PNEK: Speculative Archiving seminar

14th February 2013 from 13 – 16 (lunch incl.)
at Atelier Nord ANX, Olaf Ryes plass 2, Oslo (entrance from Sofienberrgt.)
No fee is asked to participate, but kindly register to pnek@pnek.org with regard to space and lunch.

Following Alfred North Whitehead, “the speculative reason is in its essence untrammelled by method. Its function is to pierce into the general reasons beyond limited reasons, to understand all methods as coordinated in a nature of things only to be grasped by transcending all method.” *

In the field of digital archiving and preserving of media art, challenges abound. Traditional methods have lead to a dead end when it comes to finding adequate solutions. I therefore suggest Speculative Archiving as a way of creative thinking that is based on our vast knowledge of failure. The presumed neutrality of technological and terminological systems, piratical ethics of collecting and disseminating and an autopsy of Media Art database archives of the early 2000s will be the three main courses of our feast. Furthermore, we will dissect and discuss existing problems and look into creative solutions.

Nina Wenhart is a Media Art historian and independent researcher. She is currently writing on Speculative archiving & experimental preservation of Media Art. Her MA thesis in Media Art Histories is on Descriptive Metadata for Media Arts. For many years, she has been working in the field of archiving/documenting Media Art, recently at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Media.Art.Research and before as the head of the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s videostudio, where she created their archives and primarily worked with the archival material. She was teaching the Prehystories of New Media Class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and in the Media Art Histories program at the Danube University Krems.