ADA Archive of Digital Art

Self-portrait

As a pioneer in the field of Media Arts research, the ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART (ADA, former Database of Virtual Art) documents the rapidly evolving field of digital installation art for more than a decade now. This complex, research-oriented overview of works at the intersection of art, science, and technology has been developed in cooperation with international media artists, researchers and institutions, as a collective project.

Since todays digital artworks are processual, ephemeral, interactive, multimedia-based, and fundamentally context dependent, because of their different structure, they require a modified, we called it an ‚expanded concept of documentation‘. The ADA represents the scientific selection of several hundred international artists of approx. 5.000 evaluated artists. We ascribe high importance to artistic inventions like innovative interfaces, displays or software (https://www.digitalartarchive.at/about/mission.html).

The ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART (ADA, the former Database of Virtual Art) is a project of the Department of Image Science at Danube University Krems. The ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART was sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) from 2002-2005 and by the Austrian Research Fund (FWF - Der Wissenschaftsfond) from 2012-2016 (https://www.digitalartarchive.at/about/imprint.html).

Description

The Archive of Digital Art (ADA) - previously called the Database of Visual Art - is dedicated to the documentation and research of digital art and multimedia, interactive and process art projects combining art, science and technology, since 1999. The project’s goal is to systematically preserve and document digital art through video, technical data, artist’s declarations, academic texts, discussions and related bibliographical data, as well as providing up-to-date information on exhibits and events.

The ADA was developed by the Department of Image Sciences at the Danube University in Austria as an educational and research project. It was conceptually and technically conceived by professor Oliver Grau, who is currently working with a diverse team of technical and visual programmers. The project is presented as an expanded research platform aiming to understand the complexity of artistic expression in constant change and experimentation with new media. The archive is comprised of game art, bio art, digital activism, database art, animation, performance, digital communities, net art and transmedia narrative.

The ADA community provides its members with an internal messaging system allowing them to organize activities and events. A “media art meta-thesaurus and interactive archive” project is currently in development, which will function as a free tool designed for social networking, allowing artists and researchers to contribute by posting their own information.

Interview

Christiane Paul http://dpya.org/en/index.php/Christiane_Paul

Links

URL: http://virtualart.at/nc/home.html, http://www.virtualart.at/nc/home.html

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20150725000258/http://virtualart.at/nc/home.html, https://web.archive.org/web/20160809191642/http://www.virtualart.at/nc/home.html