Welcome to the Future!

Born-Digital Collection, Museum of the Future, Cultural Heritage

The fourth theme explored by Welcome to the Future! is Born-Digital Collection, Museum of the Future, Cultural Heritage.

CD-ROM and floppy art is an emblematic example of the preservation issues of born-digital content. Playing these 20-years-old digital relics on contemporary machines is nearly impossible, and today's software-based art will run into the same issues within the next 5 to 10 years. Without new preservation initiatives, born-digital art (and other content) will soon be lost for future generations. To participate in this effort, iMAL is initiating the Resurrection Lab project in collaboration with the bwFLA team of University of Freiburg.

During the exhibition, we present a prototype of an easily accessible digital collection of software-based artworks, mostly some of the cd-roms and floppies from Welcome to the Future!. These are installed on a local server in iMAL office, running through emulation technologies and directly playable on client computers in a web browser (here Chrome). It is a prototype of digital collection for a new type of museum proposing access to born-digtial artworks, without the need of the original hardwares, and easily extensible and maintainable.

Visit the Resurrection Lab