1. Information Curation and Database Aesthetics
Archiving Context: Preservation Strategies for Net-based Art
(A Case Study)
Christiane Paul

2. I. Defining Database Aesthetics
II. Applying Database Aesthetics in Curation
III. Applying Database in Archiving and Preservation

3. I. Defining Database Aesthetics
= the aesthetic principles applied in imposing the logic
of the database to any type of information
= filtering data collections
= visualizing data
[not the aesthetics of the database as structure itself]
* database aesthetics as a conceptual potential and cultural form
* a way of revealing (visual) patterns of knowledge, beliefs, and social
behavior

4. II. Applying Database (Aesthetics) in Curation
• Presenting art projects relying on database aesthetics
• Using databases in the presentation of art
(as repositories of art; as structure for crowd curation)

5. Wattenberg and Walczak, Apartment (installation sketch)

6. Apartment at Ars Electronica, Linz Austria:
2 user stations, 2 projections (2D / 3D
component), 1 archive station
Apartment at Electrohype Festival, Sweden:
1 projection (2D) onto table

7. George Legrady, Pockets Full of Memories

8. runme software art
repository (2003)

9. Your Show Here, Mass MoCA (2001)

13. Potentiality of Database - Semiotics of Database
• Ferdinand de Saussure:
syntagmatic relations referring intratextually to other words
co-present within the text
paradigmatic relations referring intertextually to words
absent from the text
• Lev Manovich:
narrative syntagmatic dimension = explicit
paradigmatic dimension = implicit
database paradigmatic dimension = explicit, privileged
syntagmatic dimension = downplayed, dematerialized

14. III. Applying Database in Preservation and Archiving
• Database as structure for archiving art / context
(Wayback Machine)
• Database as structure for archiving metadata about art
and preservation approaches
(Forging The Future Initiative, a working group of The Variable Media
Network founded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the
Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology; members
include(d) the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive,
Cleveland Performance Art Festival and Archive, the Walker Art Center,
Franklin Furnace Archive, Rhizome.org, and the Whitney Museum of
American Art)

17. Archiving Context
• If net art is intrinsically contextual—since it often makes
context its content through a process of linking—do
institutions need to archive its fluctuating context?
• The archiving of the context of net art would require a new
understanding of the archive as a living environment that
can itself adapt to the changing requirements of the
mutable “records” it contains.

18. The World's First Collaborative Sentence
Douglas Davis, 1994
Originally commissioned by the Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, New
York, in conjunction with "Interactions," its 1994 survey exhibition of the
artist's work
With the assistance of Gary Welz,
Robert Schneider, and Susan Hoeltzel

19. Preservation Challenges
• Nonfunctional Submission Form
In the process of migrating the work from the Lehman server to Whitney ones, crucial files (the
CGI script) powering the form that allowed users to contribute to the Sentence, were omitted.
• Large Text Size
Several pages of the Sentence included text that became increasingly large, eventually making
the browser slow down and rendering the work essentially unusable. This problem was caused by
online user contributions that were not properly formatted; while older browser versions
compensated for this issue and correctly displayed the text, newer ones showed increasingly
large letters.
• Link Rot
Many of the links that were contributed by visitors to the Sentence became obsolete over the
years (a process referred to as “link rot”), because the pages and files to which they were pointing
were moved or deleted.
• Garbled Korean Characters
Several pages of the Sentence appear as garbled characters, a problem caused by the fact that
the work was shown at the 1995 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. The Korean character set did
not properly display in the browser because it was not defined in the header of the pages.

20. Live Version
• restores the work's functionality and allows visitors to contribute
(PHP script replaces the original CGI)
• display of the work has been promoted to current standards
(original HTML has been modified to include closing tags)
• original links and URLs posted by contributors were left “broken”
(to point to the ephemeral nature of the Web)
• legibility of the Korean characters was not restored

21. Korean Character Set
• “garbage text” as it appears on many pages:
μ‚²oeËüüŽ ‚Í«ì«ô ÀË«Ì åŸ Ë ÕíË…¡’ËøËê‚„ ¡Ÿ¦ÖËí²oe¸Ë«ì«ô ¦‚ ÒÈé€Ò
• example of characters above written in their raw form in HTML:
╦л╠ хЯ ╦Н╒э╦ЕбТ ╦°╦ъВД бЯж╓╦э▓Ь╕╦льлЇ
• “garbage text” with encoding:
탞쿇劍􁪽 궼レヴ 읫ヌ 􁪽 􁪽 藜􁪽 죸 傑鋸굜 줋┶健쿇맷レヴ 쫩 蘆􁪽 􁪽 읒 잴

22. Historic Version
• leaves the code mainly untouched and shows work as it would
have been experienced from 1994-2005 when it stopped
functioning
• displays as it would have at the time of its creation
• links have been modified to copies of the original pages at the
Internet Archive's Wayback Machine