Welcome to the website of the research project Capturing Unstable Media. For an overview of this site, check the right column of this page.

From March to December 2003, the archive team of V2_Organisation (a center for culture and technology in Rotterdam, the Netherlands) has conducted research on the documentation aspects of the preservation of electronic art activities -- or Capturing Unstable Media --, an approach between archiving and preservation.

For this purpose, two major case studies were investigated in depth -- both are projects that were co-developed at V2_Lab, the interdisciplinary workspace of V2_Organisation. The case studies were

• whisper by Thecla Schiphorst and Susan Kozel, a project related to wearable technologies, performance and the body;
• DataCloud 2.0 and previous and later DataClouds; projects that involve web-based 2D or 3D visualizations of complex information structures.

Based on the findings from these case studies, 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 and a new technical framework for the archive, based on XML and RDF technologies.

Visit V2_'s archive portal

The research trajectory of Capturing Unstable Media was followed up by an advisory board with researchers, information science and preservation specialists from the following Dutch organizations:

• Maastricht McLuhan Institute
• Netherlands Media Art Institute
• de Balie
• Filmmuseum
• Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
• National Library of the Netherlands