Introduction to the ISEA Online Archive Project
Update February 2007
Update July 2007
To Fluctuate - Online archiving & access at the Virtual Platform, 22 March 2007
Collaborations & Sponsors
Introduction to the ISEA Online Archive project
For the ISEA ONLINE ARCHIVE project we are digitalising, structuring, cataloguing and indexing all the material generated by the twelve ISEA symposia. This material dates back to 1988 and includes papers, images, video and other documents that include some cyber space euphoria, more computer music sobriety and a lot of computer graphic pioneering. By presenting this material online, ISEA would like to develop a guide to its past. Through this, we hope the archive project will bring the ISEA network to the surface: an interconnected web of mutual interest and collaboration that has managed to survive electronically. The thirteenth symposium - ISEA2006 at San Jose California this August will be well documented and included in the archive. Streamed and synchronized, we are curious to find out what seven days of art and connectivity will bring and how the event might relate to former symposia and its participants.
Concerning the material, Sue Gollifer (who will be director of ISEA Headquarters from September 2007 onwards at the University of Brighton) made a great effort to trace and digitize a good deal of the proceedings of ISEA, initially as part of the Critical and Archival Histories of the Electronic Arts. Without this digitized material, we would not have reached this point! Thankyou Sue! We continue to gather and digitize material, also for example now in collaboration with Shawn Decker in Chicago!
ISEA is collaborating with organisations in the field of electronic art to develop an archiving structure. Together with the Balie, who organized the festival Next5Minutes, we are building a simple ontology to structure the archiving of both ISEA and Next5Minutes as an event. Next 5 Minutes - the International Festival for Tactical Media took place four times in Amsterdam between 1993 and 2003. As a media event Next5Minutes brings a very interesting aspect of media activism to the fore that is very different than ISEA's more academic and interdisciplinary take on digital media. We would like to ensure the specificity of both events while at the same time enabling interoperability to become a possibility. For this we are also working with other organizations such as V2_, Montevideo and the Daniel Langlois Foundation, who already have extensive experience in archiving media art. Through collaborating in this way, we hope to stimulate more dialogue between organizations to take concepts of electronic art, media events and media theory further by connecting and comparing different projects.
ISEA Approval to Publish Material - If you were a participant of one of the ISEA symposia - for example you published an article in the proceedings or your work was shown at one of the exhibitions, we would like to ask for your cooperation and approval to publish any material you included in one (or more) of the ISEA symposia. We feel confident that the ISEA community supports this project: even so, we are obliged to inform you. If we do not receive a message to the contrary before September, we take it you support the project and permit the publishing of your work.
The launch of the archive is planned for August 2007. Before that we will participate in workshops and events that deal with online archiving, community presence and thesaurus building: for instance at V2_'s festival - DEAF in April 2007. I will also be at ISEA2006 for questions or for any retrieval of archive material. So, if you have any questions or perhaps you have some dusty VHS tapes concerning ISEA in your loft, please do not hesitate to contact me!
Nadia Palliser
Coordinating Director ISEA
info@isea-web.org
www.isea-web.org
Update ISEA Online Archive - February 2007
As the gathering of material continues, the data flow progresses: we are well
on our way now with the database filled with proceedings up to ISEA95. The opensource
database built in collaboration with Michiel van der Haagen, the programmer
of de Balie en Reinaart Roelofsen (intern at ISEA) is working well though we
continue to fine-tune its relations and edit wizards. The documents in the database
include the digitised proceedings of FISEA for example - gratefully received
from Leonardo and the Jstor Archives this year. These documents have been interconnected
within the ISEA ontology with their respective events, dates, locations and
creators.
From February onwards we will be working on the interface of the ISEA Online
Archive. With students from the department of Human Computer Interaction at
the Polytechnic in Utrecht (NL), we have set up a project to develop the interface,
together with Marnix Brockmeier, a student from the Archive School of Amsterdam
and the animator/designer Peter Sweenen and Jim Wiggers. We have planned an
informal workshop on the 22nd of March in collaboration with the Virtual Platform
to bring experts, users and designers together to discuss the entry points and
possible user profiles of the archive. We hope that the archive will function
as an interesting back-drop to ISEA's community and its outreach. We have received
digitised documents from the Daniel Langlois Foundation who are supporting the
project (while storing a good part of the physical ISEA Archive in Montreal).
As we continue to add the material, we have also started to address keywords,
in collaboration with Sandra Faucconnier who has made a thesaurus for the V2_archive.
On the 12th of April we will present the project together with de Balie at the
expert meeting 'Connected Archives’ at the Dutch Electronic Art Festival, organised
by V2_. We hope to bring more exposure to online archives and their ongoing
research in the material and the way this material is put together and put online.
Through thesaurus building, we hope archives will connect more to adjust and
define, discuss and elaborate the material and most importantly to bring differences
to the surface. Through difference dialogue is triggered, making a lively archive
and its interconnections an interesting online location for the future.
For questions, please contact Nadia Palliser at info@isea-web.org
Archive Update July 2007
After the workshop To Fluctuate and the Connected Archives expert meeting, we continued to work on the design of the interface and the dataflow of the archive material. There are two more students from the University of Utrecht working as interns for the project ? Jelmer Witkamp and Anna Sonnemans. Since every ISEA is so different (generating very varying material) it has been tricky planning this part of the project. The total of events often took a lot longer to add to the database than expected ? every ISEA in itself is quite a large phenomenon! But we are slowly drawing to a close with more extracted images from the catalogues spreading to different parts of the database. Michiel van der Haagen, the programmer of de Balie, has continued to help fine-tune the database, making it more user-friendly for the data-flowers and enabling all necessary relations to be added. Although we do not have all the information, the open source database allows for dynamic addition of information which will allow the ISEA web archive to grow in the future Furthermore, we have some video material to add: Jim Ilden, video editor and student at Media Technology has converted the video material and edited it. He will be working together with Anna Sonnemans to add this material to the database. In the meantime the development of the interface in collaboration with students of the Human Computer Interaction department, Jim Wiggers and Peter Sweenen continues though we have encountered some difficulties. Due to the quantity of information, it is quite a challenge to find a good balance between intuitive browsing and informational searching! A launch of the first version of the web archive is planned for the end of August 2007. We hope to organize a Live Tagging event at this moment, coupled to user tests to enable us to fine-tune the archive towards a finished result.
To Fluctuate - Informal Meeting on Online Archiving at the Virtual PlatformISEA-NL and the Virtual Platform are collaborating to organize an informal gathering concerning the accessibility of online archives, such as the ISEA online archive. Located at Montevideo - Time-based Arts in Amsterdam, we have invited de Balie with the Tactical Media Files, V2_Archive and Any Meta - Mediamatic to talk of the latest developments in their archiving projects and how these projects relate to the making of new information and web 2.0 applications. We wish to discuss and define possible strategies with designers and experts in the field. By practically thinking through the relationships of a functional design for the ISEA online archive, we hope to bring user knowledge & good content together at this session to boost accessibility.
More information on this meeting can be found at: http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/artefact-3827-nl.html
Collaborations & Sponsors
This project has been made possible by Angela Plohman, Anne Nigten and Wim van der Plas. ISEA is working together with/supported by the Virtual Platform, de Balie, Montevideo, V2_, the Polytechnic in Urecht and the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montreal. Many thanks to everybody for their ongoing efforts!
The ISEA Public Online Archive is sponsored by the Mondriaan Stichting and the VSB Fonds.
