Documentation

Already during my studies, I started working on documentation projects, first at the Rheinisches Bildarchiv in Cologne, then at the Cologne Museums, working with HIDA MIDAS, one of the first databases developed for documenting art.

At the art history department of the LMU Munich, we were one of the first collaborators within the database project Prometheus. I taught several classes on the theory and practice of documenting art, including a workshop together with the German Artist Nana Petzet.

At the LBI Media.Art.Research, the documentation of Media Art was an important topic, which we pursued in close cooperation with Ars Electronica, Linz.

We organized several conferences on the documentation of new media art and cooperated in the European Project GAMA.

• Survival and Maintenance of Media Based Art (Linz 2007)
• Online Archives of Media Art - Contextualization, Metadata, Translation, re:place, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, 2007)
• Archiving Media Art: Politics and Strategies (Linz, Ars Electronica 2009)
• The scent of information (Linz, 2009)

I presented our activities and research on several conferences, including

• Second Bremen Symposium on Early Digitial Art: Machinic Art, Art History, and Data Base, Bremen, Kunsthalle (2008)
• "Synthetic Times. Media Art China", Peking, National Museum of the Imperial City (2008)
• Cultural Heritage: The role of (digital) Archives, Ars Electronica 80+1 Projekt, Linz (2009)
• 5e Sommet international sur la documentation et la conservation du patrimoine des arts médiatiques, Montreal 2010

The following papers of mine also deal with the topic:

• Classification vs. Diversification. The Value of Taxonomies for New Media Art, in: Peter Gendolla und Jörgen Schäfer (Hg.): Beyond the Screen, Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, Bielefeld 2010, S. 503-520.
  
• Visualising Art History, in: Anna Bentkowska, Trish Cashen und Hazel Gardiner (Hg.): Convergent Practices: New Approaches to Art and Visual Culture, CHArt Conference Proceedings 6, 2003, http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2003/papers/kwastek.html
• Bez. Künstler: Herstellung? Cataloguing as Art, in: Ausstellungskatalog Nana Petzet. System SBF. Sammeln. Bewahren. Forschen, Nürnberg 2003, S. 53-60.