Archiving Australian Media Arts: A Project Overview

Abstract This article presents an overview of the ARC Linkage Project “Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a method and a national collection,” which addresses the challenges of preserving digital media artworks that are stored on obsolete media and that require legacy computer environments to access. It lays out the challenges facing digital media arts, articulates the significance of the deposit of local media art organisation archives into the custody of major, jurisdictionally-appropriate cultural institutions, and details the selection of case studies for research from these organisations’ archives and other existing digital media art collections in our partner organisations’ custody. Case studies consist of the ANAT archive (formerly the Australian Network for Art and Technology), floppy disks from the Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski archive, Experimenta Media Art’s exhibition “Virtualities” (1995), dLux media art’s exhibition “Matinaze 97” (1997), and the Griffith University Art Museum’s collection of interactive CD-ROMs. The article reports on progress to date against two of the project’s aims, outlines the collective benefits to partners and to researchers of artworks and other materials from these archives being available, and indicates that access to born digital materials should improve in the near future with digital emulation infrastructure set to be built.