[artinfo] V2_ Capturing Unstable Media

[richard de boer]

CAPTURING UNSTABLE MEDIA

Research by V2_Archive on documentation aspects of electronic art activities
http://www.v2.nl/Projects/capturing/
________________________________________________________________________________

During the last decades, electronic art and culture have gained importance 
and increased attention. So far, however, few attempts have been made to 
document and preserve this emerging field, its activities and recent 
history. V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, a center for art, culture and 
technology in Rotterdam (the Netherlands), since long has been involved 
with this issue, building an archive with documentation of twenty years of 
electronic media art.

 From March to December 2003, V2_ conducted research on the documentation 
aspects of the preservation of electronic art activities - "Capturing 
Unstable Media", an approach between archiving and preservation. For this 
purpose, two major case studies were investigated in depth Ð both are 
projects that were co-developed at V2_Lab, the interdisciplinary workspace 
of V2_. The first case study was "whisper" (2002-2003) by Thecla Schiphorst 
and Susan Kozel, a project that investigated the intersections and 
relationships between wearable technologies, performance and the body. The 
second case study was a series of so-called "DataClouds", a long-term 
research project (1998-present) that involves web-based 2D or 3D 
visualizations of complex information structures.

Based on the findings, a series of recommendations were formulated in the 
following areas:
- documentation strategies for electronic art activities;
- formal modeling and metadata;
- archival interoperability.
Furthermore, a number of technical realizations were implemented, including 
a public, web-based portal for V2_Archive on top of a technical framework 
based on open standards, through XML and RDF technologies.

One of the major results of "Capturing Unstable Media" is a formal model 
(ontology) to describe the activities in electronic art in several levels 
of detail. It offers a series of sharable, basic concepts of interest to a 
wide variety of institutions and actors in the field of electronic media 
art, along with suggestions on how these concepts could interrelate with 
each other. The ontology can be consulted at the project's website (see below).

As a follow-up to this project, the V2_Archive team intends to focus on 
research that involves international archival interoperability in this 
field, including the alignment of multilingual terminology resources, 
ontologies and the Semantic Web.

"Capturing Unstable Media" has been supported by the Mondriaan Foundation 
(NL) and the Daniel Langlois Foundation (CA). A group of experts from Dutch 
archives, research institutes and cultural heritage organizations has 
assisted the research process through an advisory board.

Links

http://www.v2.nl/Projects/capturing/
The project's results can be consulted and downloaded from the "Capturing 
Unstable Media" project site.

http://archive.v2.nl/
V2_'s public online archive portal, with documentation about a broad 
cross-section of more than 10 years of electronic art activities.



V2_Institute for the Unstable Media
Eendrachtsstraat 10, NL-3012 XL Rotterdam
The Netherlands
Tel. + 31 (0)10 206 72 72 / Fax + 31 (0)10 206 72 71
E-mail: v2 at v2.nl / URL http://www.v2.nl



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