dc.description | Biography: Giselle Beiguelman is an artist, researcher, curator and professor. Her work includes interventions in public
spaces, network projects and mobile apps. Her artistic and investigative practice is based on a critical approach
towards digital media and their information systems. Beiguelman is Associated Professor at the School of
Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP), where she specializes in digital art
conservation, intangible heritage, and interface design. She holds a PhD in Social History from the University of
São Paulo. She also does work on the aesthetics of memory, and has organized exhibitions including Memória da
Amnesia, at the Municipal Archive (São Paulo, 2015), where she explored what she terms the “politics of oblivion”
in connection with São Paulo city landmarks. In 2016, her work was featured in the solo show Cinema Lascado,
at Caixa Cultural (São Paulo) and How Heavy is a Cloud? at Galpão VB (Videobrasil, São Paulo). Group exhibits
include Unplace (Lisbon, 2015); the 3nd Bahia Biennale (Salvador, 2014); the 25th São Paulo Biennial; The
Algorithmic Revolution, at the ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany, 2004-2008) and NET_Condition, also at the ZKM (1999-
2000). Author of many books and articles about digital culture, she is the editor of Possible Futures: art, museums
and digital archives (with Ana Magalhães, 2014) and curator of Archinterface: the city expanded by networks
(2015), among others. Giselle Beiguelman lives and works in São Paulo. www.desvirtual.com. | |
dc.description.abstract | This paper discusses the conservation of net art works. It describes the overdose situation of documentary production fostered by social networks and its impact on the traditional forms of storage and the contemporary memory culture. It situates the specificity of net art in its connection to dynamic and systemic environments of flow, over which there is no control, implying new conservation parameters and investigates the particular aesthetics in this context. It problematizes the political instances that have turned the Internet into a surveillance environment, denying access to older sites and evidencing how they affect the preservation of the history of online art. In the end, it presents how we are working with Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Sao Paulo (MAC-USP), in the development of a methodology to deal with net art pieces in the museological universe. The discussion is made based on the particular case of The Book after the Book website (1999), which required a series of updates and reprogramming of codes in the process of migration to the museum collection.
Based on this experience, we suggest a reflection about net art museums as museums of the unfinished, unrepaired and unrecovered. This strategy may allow dealing with irreversible losses, without counting on the following process of disappearance of the artworks. | |