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Hi Everyone, Great discussion here, let me jump right in.... Sarah; here is one take on the difference between documenting and preserving (though it's true; the are running together) - a recording of the London Philharmonic Orchestra performing Scheherezade is documentation; Rimsky-Korsakov's score for Scheherezade is preservation. One is past-oriented (a snapshot of an historical moment in the lifetime of the work, frozen in the past for all time), the other future-oriented (the recipe for re-creating or re-performing the work hundreds of years into the future, allowing for cultural re- interpretation technical variation over multiple/infinite variations). Here's another: Ant Farm's piece "Media Burn" consisted of driving a modified Cadillac through a pyramid of TVs on fire. To park that cadillac in a museum and call it an "exhibition" of the work is really just documentation (a prop). The real work involves an event, a performance, the heat of burning TV's the speeding 3000 pound car, the splintering of glass and fire across the audience. To modify a Mini Cooper and drive it through a flaming stack of iMacs; that might be closer to preservation. Now toward Aymeric's comments on using open standards to help document and/or preserve new/media works, and not re-inventing the wheel.....one such proposal is already out there being tested. The Media Art Notation System (http://www.coyoteyip.com/rinehart_leonardo.pdf ) is an adaption of the MPEG-21 metadata standard specifically for use in preserving media art. Toward the comments on using distributed labor to help create/maintain/document the archive, MANS includes a feature called "Accounts" in which anyone can create a "memory" of the work in addition to any official institutional memory/record that was recorded using MANS (this assumes that institutions share all such documentation in an open sense online, etc. but c'mon; of course they will, right?! :) So of course I agree that standards and especially context is important for "remembering" new/media works, but I would counsel that one can go too far in this direction as well. For instance, true Archives (accredited, etc.) follow very strict professional guidelines that are different from those in museums and libraries, and one Archival tenet is to exhaustively record the context of ownership; how the object came into the archive, (ie "provenance"). I agree that this kind of context is important, so MANS is all about context, but one can go overboard in this direction too. I think that a strict Archival approach in fact emphasizes provenance to the exclusion of other important types of documentation for media art (one good example is that if you find an artwork in a true Archive and you look up the "creator" of that art work, it will not be the artist, rather it will be the collector who created the collecting containing the artwork and gave it to the Archive. In a real Archive, "creator" means collector. Perhaps that's a bit confusing in an art context, but the point about context is well-taken nonetheless! Lastly, MANS is being tested in a project called "Forging the Future", lead by Univ. of Maine, that is also hard at work developing software tools for preserving media art. One such tool is the folksonomic "Vocab Wiki" set up by Rhizome.org - just by way of another example of how some archival work is indeed being farmed out to the masses....but not all of it; it's more of a hybrid model where we don't put all our preservation eggs in either the loose fan-base, nor the stolid institutions, but rather we try to get them to work together. Seems a good approach to me! Richard Rinehart --------------- Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive bampfa.berkeley.edu --------------- University of California, Berkeley --------------- 2625 Durant Ave. Berkeley, CA, 94720-2250 ph.510.642.5240 fx.510.642.5269 On Jun 19, 2009, at 4:05 PM, NEW-MEDIA-CURATING automatic digest system wrote: > documenting and archiving - results archive 2020