“Archiving New Media Art Archives” by Byeongwon Ha

Title:

Archiving New Media Art Archives

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Medium:

Netart

Artist Statement:

The average time to stay on a web page is about 15 seconds. In the Tik-Tok generation, how do users utilize new media art online archives? Without any browser menus including the address bar, Archiving New Media Art Archives only allows visitors in a gallery to use the mouse to navigate online archives with hypertexts and hyper-images. Whenever users click the mouse button, the computer takes a picture of a small portion around the mouse cursor and places it on another screen, which is invisible to users. This project visualizes how online users access new media art resources in a collage way. When they click five times to surf the online archive, the computer automatically turns to the next archive website. Users visit Prix-Ars Electronica Archiv first, then ACM SIGGRAPH Art Show Archives and ISEA Symposium Archives in order. In the end, this project generates a collage image based on the users’ search activities on those three archive websites.

After each exhibition day, this project posts the final collage image on social media. In non-real time, as a spatial collage image, this project documents how users consume those archive resources and how users can reach different resources. This project is based not on scientific research about users’ online activities, but on an artistic method to visualize users’ history of access to online archive resources and examine users’ surfing consumption patterns on archive websites. As a delayed interactive art project, Archiving New Media Art Archives provides viewers with a certain time to appreciate the original purpose and function of digital art archives. This will contribute to not only showing how online new media art archives work, but also making creative spatial collage images with time-based online activities during the Second Summit on New Media Art Archiving at ISEA2022.