1. Information Curation and Database AestheticsArchiving Context: Preservation Strategies for Net-based Art(A Case Study) Christiane Paul

2. I.Defining Database AestheticsII. Applying Database Aesthetics in CurationIII. Applying Database in Archiving and Preservation 3. I. Defining Database Aesthetics= the aesthetic principles applied in imposing the logicof the database to any type of information= filtering data collections= visualizing data[not the aesthetics of the database as structure itself]* database aesthetics as a conceptual potential and cultural form* a way of revealing (visual) patterns of knowledge, beliefs, and socialbehavior 4. II. Applying Database (Aesthetics) in Curation Presenting art projects relying on database aesthetics Using databases in the presentation of art (as repositories of art; as structure for crowd curation) 5. Wattenberg and Walczak, Apartment (installation sketch) 6. Apartment at Ars Electronica, Linz Austria: 2 user stations, 2 projections (2D / 3D component), 1 archive stationApartment at Electrohype Festival, Sweden:1 projection (2D) onto table 7. George Legrady, Pockets Full of Memories 8. runme software art repository (2003) 9. Your Show Here, Mass MoCA (2001) 10. Potentiality of Database - Semiotics of Database Ferdinand de Saussure:syntagmatic relations referring intratextually to other wordsco-present within the textparadigmatic relationsreferring intertextually to wordsabsent from the text Lev Manovich:narrativesyntagmatic dimension = explicit paradigmatic dimension = implicitdatabase paradigmatic dimension = explicit, privileged syntagmatic dimension = downplayed, dematerialized 11. III. Applying Database in Preservation and Archiving Database as structure for archiving art / context(Wayback Machine) Database as structure for archiving metadata about artand preservation approaches (Forging The Future Initiative, a working group of The Variable MediaNetwork founded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and theDaniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology; membersinclude(d) the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive,Cleveland Performance Art Festival and Archive, the Walker Art Center,Franklin Furnace Archive, Rhizome.org, and the Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art) 12. Archiving Context If net art is intrinsically contextualsince it often makescontext its content through a process of linkingdoinstitutions need to archive its fluctuating context? The archiving of the context of net art would require a newunderstanding of the archive as a living environment thatcan itself adapt to the changing requirements of themutable records it contains. 13. The Worlds First Collaborative Sentence Douglas Davis, 1994Originally commissioned by the Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NewYork, in conjunction with "Interactions," its 1994 survey exhibition of theartists work With the assistance of Gary Welz, Robert Schneider, and Susan Hoeltzel 14. Preservation Challenges Nonfunctional Submission FormIn the process of migrating the work from the Lehman server to Whitney ones, crucial files (theCGI script) powering the form that allowed users to contribute to the Sentence, were omitted. Large Text SizeSeveral pages of the Sentence included text that became increasingly large, eventually makingthe browser slow down and rendering the work essentially unusable. This problem was caused byonline user contributions that were not properly formatted; while older browser versionscompensated for this issue and correctly displayed the text, newer ones showed increasinglylarge letters. Link RotMany of the links that were contributed by visitors to the Sentence became obsolete over theyears (a process referred to as link rot), because the pages and files to which they were pointingwere moved or deleted. Garbled Korean CharactersSeveral pages of the Sentence appear as garbled characters, a problem caused by the fact thatthe work was shown at the 1995 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. The Korean character set didnot properly display in the browser because it was not defined in the header of the pages. 15. Live Version restores the works functionality and allows visitors to contribute(PHP script replaces the original CGI) display of the work has been promoted to current standards(original HTML has been modified to include closing tags) original links and URLs posted by contributors were left broken(to point to the ephemeral nature of the Web) legibility of the Korean characters was not restored 16. Korean Character Set garbage text as it appears on many pages:oeuu oe example of characters above written in their raw form in HTML: garbage text with encoding: 17. Historic Version leaves the code mainly untouched and shows work as it wouldhave been experienced from 1994-2005 when it stoppedfunctioning displays as it would have at the time of its creation links have been modified to copies of the original pages at theInternet Archives Wayback Machine