For the FUTURE PROOF MEDIA ART project, LIMA’s research team of art conservation, documentation, technology, digital engineering, and sound and video production experts have worked in collaboration with Dutch media artist Geert Mul to conduct a large-scale investigation into documentation and preservation approaches of complex software-based and interactive media artworks in order to define an artwork script to guide future presentations of such artworks. The con- crete aims of this project are two fold:
- To conserve 10 Geert Mul artworks as case studies.
- To map the possibilities and consequences of technical and aesthetic changes in forms of digital art and develop a method and script for how to present them in the future.
The research conducted focuses on all relevant issues concerning technical innovation, sustainability, presentation and the substantiation of necessary preservation measures. Multiple installations of Geert Mul are used as case studies to explore these issues and through which a number of guidelines, methods and approaches have been developed that are relevant and useful to a wider community of media artists. The outcome of the research has included:
- Method for presenting these artworks in the future
- Script guiding future presentations of the work
- Overview and description of ‘technical’ data
- Overview and description of ‘soft’ data
- Conserved and stored content for all artwork case studies