Alain Depocas: Documentation and Preservation of Media Art

The documentation and preservation of media art has seen significant progress over the course of the past ten years. The specificity of artistic practices which employ or rely on digital technologies are increasingly well understood and accepted. The fact that these works are ephemeral or variable seems inevitable and is increasingly taken into account. Since 2000 the Daniel Langlois Foundation has contributed to this development, first as a partner of the Variable Media Network, then as founder of the DOCAM (documentation and preservation of media art) research alliance, which has recently published its results. Alain Depocas has been head of the Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D) of the Daniel Langlois Foundation since 1999. After studying art history at the Université de Montréal he worked as documentalist at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from 1991 to 1999. He was also responsible for the MACM Media Centre website. From 2002 to 2004 he was codirector of the Variable Media Network in partnership with the Guggenheim. From 2005 to 2010 he was director of research at DOCAM, a research alliance studying the documentation and preservation of media art.