Coordinated by Helena Barranha, the Art, Museums and Digital Cultures Cluster was launched via an international conference in April 2021 with the overriding ambition of studying the impact of Information Technologies on museums and the global art system. This anthology of testimonials – now edited in an e-book available on the cluster's website – constitutes a critical overview of the complex relationship between culture and technology. The series of interviews that Umbigo and this cluster is now sharing will clarify, expand and investigate most of the topics already explored in that maiden effort, more precisely the post-digital condition, the challenges for democracies and the potential the digital and virtual represent for museums and the art world. Annet Dekker has been a reference in the field of digital curation and archiving, with several books published on the subject: Documentation as Art (co-edited by Gabriella Giannachi, Routledge, 2022), Curating Digital Art. From Presenting and Collecting Digital Art to Networked Co-Curating (Valiz, 2021), Collecting and Conserving Net Art (Routledge, 2018) Lost and Living [in] Archives. Collectively Shaping New Memories (Valiz, 2017) and Speculative Scenarios, or What Will Happen to Digital Art in the (Near) Future? (Baltan Laboratories/Virtueel Platform, 2013). Dekker was a Researcher in Digital Preservation at Tate, London, core tutor at Piet Zwart Institute, Fellow at Het Nieuwe Instituut, curator at SKOR (Foundation for Art and Public Domain), and programme manager at Virtueel Platform. She currently holds the position of Assitant Professor in Archival and Information Studies and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, as well as Visiting Professor and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University. She currently holds the position of Associate Professor in Archival and Information Studies and Comparative Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. The following interview offers complex but vital answers for those who study an area that has subverted and added new forms of research and creation to contemporary art and its analysis. Dekker talks about his professional career, the challenges of digital curation, while reflecting on the major issues of the moment, notably the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence and the conflicts between the interests of Big Tech and public affairs, highlighting projects of reference and ideas for the future.

José Pardal Pina: What draws you into curating and preserving digital art?

Annet Dekker: I became involved in curating in the late 1990s. At the time, I had studied visual cultural studies, with a major in gender studies and a minor in media psychology, and my interest was in popular culture. While there were few possibilities to work in the cultural sector, I was fortunate enough to co-organise a small research project with a friend of mine who was being commissioned by the Dutch commercial broadcaster Veronica who focused on youth-oriented programming across television and radio. They were eager to explore the next frontier in technology, particularly the emerging internet, but were uncertain about its potential. To prepare for this new phase, they asked us to invite a group of innovative speakers about the topic to teach their staff the state-of-the-art. We approached around ten individuals, which led me to connect with the digital arts scene in the Netherlands, where organizations like V2_ and Waag Society were pioneering in digital art. Over two days, these experts shared their visions for the future, emphasizing the relevance of digital culture. Through this experience, I forged deeper connections with these organisations, and started volunteering in others. I never initially set out to become a curator, nor did I fully understand what the role entailed. At the time, I was more interested in advertising, drawn by my fascination with images, visual culture, and pop culture. I believed that working in advertising agencies would offer a way to influence the world through images. However, I quickly realized that the reality of advertising didn't align with my expectations. While advertising has significant influence, it is heavily constrained by the particular ideas and wishes of clients. This realization led me to the arts, where I discovered greater freedom and potential to make meaningful change. This is when I started to volunteer for several art organisations and festivals. What to me was particularly interesting was the abundance of opportunities and the multiple approaches to curating, particularly of digital art. As well, despite limited funding, there was a cohesive network of individuals eager to collaborate, exchange ideas and share resources across disciplines—be it artists, curators, organizers or technicians. This environment fostered boundless experimentation with technology, presentation methods for art projects and collaborative approaches. Perhaps due to inevitable setbacks, often attributed to funding constraints rather than lack of enthusiasm among participants, experimentation was key, marked by relentless tinkering with technology, art presentation and collaborative methods. Fast-forward ten years, artists started to tell me how their art was disappearing due to all kinds of challenges, and that conventional conservation methods and structures wouldn’t work for their type of art. This is when I decided to focus on preservation – trying to find ways to preserve these often volatile art projects. At the time, several initiatives had been developed around the preservation of time-based media art and digital art, and even though many projects were still connected to organisational ways of doing and thinking, there was a similar type of community that was eager to experiment, share insights and collaborate with others beyond the institutional structures. So, to cut a long story short, my initial attraction in curating and preserving digital art was primarily driven by a type of doing (whether in research or practice) that was driven by experimentation and spurred by a group of individual enthusiasts that would emphasise other perspectives and potentials.

