Museums and the Web 2001 : Abstract

Archives & Museum Informatics
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Published: March 15, 2001.

DEAF_00: A dynamic web environment
Sandra Fauconnier , V2_Organisation, The Netherlands
Anne Nigten , V2_Organisation, The Netherlands
Boudewijn Ridder , V2_Organisation, The Netherlands
http://www.v2.nl/deaf/00/

Session: Digital Art

V2_Organisation, Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is hosting a large and diverse archive with documentation about its past and current activities. The archive consists of representations of media art of approximately the last 15 years, and related content (publications, information about people and organizations who are active in this field...) - a contemporary, heterogeneous, interdisciplinary and often time-based subject field in constant dynamic evolution. Archiving such content requires a specific and relevant approach on the technical and descriptive side because of the nonlinear and unstable characteristics of interactive media art.

The V2_Archive has grown organically as a by-product of the activities (lectures, festivals, exhibitions...) of V2_Organisation, and is therefore characterized by strong interconnections and relations between various items in the archive. One could even say that the context of each item in the archive might be more important than the isolated item itself. V2_ has decided that, for this kind of situation, traditional relational databases would be insufficiently appropriate as tools for input, storage and online disclosure, and that an object-oriented way of organizing the information in the archive, would be better. We have chosen to organize and disclose the archive with the help of MMBase (http://www.mmbase.org/) , an open source publishing system which functions as an editorial 'layer' on top of several types of traditional databases (a.o. MySQL, Informix). MMBase creates a cloud of reusable objects and relations and is capable of organizing groups of objects into modules, which can be used as building blocks for a website.

The website of DEAF_00 (http://www.v2.nl/deaf/00/) - Dutch Electronic Art Festival, organized every two years by V2_, (released October 15, 2000), functions as a first prototype of the growing V2_Archive site. It is generated by a set of software modules called V2_Engine, developed by V2_Lab, a workspace for interdisciplinary research and development by artists, scientists and technicians. The V2_Engine is a collection of functions that translate the content, stored in MMBase, into a meaningful and dynamic environment. An active archive item on the site is contextualized into a wireframe-like model generated with the help of a semantic network of keywords and notions. The item's context is also influenced by several modules of the V2_Engine, partly defined by editors, partly by users' behavior and partly by characteristics of the information itself. The V2_Engine is able to autonomously create relations between items, in a way that is very specific to V2_s approach to media art (so-called V2_-ness). When visiting the site, a user receives the requested information, and is offered a set of related items that provide a special, V2_-ish viewpoint and context that fit with the user's personal preferences and interests in an intelligent manner (V2_ attracts audiences from many disciplines as diverse as biology, choreography, engineering...). In the future, content and functionality will increase, as more archive items are gradually added to the information space.