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Hi Martijn, Curt, Francis, Marc and others, I am Sandra "fokky" Fauconnier, archivist of V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam. Martijn just referred to our research project "Capturing Unstable Media" (2003); more information about the project can be found at: http://www.v2.nl/Projects/capturing/ As Martijn mentioned, "Capturing Unstable Media" deals with documentation and archiving strategies, not with the preservation of actual works. The reason for that is quite pragmatic: V2_ does not buy or collect artworks; we only present them during festivals / exhibitions or co-develop them at our media lab (e.g. during residencies). We do want to document this presentation and production process as good as possible, though - keeping in mind that this takes place from V2_'s perspective. I'll be happy to give more info or answer questions about the project, but first I'd like to continue the ongoing discussion from the list. Personally (and from this point on I'm expressing my own opinion, not V2_'s) I very much agree with the statement that not everything needs to be preserved. Actually, preservation efforts are mostly inspired by institutional agendas, not by artistic viewpoints (and both sometimes tragically contradict each other). But, having followed the field of tech-oriented arts for quite some time now, I'm very much convinced that what we *should* try to preserve, are the many diverse histories (plural) and perspectives and the context or cultures in which we are all working now. How can you ensure that (as a random example) it'll be possible to still understand the meaning of a work like Carnivore (RSG) within 50 or 100 years or longer? Or the impact of mailing list culture in our field in the late 1990s? This calls for better - open, low-barrier, accessible - archival and documentation strategies. (On a side note: are there any artists and practitioners out there who *do* feel that it's very important to preserve their actual works into the future? I'd be interested to hear about that.) I very much agree with Marc Garrett as well, when he says that non-institutional and non-curatorial perspectives deserve equal treatment and attention here. At V2_ we've been doing research on archival interoperability for quite some time now; mostly targeted towards data exchange between institutions (again, for pragmatic/financing reasons), but personally I'd like to see this become an open and low-barrier process. It's a very complex problem, though. I won't elaborate on it in detail (unless you ask me to :) but Semantic Web technologies are the area in which we are currently looking for possible directions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web You can already see some basic, but interesting applications in connecting resources and viewpoints through RSS (a simple application of Semantic Web languages). Take Technorati's (currently hyped) tags as an example: http://www.technorati.com/tag/ http://www.technorati.com/tag/mapping which offers an aggregation of various feeds (Flickr photos, tagged weblog posts, del.icio.us and Furl bookmarks) and combines them into one layout. You can imagine that the same could happen with resources from institutions' databases, artists' blogs and more grassroots initiatives. But what about issues such as copyright, metaspam, agreement on (and accessibility of) standards and the selection process of resources itself? There's much more to it, but these are my first 5 cents... More thoughts about issues such as documentation versus preservation, (non-)curatorial perspectives, aggregation of multiple histories, and others? Greetings, Sandra