V2_'s Archive - A Dynamic Model for the Description of Media Art

Abstract

Since its early history in the beginning of the 1980s, V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, has documented its programs and activities, in an increasingly structured way, by means of photographs and video registrations. V2_ has also collected texts, flyers, publications, videotapes and CD-ROMs that serve to document its own events and works that artists have presented at V2_ over the years. As a result, V2_ now hosts a large and heterogeneous archive, which covers the history of the organization and a representative overview of more than 20 years of electronic media art. Since the mid-1990s, V2_ has been working on structural methods for the preservation and dissemination of its archive. Its content is described through an unconventional object-relation data model; at this moment, research on open, standard and exchangeable formats - XML, RDF, Semantic Web technologies - is taking place. The V2_ archive maintains several elaborated semantic instruments: a detailed ontology and a thesaurus specific for the field of unstable media art. The archive team also conducts research into back-office tools, web interfaces, copyright, archival interoperability and capturing and preserving unstable media artworks. A selection of V2_'s archive is accessible via the Web: http://archive.v2.nl/