presentation @ STEIM's patterns + pleasures festival, september 26th 2011. topic: descriptive meta data for archiving Media Art

1. descriptive meta data
nina wenhart
interface cultures lab, art university linz
nina.wenhart@gmail.com

2. the new past
“Digital archives forever change the relationship between past,
present, and future. What does this mean for the practice of
art, music, and performance, and for STEIM – one of the oldest
media labs in the world?
What is the past of the future and the future of the past?”

3. a start

4. cleaning up

5. the bald man incident
“bald man, riding a bicycle through a city made out of text on a
screen. media art.”

6. the bald man incident
google for “media art bicycle city text screen”

7. the bald man incident

8. data enrichment
rough/broad + refined/narrow
open-ended
learning process
relations
attributing

9. “the lack of a standard terminology”
“There is a lack of standard terminology for practices, activities and
components in electronic art and for the types and genres of
documentation that describes those.”
eliminating diversity of terms and their relations does not
eliminate ambiguity of meaning

10. analyzing terminologies
- overlaps in general terms
- differences in focus
- limitations

11. standard terminology
- terms are not self-explanatory
- does not solve problems, only creates different ones:
of how to interpret and apply these terms
(→ test group of Getty's Art and Architecture Thesaurus, '88)

12. problems created
- rigid structure
- faking fixed meaning
- internal logic of creator

14. “patterns & pleasures”
- no exclusion & filtering at data entering side
- allowing for diverse forms of relations, patterns
- an open framework instead of a standard terminology
- capturing knowledge in diverse forms of utterances

15. contact
nina.wenhart@gmail.com
twitter: ninjafx
“w0rdM4g1x” - excerpt of thesis is on:
p-art-icles.blogspot.com
ninawenhart-cv.blogspot.com

16. descriptive meta data
nina wenhart
interface cultures lab, art university linz
nina.wenhart@gmail.com

17. the new past
“Digital archives forever change the relationship between past,
present, and future. What does this mean for the practice of
art, music, and performance, and for STEIM – one of the oldest
media labs in the world?
What is the past of the future and the future of the past?”

18. a start
I have a quite long intro, which is also a kind of conclusion as well.
Just like Steina and Kristina, my interest in archiving comes from my personal background and
involvement with a particular area of Media Art.
I was born and live in Linz, the city that is best known for being home of Ars Electronica When Ars
Electronica was born, I was 3.5 years old. The birth of the festival was celebrated with huge
fireworks, and I was standing amidst this crowd of 100.00 people, mesmerized by what was
happening.
Years later – Ars and I had just turned twenty – I started working on creating their archives. I was the
head of the Futurelab's video studio, a windowless room with tapes covering the floor and unsorted
files cramming the hard drives.

19. cleaning up
Being new to Ars and facing all these materials, I started cleaning up by making piles of similar
things and watching through all the videos, annotating what I saw amateurishly
As simple as this approach might seem, the tapes now included information that they didn't have
before. And when you google for: media art, bicycle, text, screen, city, what you get as a result is the
name of the artist, the title of the work, and all kinds of further information.
So what I did when I started cleaning up was to annotate assets with descriptive meta data. The assets
and the additional information were now connected. Things could only get better from then on.

20. the bald man incident
“bald man, riding a bicycle through a city made out of text on a
screen. media art.”
Being new to Ars and facing all these materials, I started cleaning up by making piles of similar
things and watching through all the videos, annotating what I saw amateurishly
As simple as this approach might seem, the tapes now included information that they didn't have
before. And when you google for: media art, bicycle, text, screen, city, what you get as a result is the
name of the artist, the title of the work, and all kinds of further information.
So what I did when I started cleaning up was to annotate assets with descriptive meta data. The assets
and the additional information were now connected. Things could only get better from then on.

