Annet Dekker

What is the role of the curator when organizing digital art exhibitions in offline and online spaces? Analyzing the influence and impact of curating digital art, the book focuses on how the experiments of curators, artists and designers opened the possibility to reconfigure traditional models and methods for presenting and accessing digital art. In the process, it addresses how web-based practices challenge certain established museological values and precipitate alternative ways of understanding art's stewardship, curatorial responsibility, public access and art history. Through more than twenty interviews with artists and curators in the course of the last ten years, and flanked by an extensive timeline, the reader of this publication is given an insight into the discourse on digital art and its curation today.

From Presenting and Collecting Digital Art to Networked Co-Curation

Curating Digital Art

Collecting and Conserving Net Art explores the qualities and characteristics of net art and its influence on conservation practices. By addressing and answering some of the challenges facing net art and providing an exploration of its intersection with conservation, the book casts a new light on net art, conservation, curating and museum studies. Viewing net art as a process rather than as a fixed object, the book considers how this is influenced by and executed through other systems and users. Arguing that these processes and networks are imbued with ambiguity, the book suggests that this is strategically used to create suspense, obfuscate existing systems and disrupt power structures. The rapid obsolescence of hard and software, the existence of many net artworks within restricted platforms and the fact that artworks often act as assemblages that change or mutate, make net art a challenging case for conservation. Taking the performative and interpretive roles conservators play into account, the book demonstrates how practitioners can make more informed decisions when responding to, critically analysing or working with net art, particularly software-based processes. Collecting and Conserving Net Art is intended for researchers, academics and postgraduate students, especially those engaged in the study of museum studies, conservation and heritage studies, curatorial studies, digital art and art history. The book should also be interesting to professionals who are involved in the conservation and curation of digital arts, performance, media and software.

Moving beyond Conventional Methods

Collecting and Conserving Net Art

An archive is a collection of documents and records that is preserved for historical purposes. As such, an archive is considered a site of the past, a place that contains traces of a collective memory of a nation, a people or a group. Digital archives have changed from stable entities into flexible systems, referred to with the term ?Living Archives?. But in which ways has this change affected our relationship to the past, present and future? Will the erased, forgotten and neglected be redeemed, and new memories be allowed? Will the fictional versus factual mode of archiving offer the democracy that the public domain implies, or is it another way for public instruments of power to operate? 'Lost and Living (in) Archives' shows that an archive is not simply a recording, a reflection, or an image of an event, but that it shapes the event itself and thus influences both present and past.

Annet Dekker

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