The Summit on New Media Art Archiving series has served as a platform and communication channel for stakeholders in new media art archiving, aiming to facilitate critical discourse and collaboration. The development of the
Summit series relies on support from various parties, especially a dedicated Summit Team.

This panel discusses research conducted as part of the pro-ject “Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a method and a national collection”, which was funded as a Linkage Project by the Australian Research Council. The s project is a partnership between academics and significant Australian collecting organisations. The aim is to develop solutions for the challenges of preserving historic digital media artworks, stored on obsolete media that require legacy computer environments to access. The panel features collaborators from within the museum, academia and practicing artists. They will discuss the challenges facing the preservation of digital media arts, touch on the collective benefits of the project’s partnership across the various institutions and reflect on the importance of access and display.

This paper discusses a novel approach to media art preservation led by Australian artist-archivist group [artist group], using a case study of expanded cinema. Works of 1970s expanded cinema (which combine celluloid film projection with live performance) are typical of the inherent “lossiness” of much 20th and 21st century media art. While offering richly embodied experiences in their moment of enactment, expanded cinema’s ephemerality means it risks falling out of circulation and thus becoming unavailable for future experience. [Artist group], over the past 20 years, has evolved a methodology for preserving works of expanded cinema, featuring three overlapping approaches. First, intergenerational transfer is attempted: younger artists learn about the work from its originators, and produce live re-enactments. Then a users manual is assembled, encoding the artwork as a set of instructions to make it available for future generations of performers and audiences. Thirdly, the archived material from phases one and two is stored on synthetic DNA, with a view to transmission into the deep future (perhaps 1000 years). While the first two phases are urgent, preventing the work’s immediate extinction, the third phase is speculative, broadening the enquiry to explore the question of cultural heritage across much longer timeframes.

Working to configure contemporary visualities as a way of under-standing our realities must be done by paying attention to all of them, as they weave our view of the world. What has happened in the Latin American context in recent decades in the artistic practices of media art is central to all of this, and building archives with all that has been generated - since the archive is memory - is essential to break down the hegemonic discourses that shape an unbalanced and unsustainable world.
The present investigation gathers a synthetic retrospective of these realities and configuration of visualities and contributes the pro-cesses that have marked the creation of the archive of the Festival Internacional de la Imagen, the most relevant and traditional in Latin America, posing archival challenges of a visuality in conflict.