Mediating Media Art. Digital Visual Archives as Mediation-Tools

MEDIATING MEDIA ART
Digital Visual Archives as Mediation-Tools
by Florian Wiencek, Jacobs University Bremen
Research Center „Visual Communication and Expertise“ (VisComX)17.03.2010

Outline
¨  Definitions
¨  Meaning Generation in Digital Archives
¨  Discussion of Current Mediation Strategies
¨  Conclusions
¨  Further Research
Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“ 17.03.2010

Definition of the Term „Mediation“
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
¨  use of the term “mediation” in the sense of the German
word „Vermittlung“ of content, which can be described
as the communication of content by different means
(tools, media, etc.)
à social-cognitive notion of mediation
¨  media are mediation interfaces (de Mul, 2009)
¨  mediation is about the „inbetween“ between recipient
and e.g. an artwork à display

Media Art
¨  change from object to process
¨  example „Interactive Art“:
¤  the project is about the action it evokes in the user à
beyond the surface
¤  meaning is only generated in the interactive process
(Kluszczynski, 1997)
¤  it is important to understand the possibilities of the “realms
of experience” of a project and its configuration as well as
to grasp the media qualities
(cf. Daniels 2004, Wiencek 2009)
¨  for Media Art documentation and archiving are
important for its preservation and mediation

Collections & Archives
¨  preliminary stage of an
archive
¨  specific selection criteria
¨  gather & store material
(cf. Assmann, 1999)
¨  selection
¨  order + metadata à
retrieval
¨  accessibility
¨  conservation of material
¨  decontextualization &
re-contextualization
¨  construction of reality
(cf. e.g. Haber, 2006; Ernst, 2002b;
Drechsel, 2005)
Collection Archive

Digital Archives
¨  Michel Foucault (French Philosopher):
¤  archive as (institutional) site of discursive formation
(Foucault 1973 – Archaeology of Knowledge)
¨  Lev Manovich (Media Theorist, UCLA, USA)
¤  the archive becomes a database à enhanced functionality
¤  “[…] [A] computer database is quite different from a
traditional collection of documents: It allows one to quickly
access, sort and reorganize millions of records; it can contain
different media types, and it assumes multiple indexing of
data, since each record besides the data itself contains a
number of fields with user defined values.”
(Manovich, 2001, p. 214)

¨  Categorization of the material
¨  Interactive processes of digital archives
¨  Visualization and contextualization of archive material
¨  Retrieval
4 Dimensions of Meaning Generation in
Digital Visual Archives
main categories from virtualart.at
main categories from V2_archive
Semantic Map, netzspannung.orgTimeline of Audiovisual Culture; Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research, 2009
http://vis.mediaartresearch.at/webarchive/public/view/mid:40 <17.11.2009>
Advanced Search at GAMA (gama-gateway.eu)
browsing through artworks: main page of „La Fondation Daniel Langlois“list of artists as one entrypoint to medienkunstnetz.de
Starting points at the
V2_archive as one form
of browsing
Learning through search. Source: Morville & Callender 2010, p. 10

Context-Levels of Media Art Archives

Example (1): Discourse-based Strategies

Example (2): Community-based Strategies

Example (3): Institutional Archives

Conclusions
¨  documentation is necessary for preservation and
mediation of media art
¨  online mediation fills the voids of offline-art-
mediation especially for research and education.
¨  online archives as open platform and research
tool, enabling to recognize and even establish
relations between material
¨  it has the potential to connect users with each
other and initiate discussions on the content

Further Research
¨  Typology of online-mediation strategies
à in the moment in progress
¨  Multimodal analysis of the mediation strategies

Thank you for your attention!

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