netzspannung.org in context

In recent years other online archives relating to digital art and culture have been created besides netzspannung.org. Their focus is mainly on documenting digital works and not on building up a collection or on conserving works.

The V2_Institute for Unstable Media (Rotterdam) and the Ars Electronica Festival and Center (Linz) now offer extensive online archives, which document digital works, events and discourses on digital culture dating back a good 20 years. And at the Humboldt University in Berlin a database of virtual art has been set up, which makes available a great wealth of material on selected individual works of media art. Similarly, the Daniel Langlois Foundation maintains a Center for Research and Documentation, whose archive on digital art can be freely accessed via the Internet.
[link 01] V2_Archive Portal
[link 02] Ars Electronica Archive
[link 03] International Database for Virtual Art
[link 04] Daniel Langlois Fondation - Center for Research and Documentation

Except for the American Internet platform Rhizome, which not only has a mailing list and a text archive but also archives Internet-based works, initiatives concerned with preserving media artworks are mainly localized in American museums. By contrast, Medien Kunst Netz (Media Art Network) pursues an approach more strongly focused on communication. Its online presentation focuses principally not on documenting individual works but on interrelating them historically and thematically.
[link 05] Media Art Net
[link 06] Rhizome
[link 07] Walker Art Center Collection and Resources
[link 08] Archiving the Avant Garde
[link 09] 404 Object not found. What remains of media art?
[link 10] Variable Media Initiative

netzspannung.org combines different approaches. On the one hand, the platform documents media art works and events in a way similar to V2 or the Ars Electronica Center. But, on the other, it also puts great emphasis on communicating content. Modules designed to communicate content, such as the fields "Media art and research" and "Learning media art", are supplemented by the development of innovative applications that support the process of accessing and communicating knowledge. With its knowledge discovery tools Semantic Map and Timeline, netzspannung.org provides tools that make it possible to explore large and thematically heterogeneous knowledge spaces. The intention is to further develop these tools as authoring tools, so that content can be published for blended learning applications specifically aimed at particular target groups.
[link 11] Knowledge Discovery