Art. Archive. Architectures

To conclude the three-year development and archive project, and as part of the festival art::archive::architectures, mediaartbase.de is to be presented and handed over to the public. International experts of media art, music and the archive scene will discourse over two festival days in lectures and round-table discussions. Among others, participants will include Peter Weibel (Chairman of the ZKM | Karlsruhe), Ludger Brümmer (Director of the Institute of Music and Acoustics), Margit Rosen (curator of the ZKM | Karlsruhe), Christoph Blase (Director of the Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems) Wolfgang Ernst (HU Berlin), Folkmar Hein (TU Berlin), Michiel Nijhoff (Stedelijk Museum) and David Teruggi (INA/GRM).
On both evenings, restored or preserved works of art and productions from inventories of the Institute for Music and Acoustics will be presented in concerts, which are to include, among others, restored abstract silent films with live music played by the ensemble ascolta. The laptop_Musician and composer, Robert Henke, will design the second concert program.

The archiving of media art has been gaining increasing significance among experts. Over the past three decades a great many valuable works have been developed most of which have barely been recorded until now. Their protection and restoration is an essential task of the future in this area of archiving since videotapes, films, analog backing material, but also CDs and DVDs all have limited durability.
For this reason, in 2008, and under the direction of the Institute for Music and Acoustics, four institutions joined forces to become the pioneering cooperative project mediaartbase.de: ZKM | Karlsruhe (Institute for Music and Acoustics), European Media Art Festival Osnabrück, documenta Archiv Kassel, and the Kassel Dokumentarfilm- und Videofest.

This joint project for the preservation and restoration of mobile cultural goods as part of the initiative program KUR of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes und der Länder [Federal and State Cultural Foundation], aims to electronically recondition selected stocks of these four unique collections, and to make them publicly accessible. An important element of this work was the development of an exemplary data bank and presentational structure, which also enables smaller archives and other institutions to dock on and process their own stocks. The technology of mediaartbase.de is based predominantly on Open-Source-Software so as to create an inexpensive, decentralized databank and to link up new content with already existing data material.