"Archiving" Participants

ABSTRACT

The topic of this year’s conference ‘RENEW’ refers to the question if and how the archiving and preservation of New Media Art can be addressed in the best way. While for more traditional artworks like paintings or sculptures there are established ways of restoring and preserving pieces of art, new media require us to think outside the box. Similar to performances that can be documented but not replaced by the original experience, many new media pieces do have comparable aesthetics and a short half-life. On the one hand this is because they rely on hard- or software that gets outdated and is not necessarily preserved somewhere, on the other hand they often feature interactivity with the audience that can only be experienced in action. For the aforementioned reasons, we believe that an equivalent approach as in documenting performances can be used in New Media Art, preventing the complete loss of the experience. A solution is needed that allows to archive multimedia assets, observations of the artwork in form of audio, images and video, and make them available online for researchers and/or the public again. It should allow the integration of user-generated content, which alongside of the curated material by experts could create a shared social memory, capturing the most of New Media Art for upcoming generations. We propose ON:meedi:a, a web-based environment for archiving, curating and presenting multimedia content on the web and would like to present the benefits our solution can bring to the discussion.

BIO
Jana Wedekind is responsible for business development at IN2. She holds a BSc in Media and Communication Informatics from the University of Applied Sciences Reutlingen and an MSc in Digital from the cross-university International Programme on Digital Media in Bremen. Her primary activities deal with market research, analysis, promotion and deployment of the ON:meedi:a ecosystem (http://onmeedia.com) and Followtheplace (http://followtheplace.com). She has been involved in the European project ImaGeo and led the business development activities at IM3I+. Her academic training focused on Software Engineering, Multimedia Production, Web Design and Media Art. She gained first hand experience archiving digital art as part of the compArt daDA: the database Digital Art project and is familiar with multimedia management and analysis as part of her work with ON:meedi:a, a web-based framework for managing and publishing media online.