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2. Research context

In order to define the broader context for the research in Capturing Unstable Media, an inventory was made of the current "state of the art" in documentation and preservation of electronic art, focusing on the field and practice of electronic art and its institutions, on existing methodologies to describe and document these practices and on preservation issues. Recently, researchers like Stephen Wilson [3] and Michael Naimark [4] have written broad and systematic inventories of practices, institutions and research laboratories in the field of electronic art. For Capturing Unstable Media a selection was made of organizations maintaining an archive database which is accessible online, based on disciplinary and geographic diversity and diversity in content focus. Five archive projects were analyzed and compared (Rhizome.org [5], Daniel Langlois Foundation - Centre for Research and Documentation[6], Netzspannung.org [7], Database of Virtual Art [8], and the Walker Art Center's Collections and Resources and New Media Initiatives [9]) together with their related preservation initiatives: Rhizome's preservation strategy for its Artbase [10], Archiving the Avant Garde [11], Conceptual and Intermedia Arts Online [12], and the Variable Media Initiative [13].

Rhizome.org, an online platform for the new media community, offers a mailing list discussion (Textbase) and a web-based archive and open repository of internet-based artworks (Artbase). Building on the Artbase, their existing system for submission, storage and display of Internet-based artworks and accompanying metadata, Rhizome explores new grounds and methodologies in preserving new media art. A key part of this system, the Artbase Artist Questionnaire, gathers information necessary for guiding future preservation measures, in analogy with the Variable Media Initiative. Artists can choose between having their work documented ("linking") or preserved ("cloning").

The Daniel Langlois Foundation is an international funding body for art, science and technology, which maintains a research center with online data collections of documentation on media art. This Centre for Research and Documentation supports the Variable Media Initiative, a network of cultural heritage organizations dedicated to inventing and sharing approaches to preserving art in new media. This affiliation proposes an unconventional new preservation strategy, the Variable Media Paradigm, that has emerged from the Guggenheim's efforts to preserve its collection of conceptual, minimalist and video art The aim of the affiliation is to help build a network of organizations that will develop the tools, methods and standards needed to implement this strategy.

Netzspannung.org is an Internet-based platform for media art, science and technology initiated by Media Arts Research Studies (MARS), a German interdisciplinary research group focusing on human presence in and experience of new technologies. Its umbrella organization, the Fraunhofer Institute, participates in the Database of Virtual Art, a research project initiated by the Humboldt University Berlin to provide for the appropriate documentation of virtual art, as a prerequisite for preservation and collection.

The Walker Art Center, a 20th Century modern art museum in Minneapolis (USA), focusing on visual, performing and media arts, has been involved in several experimental on-line projects concerning presenting and preserving digital arts (New Media Initiative, Telematic Arts). It takes part in Archiving the Avant Garde, a collaborative project of North American art institutions to develop, document and disseminate strategies and standards for describing and preserving non-traditional, intermedia and variable media art forms, such as performance, installation, conceptual and digital art. This joint builds on existing relationships and the previous work of its founding partners in this area, like the Variable Media Initiative and the Conceptual and Intermedia Arts Online (CIAO) Consortium.

This overview demonstrates that archiving and preservation initiatives are highly dependent on the practices of the involved institutions. For V2_ and many other institutions in electronic art, projects often consist of longer research processes; outcomes are the result of a collaborative team effort between artists, scientists, engineers and designers. Together, such teams realize artistic and cultural expressions within the larger context of research themes, public performances, festivals or exhibitions, referred to as aRt&D, or artistic research and development [14]. Capturing such projects, research practices, or components of them, calls for a different methodology than the documentation of more simple and static objects (like sculptures) for which standard description models already exist. Questions arise around defining which elements should be documented, described or preserved (in short: captured).

V2_'s archive of unstable media art [15] is an example of a pioneering project in this area; it served as a starting point for the Capturing Unstable Media project. The archive has grown organically out of V2_'s diverse activities. As a result the archive reflects a broad set of creative projects and practices employing or responding to new, electronic, technologies and taking different forms. They are therefore described in the archive in various ways, by various media: an interactive installation is documented with different images, flyers, textual descriptions, video and audio clips or even preparatory technical drawings and manuscripts.

Unlike Rhizome's Artbase, V2_'s archive only documents the works or projects, but does not collect them. V2_ focuses on the field of electronic art and its relation to society, which comes closest to the field of investigation of the Daniel Langlois Foundation. Similar to the latter and Netzspannung.org, V2_ supports research and art projects and makes this information public through publications, presentations and on-line activities. V2_ 's electronic art projects are often developed and presented within a larger context. Artworks may be shown during and adapted to specific programs in a certain thematic framework and are part of longer-term developments for artists and institutions. In fact, the presentation of each work can be seen as part of a broader context and story, as proposed by the Database of Virtual Art. For this very reason, V2_'s archive is not built as a traditional, record- and object-based documentation archive. Instead, it is a cloud of objects and relations, describing works and actors, events and activities (the organization's history), keywords and themes, as a broad context for the art projects, similar to the Collections and Resources of the Walker Art Center.

Figure 1. Schematic visualization of the basic principles of V2_Archive's object-relation metadata structure

Until 2003, V2_Archive has developed an object-relation data model, in which relatively small objects can be combined through relations in a flexible way (See figure 1) [16]. V2_'s detailed terminology resources (most notably its keyword thesaurus, related to Getty's Art and Architecture Thesaurus) are unique for the field of unstable media art, although the subject index of the Daniel Langlois Foundation's CR+D Database is closely related in scope [17].

A public interface for this archive was implemented as one of the deliverables of Capturing Unstable Media. Furthermore, during this period V2_ has converted its archive to an entirely XML-based data management model, independent from database applications [18]. This XML framework facilitates easy data transformations, which can be applied, among others, as a basis for interoperability with other archival systems (see further).

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