artists selfarchive their work on their own homepages. The methods on how to collect and organize vary depending on what to collect (by specific genre, geographic area, technology etc.), conservation type (emulation, rewriting) and documentation (metadata system, data sheets). Many databases today are co-creatively designed and shared, but they can also be (semi-)curated by an editorial team. However, databases are rarely interoperational and often a lack a long-term preservation and sustainability plan. The goal of archiving this contemporary art form for more than a few years is still an open question which needs to be debated between artists, scholars and conservators.

In this book, the transdisciplinary investigation includes an epistemological inquiry on the questions of what we can know and what we want to know about and from digital artworks. Since one major aspect of archiving is the historicization of digital art, we must question how we can narrate artistic, technological and institutional histories for contemporary art in a relation to specific archival methodologies. Once artworks are preserved and thereby embedded into an archival system, they become knowledge carriers for events and experiences in the past as much as individual collection objects. As such archival objects and historical sources, they are central for writing MediaArtHistories.

In this collection, we therefore begin by introducing central works of “historical media art” and the methods of collecting and archiving. Frieder Nake and George Legrady introduce their own pioneering work along with other examples from early media art and its technologies. By comparing the works of artist Harold Cohen and programmer Georg Nees, both pioneers for Computer, or Algorithmic Art, Nake questions the correlation between artistic and technological knowledge. Legrady describes the continuous influence of technical developments in photography and digital imaging for his artworks. Escribano/Alcála retrace the copy machine as a tool for early media art production in the United States and Europe, discussing how MediaArtHistories can be written by following technical procedures as origins of artistic inspiration and progress. The diversity and complexity of these histories challenged new archival projects to document the new art forms as early as the 1980s.

Anne-Marie Duguet chaired one of the very first preservation projects focused on digital art in the mid-1990s—before the publication of Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever.” The research results preceded his archival definitions by investigating the complex question of how to archive an artwork made up of not only many entities, software and hardware, but that incorporates—as a network of ideas—imagery, texts as well as human and technical input. She and her team worked very closely together with the artists to find singular preservation strategies that were approved by the artists. As a consequence, each project was developed and discussed over a long period of time (around six years) and she analyzes central themes of work ethics in regard to archiving non-object art.

The artistic perspective is often still underestimated or negated in this discourse, both due to omission or lack of knowledge by the artist and/or by the host institution. With digital artworks, and digital technologies in general, the need for a continued update is often not considered in a longterm preservation strategy. Artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer describes from his own experience how memory institutions such as art museums as well as artists can avoid technological issues and discusses how a reiteration of an artwork is in line with artistic intention and authenticity. Since the impossibility of archiving digital art has been proclaimed by artists in the past as a characteristic of its ephemerality—following a radical interpretation of Derrida’s archive theory—, artists very often did not take action in the documentation and conservation of their work. However, one must differentiate between the concept of archival power as a method of control, the idea of art as originality and the modularity of digital art entities are essential disparate characteristics.

With net.artworks as case studies, Giselle Beiguelman highlights the difficulty for archival strategies to document the artwork, or a version of the artwork, in a way that can be considered adequate, replicating and functional. Beiguelman discusses the interconnection of frontend/ backend and user interaction, how these are essential elements of an artwork and whether they can be documented. She thereby expands archival strategies by separating the outer appearance and frontend functionality from an artwork’s origin and concept. The question is reformulated as: Which elements should be considered as essential for an artwork?

Digital artworks redefine traditional art historical concepts of authenticity, object-hood and originality, and as a consequence, also interrupt the archival system towards renewed ideas for documenting and disseminating data for the future. In fact, many digital artists debate archive theory within the framework of digital technologies in their works. Annet Dekker discusses these artworks as counter-practices of the industrialised archiving system online, with companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook as some of the largest archives for digital data. Her article goes beyond the boundaries of light and dark archiving by examining how artists develop alternative ways of online archiving as a collective, networked method. Janina Hoth deliberates the opportunity of online archives for a co-creative knowledge generating system for digital art. By examining the production process of digital art in juxtaposition to the archival infrastructure of online databases, she argues for a restructured archival system, which accommodates the new and innovative creative process inherent to digital art. She further suggests that, by stepping away from the concept of an artefact, archival documents become not only original sources, but also an open process themselves.

As we progress with the question of what needs to be archived in regards to digital art preservation, and which methods are available to us, the question also shifts towards re-usability of (open) data. The documents become not only a source for seeing and experiencing older artworks, but a source of inspiration, research and education as well.

Laura Leuzzi demonstrates how archival methods can also be an artistic experiment for a continued development of media art performances. In addition to a documentation of the “original” works, artists such as Marina Abramović would re-enact their performances with new technologies, often acknowledging the former versions by incorporating them into the new performance. The continued works become embodied and interactive knowledge carriers, where not only the technology changes, but the artist’s body is also parallel in their artwork(s).

