New Media Encyclopaedia Premiered In Brussels

Museums and the New Media, Brussels, November 19, 1998

The New Media Encyclopaedia, a trilingual online catalogue, is the first Internet museum catalogue to feature excerpts of video art. Introduced in Brussels, November 19, 1998, during the symposium Museums and the New Media, the issue of digital video excerpts to provide the next generation with a primary source for rare media documents was discussed, and debated among the artists and curatorial presentations.

‚Museums and the New Media', a symposium of artists and curators, was held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, November 19-21, 1998. The public meeting was convened to premiere the ambitious shared database, the New Media Encyclopaedia ?www.newmedia-arts.org?, an online documentation project supported by the European Community's 1998 Kaleidoscope Fund. The project was initiated by Christine van Assche, curator of media art at the Centre Georges Pompidou Paris. It is the first fully accessible online database project to feature quicktime move clips (between 10 seconds - 2 minutes) from each time-based work included. Project partners for the Encyclopaedia are The Museum Ludwig Cologne (which has no website), the Centre pour l'Image Contemporaine, Saint-Gervais Geneva , and collaborating Belgium partner constant vzw constant@imaginet.be, a project group for the promotion and presentation of new media.

The New Media Encyclopaedia is not actually an encyclopaedic listing of all media work, as its name implies. It is a catalogue of the collections of the partner institutions. Presented in a sparsly designed format, the works are listed in a unified master list, and within the structure features a fairly extensive biography of each artist (or artist group), documentation from exhibitions of the work, and a curatorial description of each work. Each media art work (videotape, CD ROM or multi-media installation) is supported with a quicktime movie, which is similiar in appearance to the recent CD ROM of the videotek (the media art collection) at the ZKM, Karlsruhe, but much easier to access than the offline example. The video excerpts were selected the curators to give a view to the style, sound, and tempo of each work, the length was decided with concern for the best impression of content for each work. In disucssion with the audience in Brussels, it was initially feared that future generations would never experience the important time element of the time-based medium of video, by having this easily accessible short excerpts available. But Van Assche, when asked to comment, stated that future plans include the full-length digitization of video tapes by artists, which will be online as soon as the technology -and bandwidth-- becomes available.

The trilingual New Media Encyclopaedia (English, French, German) currently has 200 works available to view online (representing about 50 artists). Upon its completion in the year 2000, the New Media Encyclopaedia will include more than 1000 works by over 200 artists. The data base of the New Media Encyclopaedia now allows acces to data alphabetically and chronologically. A subject heading search is under construction (which will use art references like Body Art, Conceptual Art, Fluxus, etc.) to allow the sorting of artists and and the restructuring of styles from several cultural references and eras. Additional features of the New Media Encyclopaedia are a glossary of terms (soon to be in three languages), a brief history of media art in the representative countries where video, performance and multi-media thrived and made history in the 1970s and 1980s, and a bibliography of media related publications held in the libraries of each institution. These are useful tools for curators, students, and scholars, who seek further resources, as well as accurate references.

The Encyclopaedia of New Media presents the documentation of the media art collections professionally and accurately, and the information provided by this online catalogue is exceptional, especially when compared to the elaboratly designed websites of the international video distributors, that give little information, and no video images. Distributors like London Electronic Arts, 235 Media, Cologne, or Montevideo, Amsterdam have failed to provide essential biograpical or production information to their online customer base. Electronic Arts Intermix, New York gives good catalogue descriptions for each work and some still images, but has not developed video excerpts. The Video Data Bank, at the Art Institute of Chicago, is in the process of creating an online catalogue and plans to incorporate digital video excerpts in 1999.

The first phase for the online Encyclopaedia is based on the collection of the Musee national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. Among the first 30 artists represented from the Pompidou collection are Chris Marker (France) Peter Fischli and David Weiss (Switzerland), Johan Grimonprez (Belgium), Marcel Odenbach (Germany) and Jean-Luc Godard (France/Switzerland). The Museum Ludwig has contributed listings from their works of Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostel and Bettina Gruber and Maria Vedder. Many works are owned by each institution, and will be represented unanimously, for example works by Vito Acconci, Doublas Davis, Gary Hill, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, and Shigeko Kubota. Subsequent updates will include the participation of the artists, who will assist with their entries.

The symposium ‚The Museum and New Media' was organized in Brussels, one of the few major European centers which has no public collection of new media art, to focus a discussion on the relationship between museums, new media practice, and the unique artistic cultural heritage of time based art. Despite the lack of institutional recognition of new media art in Belgium, constant vzw provided a serious forum for the presentation and discussion of new media art for the online environment, with examples that included the incorporation of issues surrounding the documentation of art, as well as unique original work being developed specifically for the Net. Participants included artists George Legrady (Stuttgart), Vera Frenkel (Toronto), Karel Dudesek of Van Gogh TV (Seevetal/Vienna), Moving Art Studio (Brussels), and Stefaan Decostere (Brussels). Curators included Simon Lamuniere (Geneva), curator of documenta x Net.art, McKenzie Wark (Sydney), Julie Lazar, director of experimental programs, MOCA (Los Angeles), and Konrad Becker, chairman of the Institute of New Culture Technologies and Public Netbase (Vienna), who presented individual case studies and illustrated excellent ways that the Internet can incorporate art, the museum and institutional identity.

The preservation and documentation of early media art works (primarily works on video) has been a growing concern for the past 15 years, when it was recognized that works created since the late 1960s were undergoing decompision. This is a growing concern for both museums and artists. In the tidal wave of the communication revolution and the growth of Internet as a main topic, the medium of video has even been declared ‚dead' by a number of critics and digital art promoters. Now, it appears that through digital tecnology, the historic reference works for digital culture, and the masterworks that provided ground breaking ideas, by numerous contemporary artists, will have a revival, if not a second life. This new digital life promises an eternal flame for the medium's compromise of quality and availability, and it offers expanded distribution on the Internet. It is hoped that the curatorial commitment to preserve and present time based art -growing internationally for the past two decades-- will find a reward from the effort to bring this information online. By the year 2000 when the New Media Encyclopaedia is fully online, the benefit of having an easily available glimpse at the powerful influences video, performance and conceptual art have had on both social, political and commercial media should be recognized by museums worldwide.