First, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Alain Depocas and I am
the director of the Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D), at the
Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montreal. There are many interesting topics
in the recent exchange about preservation of digital art, but in my
opinion one have been neglected and it’s the notion of documentation.
There are great evidence that despite our best preservation efforts,
technologically based artworks will quickly decays and won't be accessible
anymore in the future, except for a few of them. At best, fragments will
remains, and we will have to found the best way to interprets them. To do
this, we will need a strong and well-structured documentation.
Documentation about the technologies used and developed by artists, about
the relationship between artists and their collaborators, and about the
historical context.
Since 6 years, the CR+D of the Daniel Langlois Foundation is building an
important documentation collection about technologically based art. It
comprise documents from the early sixties to now and includes artists and
organizations archives and document collections such as the Steina and
Woody Vasulka archives and the Collection of documents published by
Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT).
Preservation and documentation will increasingly merge, not only because
documentation is and will be even more important to conduct preservation
activities, but also because these activities will produce essentials
documentation. To understand what should be done to maintain access to an
artworks, it is needed to understand it in depth, including its level of
variability. The Variable Media Networks' questionnaire is, by example, an
excellent way of documenting artworks, adding a layer of information that
would be very difficult to find otherwise. This relationship between
documentation and preservation need to be studied and developed. This
topic will be at the centre of "Documentation and Preservation of Media
Art Heritage: Research and case studies" the new research alliance project
that the Daniel Langlois Foundation and its partners is starting this
year. Please see http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/aruc.html for more
details about this research project.

For more information about the CR+D and its collection, please consult the
Daniel Langlois Foundation's Web site: http://www.fondation-langlois.org

Alain Depocas
Director of the Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D)
Daniel Langlois Foundation
3530 boul. Saint-Laurent, Suite 402,
Montréal, Québec, Canada
H2X 2V1
Tel.: 514-987-7177 ext. 4208
Fax: 514-987-7492
email : [log in to unmask]
Web site : http://www.fondation-langlois.org