blackaeonium (a keeping-place)
The Blackaeonium project explores the concept of keeping and loss in the preservation of digital media objects. It explores how best to keep the content of these objects active, accessible and manageable for the (new) media artist both in the short term for use, reuse and manipulation, and in the long term as an archival resource.
If we do accept that over time and space we will lose some of our digital media objects - that they become inaccessible due to media obsolescence, corruption, or just physical misplacement, how best can we as creative individuals or small groups of artists and practitioners keep our content and minimize the loss of content within these objects?
The Blackaeonium project is an online, database-driven artwork and system that is both a keeping-place for digital media content, and a workspace or playground for developing new and recombinant content. The creation of this system has been informed by current new media theory and the continuum model being used by archival communities to allow preservation and access to records and artefacts in both the short and long term - across space and time. The system uses web 2.0 technologies common amongst systems such as blogs, forums, and tagging systems but also contains structural elements that are informed by international standards for archival description. The website contains many digital objects that are artworks in themselves, but together form and reform recombinant artworks.