Dear Artists, if you'd like to be more in control of the future presentation of your artworks, this tool gives you guidelines to do just that. We know that documenting and preserving your work is not easily done, or is complicated by competing requirements of your time and resources. For these reasons and more, LIMA created this Artwork Documentation Tool to empower you and other artists to feel in control of documenting your own artworks so you'll be able to show them now and in the future. The tool is free to use and offers a series of steps and tasks to support you in gathering and documenting information about your artworks and also acts as a place to store this. The information you bring together will contribute greatly to your own personal knowledge of your practice and will also help you more easily offer your work for exhibition, acquisition and purchase to interested galleries, museums and collectors.

The tool is geared towards artists who create complex, software-based installations (which could also be interactive). However, if you're an artist working with digital media in a performance or installation capacity, this tool could also be used by you. Just explore and answer what's relevant. The tool is open to artists who are in the process of creating new works, or who would like to go back and document older works.

Thinking about how artists can be better empowered to preserve their own work is part of a legacy of people working through these issues and offering advice and tools to artists. The Variable Media Questionnaire and artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's 2015 manifesto provide invaluable insights, and significantly influenced LIMA's research and the Artwork Documentation Package we developed. LIMA's Artwork Documentation Tool is actually a simplified interpretation of this Artwork Documentation Package - we've taken a broad range of activities and actions that require a team to compete, and translated it into a simple format for you to use and do yourself.

www.li-ma.nl/adt