21.01.2021
Archive of Digital Art
Media Art | Digital Art | New Media | Computer Art | Electronic Art | Image Database.
As a collaborative "living archive," the Archive of Digital Art (ADA) documents the transdisciplinary and expansive field of media art from the 1960s to the present day, showcasing its evolving practices at the intersection of art, science, and technology.
©
Boris Chimp
The Archive of Digital Art (ADA, digitalartarchive.at), founded in 1999, is a pioneering and comprehensive archive of media art and its histories. As a cross-institutional archive project, it documents the aesthetics, themes, and technologies of this broad field of contemporary art, based on an expanded concept of documentation. In addition to biographical and descriptive data on artworks, the central focus lies in recording technological designs and concepts, installations, hardware and software technologies, and audience interactions. As an online database, ADA provides a research tool for scholars, artists, students, and the interested public.
Over 50,000 individual records of cultural works can be researched and studied. The data management system includes over 900 established artists and scholars (all with a minimum of five exhibitions and/or publications), 3,400 artwork profiles, 4,000 bibliographic entries, and 1,400 institutions with scholarly and artistic events. Thanks to funding from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (2012–2016), ADA has continued its mission as a “living archive” in the spirit of community science since 2016: ADA community members worldwide manage their profiles with artworks, bibliographies, and exhibition data using Social Web 2.0 and Semantic Web 3.0 features, making ADA the first “living archive” of art and media history. A minimum of five exhibitions and/or publications is required for participation on ADA as a gatekeeping system.
Funding from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (2012–2016), ADA has been further developed since 2016. Since 2016, the Media Art Research Thesaurus (mediaartresearch.org) has been developed, employing a transhistorical vocabulary encompassing aesthetics, themes, and technology. The community can tag artworks and link them to the thesaurus. In this way, ADA has been connected to other art historical image databases for comparative visual analyses between media art and its historical predecessors.
The editorial team at the Digital Humanities Lab of Danube University supports the editorial and technical work, including online exhibitions, artist and scholar features, and tool development.