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“

17.03.2010 Florian 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.org Timeline 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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mediating media art. digital visual archives as mediation-tools

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