21. the bald man incident
google for “media art bicycle city text screen”
I described things without knowing anything about them at this point. I did not know much about
media art. I definitely had no expert knowledge or expert vocabulary.
Nor do many other people who still get the correct result when they simply enter media art, bicycle,
text, screen.
The point I want to make is not that expert vocabulary is bad. But: the people looking for something
cannot be expected to know these expert vocabularies. They search with their own terms. They
search, because they want to find and they search because they do not know

22. the bald man incident
Continuing this approach,i learned. Because people, works, events,... came up over and over again. I
saw similar things and started to relate them to each other.. and when I had learned something new or
found out about additional information, I went over old material and added my newly gained insights.
My system of descriptive meta data got more and more refined over time.
As for the amount of material, we kept continuing this approach with interns. So the first phase of
meta data we added was very rough, temporary, waiting to be refined. But it served its purpose, when
I would read an interns description of “bed, guy, projection, stroking” I knew what the intern didn't.
But I learned what I didnt know before, that “telematic dreaming” is at TC xyz on this particular tape.

23. data enrichment
rough/broad + refined/narrow
open-ended
learning process
relations
attributing
An important lesson to learn from this approach was that no matter if someone is an amateur or an
expert, everyone will describe things in a different way. And considering that everyone also searches
for things in different ways, the more diverse and rich these annotations got, the better the chances for
retrieving a particular work.
I even found out that with the rough description it was more likely that someone would know what
the other one is talking about and would have more associations to other people and projects than
with more narrow terms or terms an expert would come up with

24. “the lack of a standard terminology”
“There is a lack of standard terminology for practices, activities and
components in electronic art and for the types and genres of
documentation that describes those.”
eliminating diversity of terms and their relations does not
eliminate ambiguity of meaning
The experiences I gained through my work inspired me to do more research about archiving,
especially about descriptive meta data.
In my media art histories master thesis I analyzed the biggest archives for media art based on their
vocabularies
I was surprised that research on this topic was a) more difficult to do than I had originally thought.
There were hardly any sources about how these data are obtained and also the descriptive meta data
were not easily accessible as a whole. And b) that many of these institutions more and more found
that research in this field was a pressing matter. The clearest position was made by V2_ who spoke of
it as a lack of a standard terminology for media art
I took this as my starting point and questioned – based on my previous experiences – whether this
lack is something bad or might even be a great advantage

25. analyzing terminologies
- overlaps in general terms
- differences in focus
- limitations

26. standard terminology
- terms are not self-explanatory
- does not solve problems, only creates different ones:
of how to interpret and apply these terms
(→ test group of Getty's Art and Architecture Thesaurus, '88)
What I found interesting is that even with a standard terminology, there remain some problems:
- people still requested training in how to interpret and apply the terms ans
- even if there were terms, thery were only sparsly attributed
This request for special training does not come from media art, but from a 1988 test group that used
the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus
Terms on their own do not carry enough unanimous meaning with them, especially not I a field such
as Media Art that stems from so many disciplines

27. problems created
- rigid structure
- faking fixed meaning
- internal logic of creator
Hearing this, I find it almost pervert to think that there ever could be anything like a standard
terminology, or even worse, a hierarchical system based on such forced unambiguity
The problem I see is that in a database archive such terms become structural, petrified
These systems claim to be true, like in bivalent logic. True – false. They create knowledge systems,
they determine what we can know about something. It is history, not histories. It is a subjective view
that becomes code = law

28. The problem with a standard terminology is that it becomes an animal that does not exist in wild life.
people might use completely different terms to search for something or describe. The expert
terminology very often is an attempt to try to explain a complex situation in one word only. It is very
ofetn made up for one purpose only.

29. “patterns & pleasures”
- no exclusion & filtering at data entering side
- allowing for diverse forms of relations, patterns
- an open framework instead of a standard terminology
- capturing knowledge in diverse forms of utterances

30. contact
nina.wenhart@gmail.com
twitter: ninjafx
“w0rdM4g1x” - excerpt of thesis is on:
p-art-icles.blogspot.com
ninawenhart-cv.blogspot.com