Annet Dekker

Networks of Care

There is a need to preserve our digital cultural heritage for the future. However, the increasing speed with which technical media used in digital preservation become obsolete leads to problems such as changes to the aesthetics and content of the artworks, organisational shifts, and ecological burden.

Drawing from the concept of care as described by Mol et al. (2010) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) and connecting this to the idea of networks of care (Dekker 2014), this presentation will show how the conceptualisation of care in digital preservation helps to comprehend the challenges of digital art preservation and networked culture more widely.

By analysing three art projects in which networks have formed around the preservation of the project, this presentation will emphasise that while there are multiple typologies of networks of care, there is a shared focus on a relational arrangement of care in which preservation is negotiated between different actors, including humans, but also material and technical elements. When acknowledging that these actors, and thus the care, may change over time, the implementation of networks of care can lead to more sustainable solutions for digital preservation.

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About Annet Dekker

Annet Dekker is a curator and researcher. Currently she is Assistant Professor Archival and Information Studies and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University.

She has published numerous essays and edited several volumes, among others, Documentation as Art (co-edited with Gabriella Giannachi, Routledge 2022) and Curating Digital Art. From Presenting and Collecting Digital Art to Networked Co-Curating (Valiz 2021). Her monograph, Collecting and Conserving Net Art (Routledge 2018) is a seminal work in the field of digital art conservation.

Libby Ireland

Deliberate Slowness and Radical Hospitality

As part of the research project Reshaping the Collectible at Tate, the acquisition and display of a group of works by Ima-Abasi Okon was used as an opportunity to explore how complex artworks live within museums. These works unsettle traditional notions of collecting such as ownership, knowledge production and fixity. Creating a distributed model of ownership with dependencies outside of the museum, the artist has forced the relationship between the artwork and the museum away from one of ownership, towards one of host and guest. The research project was an important learning experience for the conservation team, as we developed an understanding of how we must adapt to become host to these types of works.

This presentation will discuss how acquiring Okon’s works allowed us to understand what is necessary for true collaboration. Through the project we learnt to be more comfortable in not knowing and to understand the importance of reciprocity, leading us to understand deliberate slowness as an act of radical hospitality. The presentation will also highlight some of the questions that these ideas raise – such as how ideas of slowness, excess and individual relationships sit within the climate of scarcity and productivity of a large institution.

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About Libby Ireland

Libby Ireland is a Sculpture and Installations Conservator at Tate where she focusses on new acquisitions into the collection. Most recently Libby has been a researcher for Andrew Mellon funded Tate research project Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum.

Ireland’s research interests include the relationship between the artist and museum, sustainability within the museum, and modern materials and fabrication processes.

Dragan Espenschied

Breaking up Metaphors in Art Conservation

As symbol processing machines, computers are very receptive to metaphors, “file” or “desktop” maybe being the most prominent ones. The same is true for the conservation or preservation of
digital art and net: ideas about practice and materiality of non-computer art forms, such as visual art, conceptual art, or time-based media art, dominate how conservators think about these works.

This has prevented most collections of digital art and net art from growing in accordance with a stupendous amount of practitioners and practices, and instead is forced to remain concentrated on “heroic works,” or is avoiding the challenge by declaring artworks as “ephemeral.” A more productive approach is to approach conservation of digital art and net art from the perspective of computer science, and the socio-economic system of software production, maintenance, and consumption.

Stepping around the fixations on “code” (conceptual art), “significang properties” (time-based media art), or “documentation” (performance art), and instead looking at the capabilities of available tools and the stability of communities, is providing a realistic way forward for the longevity of the most influential art forms of our time.

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About Dragan Espenschied

Dragan Espenschied is director of Rhizome’s Digital Preservation program, stewarding the ArtBase collection of more than 2000 pieces of software and net art. 2011 he started the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Geocities restoration project with net artist Olia Lialina. 2012-13 he led on a research project at HfG Karlsruhe to conceptually and te chnically integrate the transmediale CD-ROM art collection into the emerging Emulation as a Service framework.

In 2013, he helped preserve a personal computer from the legacy of media philosopher Vilém Flusser. In 2016 Espenschied developed a technical and conceptual framework for exhibiting legacy software and net art in gallery space. For Rhizome’s 2017-2019 online exhibition showcasing 100 pieces of online art, Net Art Anthology, Espenschied oversaw and executed conservation efforts on 74 artworks. 2015-2019, Espenschied co-directed the Webrecorder project at Rhizome. 2020 he led on the restoration of TheThing, a 1990’s artist BBS system, and the relaunch of Rhizome’s ArtBase as a linked open data system. 2021 he co-founded the Wikibase Stakeholder Group. Espenschied specializes in emulation, network preservation, and knowledge management, and has a background as a practicing artist.