JPP: Social media have become the privileged platforms through which many people have experienced artworks. What do you think will be the future of social media platforms in the art world, especially for museums that made use of them to disseminate their archives and programmes?

AD: I think a lot of things changed in relation to how museums have been dealing with their audience. Whereas a decade ago it was still hard to include audience input or documentation as part of presentations or archival activities, now museums are taking these elements much more seriously. I remember the project The Gift (2000/2008) by conceptual artist Jochen Gerz that was presented at SFMOMA as part of The Art of Participation in 2008, in which visitors could have their portrait taken in the gallery space. After the show they would receive someone else’s portrait; on the condition that they would document the portrait hanging in their home and return this to the museum to become part of their documentation archive. More than ten (!) years in 2019 later the same museum organized snap+share. transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks, this time responding to the popularization of social media platforms. Here they presented and re-performed the ten year earlier project 241543903 (2009) by David Horvitz. With the project, Horvitz reflected on the creation of a meme. Sticking his head in a freezer, and posting the image online with the directions ‘take a photo with your head in a freezer’, within a week the post went viral. He saved the images on a dedicated Tumblr site and a decade later SFMOMA reperforms the action in the museum space (including a fridge) and a (re)new hype takes place. All this goes a long way to say that museums are picking up, but often a decade or so behind the mainstream. Similarly, indeed as you mention, social media platforms increasingly have an influence on art and organisations, and particularly since the pandemic during which most public spaces were closing their doors and moved their tactics online. In an attempt to secure their funding and to hold on to their audience attention they resorted to the web. All of a sudden old and dusty museums became viral hits on TikTok and other online platforms (Dekker, 2021). At the same time, I remember Elliott and Pita from Off Site Project mentioning how they suddenly noticed how their selection were part influenced by the social media metrics (Arreola-Burns and Burns, 2020). Such an awareness is reflected more widely now, particularly after Elon Musk’s take-over of Twitter. With the more recent increasingly political strategies being played out by digital platforms and search engines, there is now a shift away from centralised platforms. While I think it is important for museums to adopt new models of participation and encourage collaborative content strategies that foster critical thinking and meaningful communication, relying on mainstream social media platforms seems a precarious path to take. Not only are these platforms known to encourage addictive behaviour, the recent trends in some AI (deep) fake videos bring back the notion of the ‘Uncanny Valley’ in ways that we’re only yet beginning to comprehend its effects. Moreover, the move by TikTok from relying on a ‘social graph’ of interpersonal connection and communication to an ‘interest graph’, which is derived from data surveillance to populate feeds with commercial contents should be taken seriously (Wei, 2020). If museums follow suit, they are not only perpetuating the notion of museum-as-database (Pepi, 2014), but accelerating it. This basically means giving in to the datafication of commercial platform logics, and neglecting or even ignoring the value of curatorial contexts. In other words, rather than re-establishing conventional modes of working and relations of power and authority, the museum should be less concerned with sharing their contents via these platforms and more with making audiences part of their work(flows). Surprisingly, museums are not visualizing their social media feeds on their own website – which with a simple API could make it ‘safer’ to control. Moreover, in a sense they uphold the divide between the authority over their collections, and how they communicate about it by also excluding the discussions that may take place on social media platforms. Thus, they are not actively linking or inviting their audiences into their world. A quick glance shows that, for instance, SFMOMA—sticking with my earlier example—has 465,000 followers. How many of these would continue to engage if they had to switch to a more dedicated and reliable micro-platform hosted on SFMOMA’s website? While there is a growing trend of people moving toward micro-communities, the next step could be connecting these hyper-local or special-purpose networks—an initiative the cultural sector could lead, or at least they could facilitate the connection of these smaller, specialized networks. This way, they profit from the reach gained through social media platforms and use it for more focused, collaborative, localized, cross-institutional, interactive or crowd-sourced projects, residencies, or other types of engagement that may lead to deeper connections with their audiences; at least, when aligning with users’ wishes.

JPP: How is Artificial Intelligence being used in the processing of archives? Do you find it a potential ally or a misleading, dark force for shaping and writing history?

