In August, together with the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, LI-MA will address the case study Clapback Fury (2021) by Saeeda Saeed. Donated by the Hartwig collection, the work was submitted to the project as a time-based media installation that exhibits many conservation problems representative of similar works. 

The work examines the burgeoning loss of digital and physical autonomy, in conversation with restrictions and propaganda exacted by the state of Saudi Arabia. Using a similar gameplay to that used by the old arcade favourite "Dance, Dance, Revolution," each step creates a meme insult and directly tags a Saudi state-run account with the intention of flooding the system and drowning out official tweets. Past installations of the work have faced functionality issues relating to the blocking of the work's associated twitter accounts as bots. 

Clapback Fury (2021) by Saeeda Saeed is one of the case studies in the Sustainable Infrastructure for Digital Art project and will be addressed from the perspective of documentation. Collaborative infrastructure for sustainable access to digital art is a practice-based research project that focuses on the needs of complex digital artworks from Dutch collections and their caretakers. The project has urgent goals: to save digital artworks for future generations to experience, and to commonly develop and share knowledge to make this happen. This case study thus aims to address how the work can be conserved and its stability improved for the long-term.

Image credit: Clapback Fury (2021) by Saeeda Saeed at Vleeshal (Middelburg). Image by  Franz Mueller Schmidt