Conservation Case Study on Communimage by c a l c

This project was carried out as the annual case study by conservator Claudia Röck at HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel.

In 2023, HEK acquired Communimage, a collaborative art project on the web, initiated by Kulturlabor Calc and Johannes Gees. The interactive website www.communimage.ch was programmed for Expo 01 in July 1999 and has since been updated several times by the artists. After the acquisition, Communimage was installed on HEK's art web server. Noteworthy for preservation is the fact that the website runs as an executable on the web server. In contrast, the other web-based artworks running on HEK's art web server consist of readable source code that is either directly interpreted by the web browser or preprocessed by other interpreters in the backend.

This case study analyzes the development environment set up by the programmer and artist Malex Spiegel to generate the executable for Communimage and the implications this has for the preservation of Communimage.