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Thank youRoger for this. You made a very important point for all of us here and Istrongly like to support your thought by adding my five cents. Comparablewith natural sciences, digital media and new opportunities of networkedresearch catapult the cultural sciences within reach of new and essentialresearch, like appropriate documentation and preservation of media art, or evenbetter, an entire history of visual media and their human cognition by means ofthousands of sources. These themes express in regard to image revolutioncurrent key questions. In order to push humanities and cultural sciences intheir development, it is necessary to use the new technologies globally and create a research infrastructure which is organisided much more intercontinental than now. Since the foundation of the pioneering Databaseof Virtual Art anumber of online archives for digitization and documentation arose: LangloisFoundation inMontreal, Netzspannung at the Frauenhofer Institut or MedienKunstNetz at ZKM * most of these projectsterminated, their funding expired, or they lost key researchers like V2 inRotterdam. Even the Boltzmann Institut for Media Art Research in Linz, faced recently itsclose-down after an evaluation. In this way the originated scientific archiveswhich more and more often represent the only remaining image source of the art works,do not only lose step by step their significance for research and preservationbut in the meantime partly disappear from the web. Not only the media artitself, but also its documentation fads that future generations of researchersand public will not be able to get an idea of the past and the art of our time.To put it another way, till now no sustainable strategy exits. What we need isa concentrated and compact expansion of ability. There is/was increasingcollaboration with these projects in a variety of areas and in changingcoalitions. But in the field of documentation projects - real preservationprojects do not exist yet (beside fantastic case studies) - the focus is stilldirected too much towards particularisation, instead of concentrating forces,what is essential strategy in most other fields (as Roger pointed out). Manyindividual projects are definitely innovative but too small and without clearlarger scientific strategy and safe financing, which is not their fault. Someprojects are already expired and not carried further. Lots of competence and culturalwealth, but too much separationism. Especially the university based researchprojects and partly also the ones which are linked to museums have developedexpertise that needs to be included in cultural circulation, not only in orderto pass it on to future generations of scientists and archivists but also togive it a chance to flow into future university education in the fields of art,engineering, and media history. Clearly, the goal must be to develop a policyand strategy for collecting the art of our latest history under the umbrella ofa strong, let’s say “Library of Congress like” institution. Ultimately, however, this can onlybe organized by a network of artists, computer and science centers, galleries,technology producers and museums. Those projects which collected culturallyimportant documents in the past and which often expired, were not further supportedor even lost their base must be supported and reanimated. They should beorganized like a corona around an institution which receives the duty ofdocumentation and may be even the collection of contemporary media art, such aninstitution could be in the USA, the Library of Congress; in Europe, besidesthe new European digital libraries database Europeana, it could be the BibliothequeNational, the BritishLibrary, the V&A or in Germany beside the ZKM for example the DeutscheBibliothek or even better a Max Planck Institute.Interestingly the libraries show increasingly interest to archive multimediaworks and their documentation; however, the usually complex cultural andtechnical know how is lacking in order to preserve principal works of the mostimportant media art genres of the last decades. Not only can the internationalstate of Media Art be a hinderance in creating common projects, also the FUNDINGINFRASTRUCTURE of media art documentation so far, has normally promotedprojects for 2, 3, or more years, neglecting sustainability. A structure whichupdates, extends and contextualizes research * whether in historical orcontemporary contexts is required. The funding and support infrastructureswhich have been built in the end of the last century are not suitable forscientific and cultural tasks in the Humanities of the 21st Century. What is needed in the (Digital) Humanities isan institutional support equivalent to that in Astronomy, Biology or ClimateResearch, in order to create enough momentum and adhesion the main fundingorganizations like NSF, NEH, the European Research Council, DFG, VolkswagenFoundation etc. have to support on an international level the necessaryresearch structure for research in Media Art and the Digital Humanities ingeneral needed in the 21st century. oliver >>> roger malina 13.03.10 13.45 Uhr >>> Rick Look forward to seeing the book. Re the Open Museum discussion, i recently posted my Open Observatory manifesto http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/entry/an_open_observatory_manifesto/ I am heavily influenced here by my work as an astronomer over the last thirty years. Thirty years ago astronomers viewed the data they took ( in those days photographic plates) as their personal property and their careers hinged on their controlling this data ( and their students careers depended on their access to their professors data). Today NASA and NSF now have a contractual stipulation that all data funded by NASA must be made publically available= its funded by public money so the public has a right to access it. This has led to a scientific revolution in astronomy= more science is now done on the hubble data archive, than with new observations= and more science is done by other people than by the astronomers who took the data. The international virtual observatory movement has