Join the ICA Section on Literary and Artistic Archives (SLA) on Thursday, 5 February at 17:00 CET (Paris time) for a focused panel exploring the challenges and innovations in preserving born digital art and media. This session brings together cultural heritage professionals whose work directly engages with the technical, conceptual, and ethical complexities of safeguarding digital artworks and making them accessible for research.
Participants will hear about current methods used to revive and maintain digital artworks, including emulation, restoration, and hardware/software recovery, as well as emerging strategies for incorporating these fragile digital objects into scholarly and creative inquiry.
KEY INFORMATION
Date and time
Thursday, 5 February 2025, at 17:00 CET (Paris time). To confirm the date/time of this session in your time zone, please click here.
Language
English. No interpretation will be provided.
Date and time
Thursday, 5 February 2025, at 17:00 CET (Paris time). To confirm the date/time of this session in your time zone, please click here.
Language
English. No interpretation will be provided.
The discussion is free and open to all. Registration is required to receive all the details regarding your participation in this session.
Presentations
1)
Reviving Digital Artworks through Virtualization and Emulation, presented by Jeremy Heil (Digital and Private Records Archivist, Queen's University Archives, Canada)
The first decades of digital art and media amplified hidden voices across Canada, empowering a wave of Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, and diasporic artists and activists. The spaces they created have already suffered loss through technological obsolescence and neglect, all but erasing a generation of art vital to this era. This paper will examine the restoration of select digital artworks by the artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and the toolkits being developed to expand this practice to other lost artworks.
2)
Remember Tomorrow: Restoring Early Canadian Videotex Art, presented by John Durno (Head, Digital Infrastructure, University of Victoria Libraries, Canada)
In the early 1980s, artists from across Canada created artworks in the then-new medium of Telidon videotex. However, Telidon failed in the marketplace, and as the years went by these very early examples of Canadian Net Art grew increasingly inaccessible as the specialized computing devices and software on which they depended obsolesced. This talk will describe a 10-year project to recover, restore and exhibit Telidon artworks.
Speakers
Jeremy Heil
Jeremy Heil has been the Digital and Private Records Archivist at Queen’s University Archives since 2001. He has taught workshops on digital records and metadata in archives and presented papers on various topics related to digital archives over the past 20 years. He has served on numerous committees locally, provincially, and nationally, including terms as President of the Archives Association of Ontario and as Managing Editor of Archivaria. He serves as the Emulator Developer for the CCA Cultivate grant-funded “Futures of Digital Media Art Histories.”
John Durno
John Durno is Head, Digital Infrastructure at the University of Victoria Libraries where, among other things, he curates the Libraries' Historic Computing collection and oversees data recovery and digital preservation activities.
