Dragan Espenschied (Rhizome) - Rhizome: 20 years of a born-digital institution #PABC2015
Channel: iMAL Brussels
Date: 2015-12-08

In the continuation of their collaborative program on Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age which started beginning of 2015, iMAL and Packed organised the first international symposium in Brussels on the issues of preservation of born-digital art and culture and their public access.

http://www.imal.org/preservationsymposium

Dragan Espenschied / Rhizome
Rhizome: 20 years of a born-digital institution

Rhizome was founded 1996 in New York and has been, under various conditions and concepts, been building an archive of born-digital art since 1999. The "Artbase" contains more than 2000 pieces of mostly web art and digital culture. Rhizome has no exhibition space and has, from the beginning, been mainly active on the net—and despite rather reactionary movements in digital art is not planning to change that.
In order to keep up with ever-changing practices and the amount of practitioners, Rhizome is heavily invested in research around the three main conservation fields: emulation, web archiving and cataloguing. A reflection on which ideas worked and which didn't in Rhizome's history will be followed by insight into the latest research projects and their practical applications—concerning emulation, the definition of object boundaries, crowd-sourced preservation and the usage of computing.

About Dragan Espenschied
Dragan Espenschied (1975, Germany) is a media artist, home computer folk musician and digital culture researcher and conservator living in Stuttgart and New York City.
Starting out as a net activist in the late 1990’s, he created several online interventions concerned with digital power structures and live network traffic analysis/manipulation together with Alvar Freude.
In his artistic career, Espenschied focuses on the historization of Digital Culture from the perspective of computer users rather than hackers, developers or “inventors”. Together with net art pioneer Olia Lialina he has been creating a significant body of work concerned with how to represent and write a culture-centric history of the networked age.
Since 2011, they together have been restoring and culturally analyzing 1 TB of GeoCities data, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Espenschied worked with the transmediale festival’s archive and the Vilem Flusser Archive to conecptually and technically integrate large scale emulation while working as a researcher at the University of Freiburg and the University of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe.
Publications include papers on large scale curation of complex digital artifacts, emulation and digital culture, the influential reader Digital Folklore as well as musical releases on Aphex Twin’s label Rephlex and several underground/net labels, performing and lecturing in between raves and museums in Europe and the United States.
Since April 2014, he is leading the Digital Conservation Program at Rhizome.

- http://archive.rhizome.org/theresa-duncan-cdroms/

Intro music: Dighom - Nuurat (https://archive.org/details/apl009)