AD: So, while I’m highly critical around the use of AI, some of which you perhaps can see reflected in the above, recently I did a few experiments together with Gabriella Giannachi around the use of AI in documentation. Clearly, the discussion surrounding the (mis)use of AI is thriving. While acknowledging the environmental, economical, political, technical and psychological challenges posed by AI, and how it’s trained on vast and often biased or at least subjective-build databanks, there are cases where it can be useful. Rather than merely recording events, algorithms are employed to fasten tedious jobs, solve problems or make predictions. Trained on diverse datasets, their task is to quickly generate solutions to specific problems. While this is beneficial for practical tasks like registration or retrieval, it’s also intriguing to consider its role in practices such as documentation. As the emphasis shifts toward rapid retrieval and optimization, documentation is no longer solely focused on the past but is increasingly driven by data to predict potential futures. Drawing on legal scholar Antoinette Rouvroy's insights, this shift suggests that documentation “is not produced about the world anymore, but from the digital world” (Rouvroy, 2013, p. 147, original emphasis). Consequently, documentation is not just future-oriented in the sense of activating existing artworks in museum collections; it has the potential to evolve or mutate into something entirely new. While this may seem futuristic or as you mention misleading, a dark force shaping history, it merely makes more explicit how the past has always been present. In other words, a more generative archive, where records are not only understood in the context in which they are used, but may also generate new versions of information that before was not known or seen. The latter is a small, but not insignificant shift, showing how there is not an end stage in records-management, but instead records are always becoming and are used in different ways by different people – an idea that already gained traction in recordkeeping informatics (McKemmish, 1994).

JPP: Data centres have been seen as huge energy consumers and an environmental hazard. But recently you talked about “digital sustainability” being an “oxymoron” (Dekker, 2020) in what concerns conservation. Could you elaborate on that?

AD: In my exploration of digital preservation methods for digital art, I noticed the immense efforts required to keep even relatively small art projects functional. Methods like migration, emulation, virtualization, and documentation are being implemented to extend the life of digital heritage. However, the emphasis on high-end technical preservation strategies has proven to be both unsustainable and questionable. At the heart of the issue is the preservation approach itself: these methods risk altering the form and content of these projects. Additionally, each software upgrade can further alter the media environment, changing the aesthetics and functionality of the art. This creates a constant need for specialized knowledge and expertise to address new technical challenges, placing an ongoing burden on most organizations. Moreover, the relentless pace of technological advancement comes with a significant environmental cost, as the energy required for digital preservation results in high carbon footprints. Thus, digital preservation not only presents a challenge to organizations but also to the ecological environment. In sum, a tension arises between the need to protect digital heritage for future research, cultural memory, and evidence, and the ongoing requirement to update technical tools and methods for survival. This tension increases the burden on organizational infrastructures and has ecological ramifications, making digital sustainability both a preservation dilemma or, arguably, a paradox. Moving beyond the role of (digital) tools in minimizing physical storage needs, or exploring of biodegradable and renewable materials for archival and preservation practices, I’m instead interested in community-centered models of stewardship that challenge centralized and extractive logics. I’m investigating how notions such as ephemerality, loss, storytelling and collaboration, can position archives and preservation practices as vital agents and methods in the shift towards more sustainable ecosystems of knowledge. My aim is to move towards a more ecological-driven stewardship for future generations that balances memory and preservation. This could mean that archiving and preservation turn more actively into interventionist and activist practice and hence play a critical role in challenging how data and information are disciplined, reproduced, and normalized, while offering imaginaries for how archivists, curators, and users can intervene in the ways they create, use, and share information. In addition to serving as a critique, this could point to a positive and speculative practice, by reconsidering preservation approaches and archival institutions, while exploring or imagining different futures for archiving that allow for the emergence of potentially more equitable forms, genres, and spaces that are open to critical change, ambivalence, and imagination.

JPP: How would you characterize the space-time of online exhibitions? Should we address it as a sort of emulation of the physical space or just consider and develop new conceptual, design, and perceptual tools for the display of, for instance, net art?

