LABORAL: CENTRO DE ARTE Y CREACION INDUSTRIAL - GIJON

28 - 29 MAY 2010

The current situation of art and research centres calls for a new, groundbreaking approach to forms of conserving and documenting new media projects and collections and making them available to the user.

LABoral wishes to begin a series of debates in an international forum of experts with the intention of fostering debate on the cultural heritage of new formats and the archives, mediatheques and documentation centres which respond to the needs of the 21st century. This forum is conceived to be an annual meeting that will bring together experts and researchers in the field, coming from institutions, research and industry centres in the visual arts sector who are making outstanding contributions to technological development and innovation in audiovisual culture, in the area of digital archives and conservation.

LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial is organising the International Symposium of Medialibraries and Archives for the 21st Century for May 28th & 29th 2010, inviting renowned experts and leading institutions in the field of the conservation and archives of contemporary cultural heritage.

The symposium coincides with the opening of Mediateca_Archivo at LABoral, which was conceived with a mandate to be a permanent space exclusively dedicated to the documentation, consultation and diffusion of the art of today and experimental cultural industries, as well as a pioneering centre for study and research.

Information about sessions

Access to contemporary culture and creation through media libraries and archives
Internet and new technologies constantly change the context of information and communication. Due to this situation, cultural institutions have to readapt the way audiences have access to their contents. Technical innovations starts a discussion about preservation mechanisms, archives and the importance of having the appropriated documentation and the adequate communication channels.

Contents production and selection. What to conserve?

Communication and information technologies have generated new ways of production and cultural diffusion, giving way to lots of digital artistic and cultural practices. Due to this situation, institutions have to face technical and economic challenges to able to digitalize their contents and offer their audiences the right channels to access to this information. We think this symposium offers the perfect context to analyze methodologies and tools for cultural management and preservation in digital format, but first we have to answer a few questions: what contents are to be preserve? In which formats? what resources do we have?

Media art conservation. Archives and Media Libraries

This discussion will focus on media art conservation and preservation needs, works and projects produced during these last three decades and now in risk situation. Their conservation and archive will give us the opportunity to both learn and preserve as they challenge us in the way we use new technologies to find solutions for media art exhibition and preservation.

Archive versus collection

Institutions preserving cultural heritage face new challenges: on one side, limits between collection and archive are very diffused due to the characteristics of artistic projects and on the other side, archives are becoming an investigation resource. An analysis about how to digitalize collections and find new ways of preservations and conservation adapted to digital formats is needed.

http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/seminarios/proximos