What impact does the purchase of a digital work of art have on an organization or museum? How is conservation managed for the work? And how are digital works of art best preserved for the long term?

On June 27th 2013, the Digital Art Force (DAF) organized a seminar focusing on these issues at The New Institute. The DAF is a partnership between LIMA, the SBMK (Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art), DEN and The New Institute. The entire day was dedicated to collecting, documenting, managing and preserving the often unstable media art forms. The program started off with several presentations by specialists in the field of new media art preservation. Marco de Niet (Director DEN), Karin van der Heiden (digital collections consultant), Annet Dekker (researcher) and Margriet Schavemaker (head of collection and research at the Stedelijk Museum) came to talk about policies, strategies, and research along their practice with digital art. In the afternoon there were four workshops focussing on digital preservation, presentation and documentation of digital artworks.

On behalf of LIMA Gaby Wijers and Wiel Seuskens presented ‘Digital Sustainability the Do’s and Don’ts’. This workshop focused specifically on storage. Just like a physical heritage, digital heritage needs to be stored. This type of storage system is called an E-depot. An E-depot requires a different way of dealing with data than most institutions are accustomed to. For the Netherlands media art collection LIMA manages the E-depot. Wiel Seuskens, technical manager at LIMA explained the structure and functioning of the e-depot. There are several issues that need special attention when storing digital heritage within the structure the E-depot. Gaby Wijers gave insight in how LIMA developed methods and practices to store digital heritage in a durable and sustainable way. The participants of the workshop had the chance to examin the digital structure of their institutions. With the score model, developed by PACKED and DEN they could individually test how far along their instituion is in the process E-depot management and what could be improved in the future.

In addition to LIMA's workshop, three other workshops took place. A workshop by Yolande Kooistee of the Augmented Reality Lab of the Royal Academy of Art The Hague focussed on the relationship between new visualization technology and the strategies to preserve and manage them. She explained the possibilities of the augmented reality (AR) technique and introduced various forms of AR that create a mediated reality. Sandra van Kleef, coordinator storage management and logistics of the art collections at RCE gave a workshop on the documentation system SPECTRUM. This system can assist with documenting video art, media art and born-digital works. Various aspects of collection management were discussed, such as registration, acquisition and loan. The workshop by Ellen Jansen, conservator and lecturer on the Conservation of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Amsterdam addressed the issues surrounding the artist interview. The artist interview is an important source of information on the method and materials of the author in relation to the meaning of the work. The responses of the artist contribute to decisions about (future) management, conservation and presentation of contemporary art. 

The Digital Art Force was formed through a collaborative effort between the Virtual Platform, LIMA, SBMK and DEN and is committed to optimal management and conservation of digital art. 

You can download a full report of the day in PDF on the right. (in Dutch)
You can consult recordings of the full presentations on the DAF seminar 2013 down below. (In Dutch)

Video documenation of the DAF presentations