Several international experts in digital preservation will be visiting Flinders’ Digital Heritage research group in June 2014. In Australia for the ‘Play It Again‘ project’s upcoming Born Digital and Cultural Heritage conference, to be held in Melbourne, 19-20 June, we will be making the most of their visits to Adelaide.
Dr Anne Laforet (ESADS, France) is visiting as a part of Melanie Swalwell‘s Future Fellowship project, thanks to support from her Faculty. Anne will deliver a public lecture in Adelaide on Mon 23rd June at the State Library of SA. She will also deliver a masterclass, and participate in a seminar on media arts history and preservation (dates TBA).
Anne is an expert in net.art preservation. She was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture to conduct a study in this area in 2002, and worked from 2010 to 2012 on the European research project “Digital Art Conservation” (led by ZKM, Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, in Germany). For this project she developed preservation case studies for the Espace multimédia Gantner in Bourogne (France) while studying its collection, and co-directed the international symposium “Digital Art Conservation: Practical Approaches. Artists, Programmers, Theorists” for the Ecole supérieure des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg (ESADS, France) in 2011. Since 2011, Anne Laforet has been teaching at ESADS. She is currently part of the Locus Sonus audio art laboratory in Bourges and Aix-en-Provence (France). Since 2001, Anne has also worked as a freelance writer on digital art for print and online publications,including Poptronics.fr and Arte.
Another significant visitor is digital games preservationist Andreas Lange, of the Berlin Computerspiele Museum. Andreas is a PI on ‘Play It Again’ and will give a public lecture about his work on the 23rd June, at the State Library of SA.
Andreas Lange is director of the Computer Game Museum in Berlin. He studied Comparative Religions and Dramatics (M.A.) at Freie Universität Berlin. His 1994 graduation work, The Stories of Computer Games – Analysed as Myths, was one of the first academic works, in which computer games are treated as cultural artifacts. Since then, he works in the business of interactive digital entertainment culture as a curator, author, consultant, and expert, among others, for the German age-rating system USK. Since 1996, he is the director of the Computer Game Museum in Berlin, which opened in early 1997 as the world’s first permanent exhibition dedicated solely to interactive digital entertainment culture. On that basis, Lange lectures in academic and other contexts. He has held the positions as the museum’s project manager of the European research project KEEP and speaker of the SIG Emulation of the German competence network for digital preservation. Besides that, he is a member of the Academy of the German Game Developers, the jury of the German Games Award Lara, and the advisory council of the Deutsche Gamestage and the Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur. Lange is co-initator of EFGAMP (European Federation of Game Archives Museums and Preservation Projects).
Maria Garda is a Ph. D. Candidate in the School of Media and Audiovisual Culture at the University of Łódź, Poland. She is a video game researcher interested in the history of media, genre theory and digital media preservation.
Watch this space for more announcements on these events or join the Digital Heritage mailing list to be kept abreast of updates.