Infrastructures for Digital Arts Teaching and Research in Higher Education

The project goal is the expansion of the Archive of Digital Art (ADA, digitalartarchive.at), founded in 1999 by Prof. Grau and today probably the most comprehensive international academic archive in the field of digital media art. The aim is to develop the archive into a comprehensive teaching and research tool as well as an information platform for art institutions, in order to offer artists, students, teachers and researchers at universities and art colleges, but also museums and galleries, a necessary knowledge base in the future. The starting point and main focus of the project is the constantly and rapidly changing environment of the digital arts, which since their beginnings in the 1960s have on the one hand reflected the technological advances of digitalisation, but are increasingly confronted with the phenomenon of transience due to the changing storage media. ADA is therefore already today often the only source of images and information on pioneering works of digital art forms. Furthermore, human perception and the institution of the art archive are undergoing a transformation with new challenges as a result of digitalisation, which the research project is addressing on a technological and theoretical level. By means of new interactive and immersive spaces of experience or interfaces, which are being developed by the partners Die Angewandte Wien (directed by Prof. Schnell) and Kunstuniversität Linz (directed by Prof. Sommerer), the project opens up prospects for expanded possibilities of perception and use of the archive.