This document discusses strategies for mediating media art through digital visual archives. It begins by defining mediation and describing how meaning is generated in interactive media art and digital archives. It then examines four dimensions of meaning generation in digital visual archives: categorization, interactive processes, visualization and contextualization, and retrieval. Several examples of current mediation strategies are provided, including discourse-based, community-based, and institutional archives. The document concludes that digital archives have the potential to better preserve and mediate media art by connecting users and facilitating discussion. Further research into typologies of mediation strategies and multimodal analysis is suggested.
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MEDIATING DIGITAL MEDIA ART
1. MEDIATING MEDIA ART
Digital Visual Archives as Mediation-Tools
by Florian Wiencek, Jacobs University Bremen
Research Center „Visual Communication and Expertise“ (VisComX)17.03.2010
2. Outline
¨ Definitions
¨ Meaning Generation in Digital Archives
¨ Discussion of Current Mediation Strategies
¨ Conclusions
¨ Further Research
Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“ 17.03.2010
3. Definition of the Term „Mediation“
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
¨ use of the term “mediation” in the sense of the German
word „Vermittlung“ of content, which can be described
as the communication of content by different means
(tools, media, etc.)
à social-cognitive notion of mediation
¨ media are mediation interfaces (de Mul, 2009)
¨ mediation is about the „inbetween“ between recipient
and e.g. an artwork à display
4. Media Art
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
¨ change from object to process
¨ example „Interactive Art“:
¤ the project is about the action it evokes in the user à
beyond the surface
¤ meaning is only generated in the interactive process
(Kluszczynski, 1997)
¤ it is important to understand the possibilities of the “realms
of experience” of a project and its configuration as well as
to grasp the media qualities
(cf. Daniels 2004, Wiencek 2009)
¨ for Media Art documentation and archiving are
important for its preservation and mediation
5. Collections & Archives
¨ preliminary stage of an
archive
¨ specific selection criteria
¨ gather & store material
(cf. Assmann, 1999)
¨ selection
¨ order + metadata à
retrieval
¨ accessibility
¨ conservation of material
¨ decontextualization &
re-contextualization
¨ construction of reality
(cf. e.g. Haber, 2006; Ernst, 2002b;
Drechsel, 2005)
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
Collection Archive
6. Digital Archives
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
¨ Michel Foucault (French Philosopher):
¤ archive as (institutional) site of discursive formation
(Foucault 1973 – Archaeology of Knowledge)
¨ Lev Manovich (Media Theorist, UCLA, USA)
¤ the archive becomes a database à enhanced functionality
¤ “[…] [A] computer database is quite different from a
traditional collection of documents: It allows one to quickly
access, sort and reorganize millions of records; it can contain
different media types, and it assumes multiple indexing of
data, since each record besides the data itself contains a
number of fields with user defined values.”
(Manovich, 2001, p. 214)
7. ¨ Categorization of the material
¨ Interactive processes of digital archives
¨ Visualization and contextualization of archive material
¨ Retrieval
4 Dimensions of Meaning Generation in
Digital Visual Archives
main categories from virtualart.at
main categories from V2_archive
Semantic Map, netzspannung.orgTimeline of Audiovisual Culture; Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research, 2009
http://vis.mediaartresearch.at/webarchive/public/view/mid:40 <17.11.2009>
Advanced Search at GAMA (gama-gateway.eu)
browsing through artworks: main page of „La Fondation Daniel Langlois“list of artists as one entrypoint to medienkunstnetz.de
Starting points at the
V2_archive as one form
of browsing
Learning through search. Source: Morville & Callender 2010, p. 10
8. Context-Levels of Media Art Archives
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
9. Example (1): Discourse-based Strategies
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
10. Example (2): Community-based Strategies
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
11. Example (3): Institutional Archives
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
12. Conclusions
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
¨ documentation is necessary for preservation and
mediation of media art
¨ online mediation fills the voids of offline-art-
mediation especially for research and education.
¨ online archives as open platform and research
tool, enabling to recognize and even establish
relations between material
¨ it has the potential to connect users with each
other and initiate discussions on the content
13. Further Research
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
¨ Typology of online-mediation strategies
à in the moment in progress
¨ Multimodal analysis of the mediation strategies
14. Thank you for your attention!
17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
15. 17.03.2010Florian Wiencek – Mediating Media Art @ „The Arts of Mediation“
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