Mila van der Weide (LIMA) : What Net Art Needs From Documentation: Examining Arthost
Mila van der Weide / on behalf of Rachel Somers Miles : The Importance of Digital Art Distribution
Sylvia van Schaik (RCE) : Mediakunst.net
Ernst Van Velzen (Eye Filmmuseum) & Wiel Seuskens (LIMA) : A Case Study from LIMA and Eye Filmmuseum: Mixing Video Art and Film Together in One Digital Storage Facility?
Dragan Espenschied (Rhizome) : Remote Browsers
Miriam Windhausen (Researcher & Curator) : A Gift Crocodile…Artists’ Legacies, Choices and Chances
Moderated by Wilbert Helmus (NDE) / on behalf of Marcel Ras

The second day of Transformation Digital Art 2019 opened with the promotion clip of ArtHost, a morning focused on highlighting current research in digital art conservation at LIMA and partner institutions. The session started with Mila van der Weide (LIMA), who presented ArtHost, a research into storing and access of online artworks. Together with DullTech (artist Constant Dullaart), LIMA developed a service for hosting and storing online artworks, thereby implementing Rhizome’s Remote Browser service. The goal of this project is to develop and implement a system for the sustainable storage and maintenance of ‘complex’ software-based art with a special focus on online artworks while collaborating with and supporting artists in the preservation of their work, as well as finding a methodology that prevents the loss of online artworks. Van der Weide zoomed in on the ways LIMA documented Dullaart's artworks.

Slide from Mila van der Weide’s presentation with stills from video documentation with artist Constant Dullaart.

In the follow-up, Mila van der Weide (on behalf of Rachel Somers Miles) presented a new research project that aims to map the state of digital art distribution on an international level, investigating, analyzing and assessing models and to put digital art distribution on the map.

Ernst Van Velzen and Wiel Seuskens, presented a collaborative research into the possibility of storage of LIMA’s digital collection in Eye’s storage facility using LTO tape robots. The LIMA’s digital collection is growing fast and a cooperation with the Eye Filmmuseum in storring the works seemed to be a good solution with costs benefits. The idea was to use the residual capacity of the digital archive of Eye Filmmuseum to archive LIMA’s digital collection. Three different approaches were proposed and considered, however, introducing two workflows into a same archive environment had high costs and presented complexities. Due to the complex logistic and the seperations of the worksflows (different needs) the need for extra staff and money made further collaboration on this topic not possible Ofcourse knowledge exchange between LIMA and Eye Filmmuseum (in NDE and more) will be continued.

Sylvia van Schaik, curator of the art collections department of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, presented Mediakunst.net, launched last year by LIMA, Van Abbemuseum, Frans Hals Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands. Mediakunst.net is an online platform which joins several Dutch media art collections to gain visibility to media artworks, giving access to researchers, curators, art historians, conservators, general public, and others. Mediakunst.net as an catalogue raises many questions, such as the handle of metadata in each institution, the principles for clearing copyrights, and by who and how this platform will be used? To be continued...

Dragan Espenschied, a net artist, musician, digital conservator, and head of the Rhizome’s Digital Preservation Program, talked about remote browsers in the frame of LIMA’s ArtHost project (2017-2019). The questions is how artworks can be presented on internet? Even while artworks remains stable the software environment change with time, changing the way users see and interact with web pages. Rhizome aims to preserve the environment in which the artworks are performed and re- performance it in the future, so they developed a tool to access web archives – oldweb.today, this tool allows users to browse public web archives using old browsers running on remote machines.

Miriam Windhausen, an independent art historian and curator, presented A Gift Crocodile… Artists’ Legacies, Choices and Chances, a research on artists’ legacies and estates, funded by the Mondrian Fund. Windhausen spoke about the importance of the artist’s archive and sketched out a model where the artist’s estate gives access to open content to users (content curators, researchers and creative industry) and general public, raising awareness among artists, the heirs, estate managers, institutions and creative makers since the care of an artist’s legacy is crucial for the future of the cultural heritage and preservation of the collection and the archive keeps the artist’s oeuvre alive.

Mila van der Weide on behalf of Rachel Somers Miles



Wiel Seuskens



Dragan Espenschied


Miriam Windhausen