Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives

Framing Film

by Vinzenz Hediger (Editor), Barbara Le Maître (Editor), Julia Noordegraaf (Editor)

This important and first-of-its-kind collection addresses the emerging challenges in the field of media art preservation and exhibition, providing an outline for the training of professionals in this field. Since the emergence of time-based media such as film, video and digital technology, artists have used them to experiment with their potential. The resulting artworks, with their basis in rapidly developing technologies that cross over into other domains such as broadcasting and social media, have challenged the traditional infrastructures for the collection, preservation and exhibition of art. Addressing these challenges, the authors provide a historical and theoretical survey of the field, and introduce students to the challenges and difficulties of preserving and exhibiting media art through a series of first-hand case studies. Situated at the threshold between archival practices and film and media theory, it also makes a strong contribution to the growing literature on archive theory and archival practices.

428 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2012

Reviews

[Ximena Apisdorf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art, edited by Julia Noordegraaf, Cosetta Saba, Barbara Le Maître, and Vinzenz Hediger, offers a rigorous, transdisciplinary exploration of the challenges and frameworks for the conservation and presentation of time-based media art. The volume is an essential contribution to contemporary museum and media studies, proposing a shift from object-centered to processual, context-aware approaches to exhibition and preservation.

From the perspective of my research—focused on the mediatization of the museum and its intersection with television and advertising—the book is particularly valuable for its insistence on the media dispositive as a dynamic, historically situated framework. The book’s fourth chapter, dedicated to archives, resonates deeply with my own analysis of how institutional memory and visibility are constructed through media infrastructures. Rather than treating the archive as static, the authors highlight its role in shaping and reshaping cultural meaning over time.

Additionally, the book makes important conceptual distinctions between media, medium, and medias, which sharpen our understanding of how aesthetic, technical, and institutional factors converge. This vocabulary proves useful in thinking about the museum not just as a site of display, but as a symbolic interface—a space of circulation, translation, and negotiation of value in the broader field of cultural production.

Although the book focuses mostly on European case studies—reflecting the centrality of institutions like the University of Amsterdam—its theoretical proposals invite further application in peripheral contexts. In my Latin American focus, these debates about media temporality, exhibition rituals, and institutional frameworks gain new meaning when mapped onto asymmetrical geographies of cultural legitimacy.

In sum, Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art is a thought-provoking and methodologically rich volume that opens crucial debates not only for conservators or curators of media art, but also for scholars working at the intersections of media archaeology, museology, and cultural policy.