On the occasion of the International Archives Week, from NEWART Centre we focus on one of the great challenges of contemporary creation: the preservation, documentation and activation of digital art archives.
International Archives Day is celebrated on 9 June, a date promoted by the International Council on Archives to recognise the fundamental role of archives in preserving collective memory. Around this date, International Archives Week invites institutions, cultural centres and professionals from around the world to reflect on the importance of archives and the new challenges they face today.
In the case of digital art, these challenges are especially complex. Many works depend on technologies, formats, devices and systems that evolve quickly or that may become obsolete in a few years. Preserving a digital work of art involves documenting its operation, creation processes, assembly instructions, the technical and conceptual context, and the conditions necessary for it to be able to react in the future.
In this context, digital art archives become critical infrastructure for understanding culture in the age of artificial intelligence. How we preserve, describe and classify digital culture today will influence how these technologies interpret the world tomorrow. Archives must therefore be understood not only as spaces for conservation, but also as active spaces for research, cultural memory, experimentation and the production of knowledge.
From the NEWART Foundation we work on this challenge in connection with archAIve, a European project that raises digital art archives as critical spaces to examine the cultural impact of artificial intelligence and contribute to its responsible development.
archAIve proposes to understand digital cultural memory as a living, collective and constantly revising process. The project explores new ways of conserving, documenting, activating and reinterpreting media art archives, putting digital heritage, artistic research, emerging technologies and mediation practices into dialogue.
For NEWART Centre, this work connects directly with the need to preserve the heritage of digital and technological art, but also with the commitment to make it accessible, understandable and meaningful to audiences of the present and the future.
Preserving digital art is not only saving the past. It is also activating knowledge, memory and future.
