"Archiving" Participants

ABSTRACT
My paper deals with the attempt to find a way for reactualize the memory of Media Art in contemporary society, focusing on the audiovisual works. One of the most important problems in this field of studies is the recreation of the Media Art histories in the contemporary visual culture. Today we are seeing a big phenomenon of reinvention of our cultural memory: a great images proliferation, with the emergence of big database and online archive, that has permitted the possibility to use a big part of our cultural audiovisual heritage: toward an “ecology of images”. With the Web, for example, we are witness of an ongoing recreation of the audiovisual memory finding always new connections between the elements in posting on Social Network thanks to the possibilities of using and recycling archive material: thus creating a dynamic cultural memory. The preservation and archiviation practice have to confront with this social changes. The archive can’t be anymore a merely depository of “things” but it must be a dynamic place of recreation of memory. Starting from a new reading of the concept of the archive and the importance of this concept today, I will try to find a way for recontextualize the audiovisual Media Art histories, using the analysis tools given from Media Archeology, in particular in the study of the original contest. Analyzing the theories and practices of preservation and storage of audiovisual archival materials – the preservation of hardware and software, the recreation of the conditions of hardware, software or operating systems and the migration – I will try to propose a new way to conceive the role of the Media Art archive today in the artistic practices of recycling of the media and video art histories: the only way to create a new landscape for the Media Art Histories.

BIO

Elio Ugenti gratuated in 2011 in Image Theory at Roma Tre University, where he is now a PhD Candidate in the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts.
As part of its research he is working on Visual Culture, with particular attention to the practices of reusing images in artistic and non-artistic area.
He published two essays in two collective volumes on italian cinema, and one on the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami in a monographic issue on “Cinema and Iconoclasm”.