Archive 2020: Goto10

Art.deb
The art.deb group will examine strategies and approaches for archiving and exhibiting software art in the context of FLOSS. The logistics of using live distributions, repositories, virtual machines and servers as more stable and lasting infrastructures for software art will be explored, as well as discussing artistic implications, such as the non-refactoring needs to preserve original art versus software rot and decay. This discussion will be key practical research for this new GOTO10 project, and will be documented and fed into the project's development beyond the event.

Such an attempt to kick start this project is also an opportunity to raise some key questions and open together the can of worm that is the future archiving of digital art.
During this group the following topics are covered:
- Curatorial practices: Is it possible to find a balance between archive selection and maintenance work without having to reinvent the wheel all the time? How can several groups and institutions agree on interoperability and common standards for archive selection and
maintenance. What is the future of archiving in a distributed content production process?
- Simulacres: what does constitute a work of software|net|game art and how far simulation and emulation can bring back the real experience of an obsolete environment. What about the works that exploit glitches and artefacts of hardware, such defects are usually inexistent in idealised VM. Is it acceptable to "let go" the quest for archiving and accept the increasing density and short lived experiments in software art?
- Live archives: What does it mean to archive in the era of the Internet, when everything is aimed to be cached, stored and put under various revision control systems. Similar to the time machine paradox (you cannot travel back to a time prior to the time the machine has been
invented), we are today experiencing a transition toward a multi layer network in which it becomes possible to pull data that has been removed (for example waybackmachine, google cache). Does it make archiving obsolete? Is the future of archiving aimed to focus on the
distribution of work rather than the sole storage?

Biography Aymeric Mansoux
Aymeric Mansoux is an artist and musician, member of the GOTO10 collective. His main artistic and research interests revolve around online communities, software as a medium and the influence of FLOSS in the development and understanding of digital art. His most recent projects and collaborations include the 0xA file repository band with Chun Lee, the digital artlife Metabiosis project with Marloes de Valk and the pure:dyne GNU/Linux live distribution for media artists. Aymeric is editor of the FLOSS+Art book (Openmute 2008), as well as Folly s Digital Artists Handbook which was launched early 2008. He currently lives in the Netherlands and teaches in the Network Media Master of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.