The second day focuses on collaborative care, managing and facilitating change in sharing knowledge and responsibilities in the digital art ecosystem.

Here you will find the BIOS of all the participants of this year's Transformation Digital Art symposium.

Here you will find the descriptions of all the DAY 2 workshops and presentations.

Timetable | Day Two 

9:00 Registration, coffee at LAB111 / LI-MA, Amsterdam 

10:00 Welcome and introduction by Gaby Wijers (Director, LI-MA), moderation by Vivian van Saaze (Senior Specialist Modern and Contemporary Art, Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and Associate Professor, Maastricht University).

10:15 - 10:35 Shaping HEK’s Collection and Digital Infrastructure by Sabine Himmelsbach (Director, House of Electronic Arts)

10:35-10:55 Dragan Espenschied (Preservation Director, Rhizome), From Artwork To Infrastructure the practice of digital art conservation struggling with software as a material. Institutions and conservators are facing challenges that are not only technical, but in fact very much in the field of knowledge management. With the constant deprecation of software and the increasingly networked existence of both artworks and supporting software tools, recorded knowledge about an artwork as well as documentation can become illegible or outdated surprisingly quickly, and in addition is rarely generalizable enough to share and re-use among peer institutions and collaborators. This presentation proposes a process on how to advance general research in preserving software for digital art conservation, and make productive collaboration possible.

10:55-11:30 Collaborative and future approaches for preserving digital art. A conversation with Dragan Espenschied, Sabine Himmelsbach and Gaby Wijers, moderated by Vivian van Saaze. 

11:30 -13:00 Where do we go from here? How to build and sustain the network? Short presentations by NDE (Dutch Digital Heritage Network), SBMK (Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art) and DPC (Digital Preservation Coalition) on their goals, current challenges and topics, organization structure and business model followed by a collaborative session where the audience in groups is exploring multiple approaches. With Ilka van Steen (SBMK), Sarah Middleton (DPC) and Tamara van Zwol (NDE). 

13:00 - 14:00 LUNCH

14:00 - 15:30 Parallel workshops and presentation

1. The workshop Netart Analysing highlights some key, specific questions that can arise when considering the preservation of computer generated and net art works. Two artworks, Compressed Forests ( (2016 RCE/Centraal Museum) by Jan Robert Leegte (Artist) and Being Human by Annie Abrahams (Artist) will be presented and discussed, followed by a DIY session on the analyzing of net art. The workshop will be moderated by Monika Szűcsová (Curator and researcher, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University Brno) and Joost Dofferhoff (Registrar & Assistant documentation & preservation, LI-MA).  
   
   compressedforests.com/ is a browser-based artwork consisting of a website that features pixelated images of forests retrieved from Flickr. The final effect at compressedforests.com shows extremely pixelated images that progress through in 60-second intervals. Being Human, is a big interlinked html universe where Abrahams questions notions of identity and connectedness, which can be experienced via various entrances she created throughout the years (1997-2007). Since 2000 Being Human has resided on bram.org.
   
   
2. Online workshop. This Netart Analysing workshop highlights some key, specific questions that can arise when considering the preservation of net art. First, Rafaël Rozendaal's (Artist) Fill this Up (2014, KRC collection) will be presented and discussed,followed by a DIY session on the analysing of net art. The workshop will be moderated by Olivia Brum (Junior Conservator, LI-MA) and Paula Fernández Valdés (Predoctoral Fellow Researcher FPI-UPV, Universitat Politècnica València) and supported by Wiel Seuskens (Technical Manager, LI-MA).
   
   fillthisup.com consists of an interactive webpage. When the visitor loads the website, it appears blank until the cursor is moved into the browser window. At this point, shapes in brightly coloured gradients begin to rapidly stack up following the cursor. Once the shapes are laid down, they become part of a non-dynamic bitmap.
   
   
3. Presentations of collaborative projects, moderated by Gaby Wijers: 
   
   From storing to streaming data: the climate impact of our digital heritage: The Dutch digital heritage community (NDE) is examining the CO2 impact and possible measures. What is the environmental impact of storage and the use of collections? What can we do to lessen the impact? And what measures could have (the most) effect? The NDE has focused their investigation on the impact of servers, infrastructure, cloud storage and use. In this session, we will show the most important results and recommendations of these four areas. Also, we will explore where we stand as museums or cultural institutions compared to (big data) sectors, like social media platforms.
   
   Het Archieftraject. Every designer, collective, agency and festival owns a treasure trove of archival material. The beautiful sketches, critical notes and rich visual material inspire new creators, researchers and the public. Het Archieftraject helps organisations and makers in the cultural field by (re)organising their archives so they can share them with others. Podiumkunst.net and the Network Archives Design and Digital Culture (NADD) jointly organise. Het Archieftraject, in which participants, with the help of a coach, map their archives and plan to preserve them and make them accessible. Learn more about Het Archieftraject and hear about the experience of a former participant. With Brigitte Jansen (Project Lead, NADD), Guido Jansen (Coordinator Archival Development, Podiumkunst.net) and Jarl Schulp (Director Fiber Festival).

1. Presentations on Documentation, moderated by Gaby Wijers: 
   Debra Solomon's The Living 1997-1998: a reconstruction. This early net art and performance-based work no longer exists. Is it possible to reactivate the site through media archaeology and based on documentation? Haitian Ma (Researcher, LI-MA) a.o. will share questions and scenarios for the future life of this artwork. 
   
   Artists Mapping Interactivity by Marije Baalman (Artist, iii). Baalman recently published Composing Interactions - An Artist’s Guide to Building Expressive, Interactive Systems. She applies her extensive experience as an artist and engineer to guide us through the creation process of interactive digital artworks. This lecture will explore mapping, visual language and case study documentation.
   
   From Thousands of Documents to One Wiki by Morgane Stricot & Matthieu Vlaminck (Media and Digital Art Conservators, ZKM\). In 2019, ZKM’s wiki was resurrected to document the software-based art collection. Improved and adapted to their specific needs, the wiki led to a profound restructuring of documentation and management strategies for software-based artworks. The possibilities offered by this editing tool are beyond expectation, especially for version control and collaborative documentation. 

16:00 - 16:45 Art documentation in the context of festival activity by Sarah Cook and Bilyana Palankasova This talk draws on Sarah Cook's experience of curating for festivals, and on research by doctoral student Bilyana Palankasova (in collaboration with NEoN Digital Arts) considering the value of festivals to artists, audiences and digital art history. We consider how exhibitions are documented and those records kept, with a view to understanding the responsibility of curators to maintain legacies for works of art which might otherwise go unnoticed until such time as they enter collections.

16:45 - 17:15 Digital Care: Conversation on collaborative conservation A discussion on exhibiting and reactivating iconic media artworks, interpretations and collaborative digital care. With Sanneke Huisman and Klaas Kuitenbrouwer

17:15 Wrap up Transformation Digital Art 2023 by Gaby Wijers and Vivian van Saaze

17:30 Drinks and celebration 

This day of the symposium is part of the collaborative research project Infrastructuur Duurzame toegankelijkheid Digital Kunst and is supported by Mondriaan Fund, Prins Bernhard Cultuur Fonds & Gieskes Strijbis Fund and AFK

Here you will find the BIOS of all the participants of this year's Transformation Digital Art symposium.

Here you will find the descriptions of all the DAY 2 workshops and presentations.