Documents – Collecting digital art – Volume 2 – 2007-2018

The collection of digital artwork at the Espace Multimedia Gantner (EMG), the contemporary and multimedia art branch of the regional multimedia library, was born of the desire to share digital art with as many people as possible and in places not necessarily devoted to art. In order to begin this collection, the art historian Bertrand Gauguet was given a commission in 2004. He selected 35 works from 35 different international artists, offering a varied panorama of this new contemporary creation. Thirty-five works in digital mediums were thus acquired, all on CD-ROM. This period is recorded in the catalogue as Documents, edited by Presses du réel in 2007. Ever since, the acquisitions have continued regularly, thus allowing the collection to take form around new artistic practices in progress.
Ten years later, the need to take stock of the collection, to present its 23 new acquisitions, has become evident in order to account for the evolution of the corpus of works, but also to examine the near absence of digital art in contemporary art collections, to examine the act of collecting in the era of the digital and of programmed obsolescence…
For these reasons, this new catalog offers, beyond the records describing these 23 works, two new texts as an introduction. Domenico Quaranta, the curator and art critic, was commissioned to write the first text, “Art numérique: un art contemporain” [Digital Art: a Contemporary Art], which allows us to better understand the place of digital art in the field of contemporary art. A second one, written by Cécile Dazord, curator at the C2RMF, “Conservation and Restoration of Artwork in the Face of Industrial Serial Production: the Paradigm of the Encyclopedist and the Laborer”, analyzes the issues related to the conservation of works of contemporary art with a technological component.