TechBrunch: Born-Digital Art

Digital things don’t survive on their own. A missing plug-in, a browser update, an operating system that no longer exists, and a work can disappear overnight. What does it mean to care for an artwork whose environment keeps changing?

In this TechBrunch, Claudia Röck, conservator of HEK’s media art collection, and Dragan Espenschied, Preservation Director at Rhizome (NYC), open up how museums care for born-digital works. Claudia offers insight into HEK’s own collection of Swiss media art: which artworks have been preserved, which resist, and how conservators decide what belongs to the artwork. Dragan invites us into Rhizome’s decades of preservation practice, showing why born-digital art is inseparable from the systems and contexts of its time, how early web aesthetics became cultural heritage, and why emulation is not just nostalgia but a method experiencing digital artworks beyond screen recordings and snapshots.

Together, we’ll become digital conservators for an afternoon. With Claudia and Dragan’s expert guidance, you’ll set up a Windows XP environment and explore artworks that only reveal themselves inside this reconstructed digital space. You need absolutely no prior knowledge — curiosity is enough. Together we’ll find orientation, explore what digital heritage can be, see how media art is kept alive, and revisit the particular nostalgia of early online worlds and their operating systems.

TechBrunch wis always served with coffee, tea, orange juice and Gipfeli. ☕🥐

Claudia Röck is passionate about the history and preservation of media art and its technology. She works as a media art conservator for the House of Electronic Arts, Basel, the Kunstmuseum Basel and other institutions. Before that she researched conservation strategies for software-based art at the University of Amsterdam. This research was part of the EU funded project New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA). From 2019 to 2021 she collaborated on a software preservation project at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Previously, she worked as an assistant time-based media conservator at Tate mainly with video-based art.

Dragan Espenschied is Preservation Director at Rhizome NY, stewarding ArtBase, a collection of more than 2200 works of digital art and net art. With a background in net activism, net art, and electronic music, Espenschied’s activities as a conservator are mostly focused on infrastructure and field-wide action concerning web archiving, emulation, and linked open data, rather than singular artworks.

This special edition of TechBrunch takes place in the context of the project «Zeitreise in unsere digitale Vergangenheit» (Time Travel Through Our Digital Past), supported by the Foundation for Art, Culture, and History (SKKG). The project explores cultural preservation through the lens of emulation technologies.