Finally, the projects MediaArtResearch Thesaurus (Grau) and the Narrative Book Collection present methods of dissemination for both research and education. Examining the works as digital data which can be processed, compared and analysed, archiving goes beyond saving documents for collection and exhibition purposes towards their continuing reusability online. The MediaArtResearch Thesaurus project focused on visual comparisons to bridge media art with its art historic predecessors. For the Narrative Book Collection, Miyakita/Okawa/Earl examined the online education platform “FutureLearn” for an interactive knowledge exchange.

Digital Art & Collection Strategies

On the Archive of Digital Art (ADA, digitalartarchive.at), over 1,500 institutions are documented as digital art event venues with conferences and summits, exhibitions and performances as well as higher education organizations with graduate programs and teaching platforms. Only a small amount of these institutions have an official program or strategy for collecting digital art. With museums, archives and libraries continuing as the core collecting memory institutions of our societies, as they are publicly funded, they can with certainty claim that digital art has not fully arrived as a main contemporary art form in the main art collecting institutions. Due to the lack of institutional support and rapid changes in storage and presentation media, works that originated ten years ago can often no longer be recovered technically for exhibition or preservation purposes. As debated since the 1990s, museums rarely include digital art in their collections in an encompassing strategy, which can preserve digital art as part of media art histories in regards to both content and technology. Those that do struggle to sustain financial backing, expertise, and technology for the preservation of artworks through strategies such as migration, emulation, and reinterpretation (MacDonald 2009; Ippolito/Rinehart 2014). Hence, in the 2010s, we are facing the loss of an art form in all of its varieties and as part of digital heritage from the early times of our post-industrial digital societies.

Digital art has also changed the venues and media for exhibition and dissemination. Rather than museums and galleries, around 200 festivals and biennials worldwide can be considered as the most important venues for digital art. They have shaped the histories of digital art insofar as their foci on future-oriented technology, and its main discourses and issues supported digital art’s position at the intersection of art, science and technology (Waelder 2010). As temporary events, they collect their own histories—Transmediale, Microwave and ISEA all having their own online archives—, but are rarely involved with the collection of digital art. At the same time, digital art has not significantly entered the walls of museums.

Which infrastructures online and offline are necessary to collect digital art within public funding methods? Today there are more than 50,000 museums worldwide. Japan and Germany, for example, have more than 5,000 each, among them hundreds dedicated to art only. At the same time, in many other countries, a museum infrastructure is still developing and this challenges established research strategies within museums. With all the diversity and history of the museum in its role as preserving and disseminating cultural heritage, the responsibility of collecting borndigital objects is still an open question.⁹

Digital technologies and cultures have made their own impact in these debates with digitisation methods and their position in “saving” endangered cultural heritage objects as well as enabling new research methods for collection items. In the digital age, new tools to present, to explore, collect and access cultural artefacts; to connect, research, manage and visualize data were established. Which status should be given in museums worldwide to digital-born arts and cultures? Which have their own history of more than five decades?

Howard Besser re-narrates the historic development of museums in the US towards digitisation and using digital tools. Looking at several key technological developments inside and outside of museums from the 1970s onwards, the difficult relationship between museums as traditional knowledge institutions and the progressive new technologies is retraced. Sabine Himmelsbach introduces the collection methods at the Haus der elektronischen Künste in Basel—one of the few government supported institutions in Europe with an active collection strategy for digital art. She describes central issues in applied preservation methods at museums and other institutions and thereby offers a comparative view.

Together, the texts in this collection provide a survey of key perspectives and debates in digital art preservation and the histories/ futures of archive and conservation methods. Bridging theory and practice, Digital Art through the Looking Glass points to new perspectives on how to un/sustain digital art online and offline, and how to analyse it with DH methods. Within Digital Humanities, digital art becomes palpable in its transdisciplinary position in creative tool development, as a critical medium for digital culture and as a research subject. In order to acknowledge these potentials, we need to apply preservation methods, find best practices for documentation and conservation and be able to re-use them for future scholarship.

This book results from the 2017 Re: Trace conference, the seventh edition of the conference series On the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology and a cooperation with DARIAH-ERIC. The third day of the conference focused on “Digital Arts, Archives and Museums.” As one main outcome, we discussed the need to bring together all of the involved stakeholders and, hence, it became the main theme of this book. The editors would like to thank all the conference participants and panel members who gave vital input for our research and, of course, the authors for sharing their insights and expertise.

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1 https://www.digitalartarchive.at/database/artists/general/artist/thiel.html.

2 http://marclee.io/en/pic-me-fly-to-the-locations-where-users-send-posts.

3 http://plantasnomadas.com.

4 http://bak.spc.org/iod.

5 https://vimeo.com/253584186.

6 IDC Digital Universe: http://www.emc.com/leadership/digitaluniverse/iview/index.htm

7 See the Digital Preservation Glossary for a technical definition of the term “dark archive“: https://www.lib.umich.edu/preservation-and-conservation/digital- preservation/digital-preservation-glossary.

8 International Liverpool Declaration “Media Art needs global networked organisation and support”: http://www.mediaarthistory.org/declaration.

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