Besides exhibitions and screenings, media art from museum collections is barely visible. That has changed now. Over the past three years, LIMA, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Van Abbemuseum, Frans Hals Museum and the Cultural Heritage agency of the Netherlands have made roughly three thousand media works of art accessible online.

Performances, video art, media art installations, digital artworks and online artworks from these five institutions have been visible and usable since 19 June 2018 through the online catalog. Mediakunst.net is a true milestone: never before have so many media artworks from various museums and institutions been available online via one interface. With this, the Netherlands has an image-defining world premiere.

Every collection of contemporary art and design contains numerous media art works. In order to be able to conserve and make the works accessible, specialist knowledge is required. Mediakunst.net aims to improve the visibility and sustainable accessibility of the media art collection in the Netherlands. This benefits presentation, management, conservation, research and education, but it also promotes the development of knowledge about, and appreciation for, media art in general.

To serve an even broader public, and to be able to continue beyond the museum walls, the participants of Mediakunst.net are working towards a next version of Mediakunst.net. To exhibit work in the room, to offer work on education and to invite a wider audience to discover the media art collection in the Netherlands through a simplified and more associative interface. One of the components of the new catalog is a collaboration between the institutions participating in Mediakunst.net and Wikipedia for the exchange and generation of information. By linking the data of artists, works and technology to Wikipedia, use can be made of  global knowledge and the information of media art is made accessible to a wide audience. This project will start in 2019 and will be financed by the Creative Industries Fund.

Read the entire project report (in Dutch) here.