generalised this and there are now shared data analysis tools that are open sourced. This open data is still not the case in many fields of science even though the data was funded by public monies, but its a growing trend (even in the genome project). And indeed the model is that the scientist is funded up front to take the data, and then its open sourced. In the humanities its still not the case often= and access to collections is tightly controlled ( cf the ongoing debate about the dead sea scrolls..) So a first piece of your open museum proposal could simply be that any work commissioned using public monies must be open sourced on the ideological basis that the public paid for it so they have a right to it. And indeed the artist is paid up front ( just as the scientist is paid up front) This approach obviously ignores the fact that in art ( as opposed to science) a lot of the art economy depends on speculation and that a small tiny fraction of artists get very rich because the intellectual property can be controlled and monetarised in speculation. I guess in science the equivalent is that a few scientists have benefited from very lucrative patents that they have filed- which are not so much speculative but are market driven. Patents that result from government funding are tightly regulated, with the inventor and the institutions getting their share. Many of these issues were discussed at the CODE conference some years back and in the book edited by Ghosh in the leonardo book series http://leonardo.info/isast/leobooks/books/ghosh.html Open source software is considered by many to be a novelty and the open source movement a revolution. Yet the collaborative creation of knowledge has gone on for as long as humans have been able to communicate. CODE looks at the collaborative model of creativity -- with examples ranging from collective ownership in indigenous societies to free software, academic science, and the human genome project -- and finds it an alternative to proprietary frameworks for creativity based on strong intellectual property rights. the museum issue is tangentially addressed roger On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 11:59 PM, Richard Rinehart wrote: > Hello again New-Media-Curating, > > In addition to the other mischief we like to cause individually, Jon > Ippolito and I are co-authoring a book for MIT Press, due out Spring '11 on > collecting and preserving new media art . > > I include below a brief excerpt from the book relevant to our discussion > this month on commissioning variable media art. In it, I'm proposing a new > model for an archive of new media art I call "the Open Museum" and > describing perhaps a new way that commissioning could be seen to function in > that. > > I was originally inspired along these lines by the V2 arts organization in > Rotterdam that had a stipulation in which new media works commissioned for > their lab space must remain open-source within the lab space for future > commissioned artists. It got me thinking, why not take that great idea a > couple steps further..... > > "Students, scholars, and the public can currently access images and records > *representations - of artworks held in museum collections, but they cannot > access the collections themselves. The Open Museum takes advantage of the > unique property of new media that allows one to share the original without > diminishing it. In the Open Museum, the source code and other files for > digital artworks from the collection are free for users to download, study, > use, and re-mix into new works. In this way, even the casual student can > peer under the hood and examine the inner workings of these artworks in the > way that previously only privileged scholars could with traditional material > collections. ....... > > Intellectual property law was created to balance the private need with the > public good. It grants authors and artists exclusive rights over their work > for a limited period (not a short period, sometimes 90 years after the > artists lifetime) after which the rights in the work move into the public > domain. The artist has time to find ways to earn a livelihood from their > work and this is seen as an incentive to create in the first place. Why > then, could not public museums act as stewards of the public good and > compensate the artist earlier rather than later by commissioning works for > the Open Museum, after which they apply Creative Commons licenses and > release the work to the public. The museum would earn their renown not for > the quality of art they obtain in exclusivity, but for the art they obtain > and then give away. The artist gets money up front and still owns their > work. And the public is served by waiting months rather than decades to gain > access and rights to use the work in question." > > Two more items. > > Within the Berkeley Art Museum's net art portal, we were able to include > *some* of the function of the Open Museum - an open-source net art archive. > Call it a baby step. > (see http://netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu and scroll down to NetArtchive) > > An earlier post to this list (from Leigh I believe; I lost the email), > outlined how public institutions in Scotland are now using their muscle to > gain IP rights in works they commission. While public art funding and IP are > quite different between the UK, US, Canada and elsewhere, I wonder if the > Open Museum provides a more positive spin on how public institutions could > partner with artists with regard to the disposition of IP in commissioned > works - or - is the Open Museum just another step toward big brother taking > everything? > > What do you all think? What are the ways in which commissioning new media > *could* work in addition to how it already works? What are your dreams? > > 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 > -- Roger Malina is in France at this time I 011 33 (0) 6 15 79 59 26 or (0) 6 80 45 94 47 Roger Malina is acting Director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press and member of the steering committee of IMERA the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies.