Digital Preservation Coalition

Sarah Cook (CRUMB) and Jon Thomson (UCL): Curating, Commissioning, and Conserving - Digital Art in Practice

Notes by Kristy Davis ... Sarah Cook discussed how digital and media art fits into art history and how it exists in a larger context. She described two online art projects she had curated that raise issues of preservation. The first one, Add-Art, is an online exhibition ‘curated’ by a different person every two weeks of digital images which replace commercial advertising on the web; it is predominantly documented by screen grabs, but this method won’t provide much context. The second, MobileScout, was a time-based, user-contributed artwork, commissioned for a touring exhibition; the work is no longer online but wasn't intended to exist 'live' indefinitely, raising questions about the responsibilities of commissioners and curators. She raised the question of how much does complete metadata matter for art history research, and that documentation - writing and publishing about digital and media art - is one preservation strategy.

Jon Thomson of the artist duo Thomson & Craighead, gave examples of how some of their digital art and installations was made and how it has been acquired by museums or national collections or commissioned for (semi)permanent display in public space. Each of the artworks discussed raised various issues in how they were to be preserved since all are at some level software-based work, many using live data drawn from the internet.

Sarah Cook's Presentation / Jon Thomson's Presentation (link to follow)