Documentation and Conservation of the Media Arts Heritage

Call for Papers

This editorial marks the launch of a new Leonardo special section. This new section is the journal's contribution to a larger research alliance headed by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology (Montreal, Canada) for documenting and conserving the media arts heritage. This 5-year research alliance—bringing together museums, universities and organizations from Canada, the U.S.A. and Europe—is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Daniel Langlois Foundation.

For the next 3 years, we will use this section in Leonardo to publish articles and reports arising out of the alliance's ongoing research. We also wish to invite researchers, scholars, artists and others concerned about this constellation of problems to propose articles to Leonardo. We welcome articles under the following three programmatic headings: documentation, cataloging and conservation.

Background

Throughout the 20th century and certainly at an increasing pace since the 1960s, new art forms that feature technological components have been throwing traditional conservation and documentation practices into upheaval. These works of art are many and varied. They may be analog or digital, mechanical, and/or electronic; they are often multimedia-based and include a variety of components, such as mechanical parts, software, electronic systems, varied electronic media formats, etc. Museums, which are charged with preserving and providing access to these works, often find themselves without adequate resources and must make do with methods and means that are poorly adapted to a growing number of artistic practices.

To address these problems, a variety of established disciplines are called upon to pool numerous fields of expertise, including art preservation, art documentation, art history, history of technology and media, communications, information sciences, archival management, engineering and computer science. In order to resolve the intricate web of issues at stake here, the alliance of researchers will be focusing on three principal areas, each of which will produce tools, guides and methodologies essential to preserving this new cultural heritage. The first area is the history of technologies, through which the technical composition and historical significance of specific technologies, as used by artists, will be rigorously detailed and placed within a broader context of historical understanding. The second, related to the first area, is art documentation, which seeks to preserve and catalog contextual material essential to understanding the works and their historical context. The third area of expertise is art conservation, which for centuries has established art preservation and restoration protocols and techniques but must now investigate and integrate new protocols better adapted to technologically based artworks and the art of the future.

In order to address these challenges and problems, historians, conservators, curators, engineers and their combined expertise are required to focus on numerous important and problematic works of art featuring technological components. To this end, the research alliance will be gathering technologically based artworks in the collections of our museum partners: the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Within the course of the research project, a multidisciplinary team of researchers representing all the necessary disciplines will propose, select and conduct in-depth and documented case studies.