Toward an extended metadata standard for digital art
| Date | 13 December 2023 |
| Pages | 469-486 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2023-0126 |
| Published date | 13 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Sofia Martynovich |
Toward an extended metadata
standard for digital art
Sofia Martynovich
School of Information, Pratt Institute, New York, New York, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The interpretation of any emerging form or period in art history was never a trivial task. However,
in the case of digital art, technology, becoming an integral part, multiplied the complexity of describing,
systematizing and evaluating it. This article investigates the most common metadata standards for the
documentation of art as a broad category and suggests possible next steps toward an extended metadata
standard for digital art.
Design/methodology/approach –Describing several tec hno-cultural phenome na formed in the last
decade, manifesting t he extendibility of di gital art (its ability t o be easily extended acro ss multiple
modalities), the arti cle, at first, points to the lo ng overdue need to re-eval uate the standards around it . Then it
suggests a deeper analy sis through a comparat ive study. In the scope o f the study three artwork s, The
Arnolfini Portrait (Jan van Eyck), an iconic example of the early Renaissance, The World’sFirst
Collaborative Sente nce (Douglas Davis), a classic exa mple of early Internet art and Fake It T ill You Make It
(Maya Man), a prominent example of the blockch ain art, are examined following the s tructure of the VRA
Core 4.0 standard.
Findings –The comparative study demonstrates that digital art is more multi-semantic than traditional
physical art, and requires new taxonomies as well as approaches for data acquisition.
Originality/value –Acknowledging that digital art simply has not yet evolved to the stage of being
systematically collected by cultural institutions for documentation, curation and preservation, but
otherwise, in the past few years, it has been at the front-center of social, economic and technological trends,
the article suggests looking for hints on the future-proof extended metadata standard in some of those
trends.
Keywords Metadata standard, Digital art documentation, Digital art preservation, Digital art taxonomy,
Platforms for digital art, VRA core
Paper type Article
1. Introduction
A medium for endless experimentation, digital art constantly sets new challenges in front of
those who try to fit it into some frame of reference: collectors, dealers, subject matter experts
and the general public. While the interpretation of any emerging form or period in art history
was never undemanding, technology, becoming an integral part of digital art, multiplies the
complexity of describing, systematizing and evaluating it. Consider these three examples,
which belong to different periods of art history, yet united by the controversy around their
classification.
In 1962, Ray Johnson founded a community of artists –the New York Correspondence
School. A particular visual language that has been combining text with scribbled illustrations
Johnson and other members of the School used in their letters to each other, gradually evolved
into the corpus of “mail art”culminating with the exhibition at The Whitney Museum of
American Art in 1970. Much later, hinting at a blend of milieu and creative content aspects,
the New York Correspondence School was referred to as an early example of a social media
network (Keats, 2022).
In 1994, Douglas Davis released The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, an online
webpage with an input field, that any Internet user could type into, contributing to the
never-ending sentence –an ancestor of a modern social media feed. A year later the web
instance and computer program behind The World’s First Collaborative Sentence were
Extended
metadata
standard for
digital art
469
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 5 July 2023
Revised 8 October 2023
Accepted 15 October 2023
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 80 No. 2, 2024
pp. 469-486
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-07-2023-0126
donated to the Whitney Museum and since then remained to be a part of the museum’s
new media art collection.
In 2022, Maya Man, a generative artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the
Internet, created an algorithm generating motivational phrases exposing fake positivity
proliferating through social media (all texts were sourced from Instagram). Titled “Fake It
Till You Make It”, the series was released as a collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Art
Blocks, a curated platform trading digital art (Man, 2022).
Why emphasize these three examples? Especially when the first one has nothing to do
with the subject of this article –digital art, an arena for much more complex and
unconventional stories. On the common ground of the same topic (social networks),
specifically these three examples represent well the scale of technological shift and the
significance of technology in the constitution and perception of an artwork. The role of
technology, from non-existent in the case of the New York Correspondence School, shifts to
fundamental in the case of The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, defining the creation
process and the form of art display and finally, in the case of Fake It Till You Make It –to
transformational –showing how digital footprint, initially left on the Internet without any
artistic intent, could now be transformed into art. The perception changes as well. The public,
generally having been dismissive of unconventional forms of art, now gives more attention to
it. It seems that it took us longer to accept physical ephemera, such as letters, as art, than a
piece of digital code.
This short discourse is a mere attempt to echo the profound research this article refers
to in the following chapters: technology has reframed the boundaries of art. To an extent
where, potentially, all three artworks described above could become parts of one themed
exhibition. Let us call it, for instance, “Mutation of Social Networking into Art”.Now,let
us imagine ourselves being curators of this multimedia collection, or archivists cataloging
it in an asset management system. Besides the theme, it is not so easy to find common
ground.
The complexity of processing media art collections is covered in the scientific literature
from both the archivist perspective (Saba, 2013) and under the umbrella of so-called “digital
forensics”(Dietrich and Adelstein, 2015)or“media archae ology”(Strauven, 2013).However,
the ways to scope, categorize and describe digital art in exhibition catalogs, museum
inventories and artist websites still vary from extensive texts to generic descriptors, like
mixed media. Long-time new media art theorist, Margaret Boden came up with a
classification based on the nature of artist-technology-audience interaction. She suggested
14 types of art: electronic art, computer art, digital art, computer-aided art, generative art,
computer-gener ated art, evolutionary art, robo tics art, Intern et (or net) art, int eractive art,
computer-based interactive art, virtual reality art, live-coding art and 3D-printed art (Boden
and Edmonds, 2019). A few years later, this classification is still relevant at most, however,
needs an update. The rapidly changing technological landscape constantly interrogates the
ontology of digital art, introducing new tools and breeding new aesthetic styles. Art
creation and ownership models are changing dynamics from mono to collective. By
embedding these and other socio-technological aspects into the discourse, this research
investigates the current state of industry and new demands from the perspective of art
documentation.
2. Motives for re-evaluating metadata standards for digital art
Digital art emerged in the early days of computing and since then evolved through every
new generation of technology (Franco, 2019), however, the technological landscape of the
last couple of decades, including the blockchain, open source frameworks and virtual
reality, imposes new challenges. Looking for lessons learned in the history of critical
JD
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