Museums, New Media Art, Documentation and Collection

CRUMB, the research centre CRUMB (http://www.crumbweb.org) at the University of Sunderland in the UK, has a deep interest in how the ‘behaviours’ of new media art, such as connectivity, computivity and interaction,2 present opportunities and challenges for curators. One of the particular characteristics of new media is the connected network of issues concerning documentation, archiving, collecting and preserving works of new media art. Thinking of net art, for example, the same technologies might be involved in the production, distribution, interpretation, collection and preservation of the art, much to the confusion of tradition museum studies theories: as Howard Besser says, “ collection management systems start to look like exhibition systems ”.3 The fact that these issues are connected is reflected in the kinds of events that CRUMB organizes: the symposium Commissioning & Collecting Variable Media ,4 for example, acknowledged that the technical challenges of collecting new media had been largely addressed by useful case studies,5 leaving the conceptual challenges of policy concerning differentiating production, documentation and collection. As Lois Keidan pointed out at that event, the history of Live Art has much to offer concerning these issues.