AD: In the ongoing exploration of aesthetics and narrative form, space and time are central themes in exhibition design and curating. However, in the context of the web, these concepts take on a slightly different meaning. A website, for instance, can be accessed, located, and experienced from virtually anywhere and at any time. While less constrained by physical architecture, it is still tied to a specific location: a website's physical IP address corresponds to a Unique Resource Locator (URL), a particular type of URI (Universal Resource Identifier), which can only be accessed through a designated protocol, such as http:// or https://. Thus, a website remains dependent on a server's accessibility and the owner’s ability to maintain it—whether by updating software, paying bills, or ensuring uptime. While a website may seem like a site-less or space-less entity, much like a physical gallery, it is nonetheless subject to a host of technical and human constraints. To fully understand how online exhibitions function—how they negotiate distance and time, produce scenography or choreography, subvert space, or create relationships between artworks, audiences, and even audience members—many people still need to gain a deeper understanding of space on the web. The same is true for the concept of time in a digital sense, where the web offers an ideal space to explore alternative understandings of time. Many have proposed the idea of the “detemporality” of Internet time, arguing that the rapid flow of information creates a temporal compression in which time as a process seems to disappear. These observations often portray the web as fluid and continuous, a seamless, uninterrupted flow of data and interactions. However, most real-world web experiences are more volatile—less like a steady stream and more like a wild river that moves at varying speeds, including downtimes, blockages, broken links, and dead ends. In this sense, rather than detemporality, the web embodies temporal discontinuity, or fractured time. Generally, space and time on the web remain underexplored in the context of online exhibitions. Curators often turn to “curatorial platforms” that offer templates mimicking the physical layout of museum galleries or commercial art spaces, rather than investigating the unique potential of digital space and time.

JPP: A little while ago, I read What Makes a Great Exhibition? (2007), edited by Paula Marincola. Although it had interesting ideas and clues regarding the conception and design of exhibitions, it seems to me that, with the rapid development of online exhibitions and digital-native works of art, it quickly became an incomplete compilation of articles. As someone who’s deeply invested in this line of research, I would like to ask you what then makes a great online exhibition or, more broadly, how can we curate digital art on or for the Internet.

AD: This question is difficult to answer because there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. Until recently, museums were primarily seen as spaces for passive spectatorship, with objects displayed in glass cases and paintings hung at eye level, arranged and lit in specific ways. Although this situation is being re-evaluated, as I mentioned earlier in the example of SFMOMA, exhibitions on the web don’t have such a historic standard yet. In 2020, together with curators and researchers Marialaura Ghidini and Gaia Tedone, I worked on The Broken Timeline, a historical timeline of online exhibitions. Initially, we identified around 500 examples, but we ultimately focused on those that highlighted the unique characteristics of the web: its role as a communication medium, its volatility, and its dependence on technical environments and user input. We chose to emphasize exhibitions in which the concept of the ‘networked (co)curatorial’ played a significant role—those that involved a collaboration between the curator and the technical environment, reappropriating or subverting existing digital tools or platforms. Another key aspect we wanted to explore was how exhibitions evolve over time, either through technical means or user participation. For instance, we examined experiments with algorithms, platform-specific features, or interactive co-creation, where alternative forms of participation, space, and time came into play. These included exhibitions featuring generated artworks, temporal narratives, real-time data streams, or webcams that streamed continuously for days or existed for specific durations—resembling performance art. Other exhibitions shift control to the users, offering downloadable ZIP files that transform their desktops into the exhibition space, allowing them to repurpose content, create personal exhibitions, or participate in collaborative co-curation events (such as those in Google Docs). These exhibitions focus on user participation, either by reappropriating or subverting existing digital tools. They are dynamic, evolving over time through the interventions of curators, artists, and users.

JPP: How has digital art and net art been contributing to the expansion of the History of Art?

AD: I think digital art and net art have played a significant role in expanding the History of Art by challenging traditional notions of what art can be, how it can be created, and how it can be experienced. Yet, there has been little rigorous art historical study of museums' (online) engagement with digital art, or how they could improve inclusive connections with global audiences through digital art and online exhibitions on the World Wide Web. Perhaps it is not surprising that museums have not yet fully expanded upon the pioneering examples of digital art or online exhibitions, as numerous challenges exist in constructing a comprehensive historical trajectory for these art forms and curating them online. Early examples—and even some more recent ones—are often stopped functioning, removed or deleted due to software updates or simply vanish in the flow of online data. Additionally, few archival projects are dedicated to net art and web-based exhibitions, and the rapid expansion and commercialization of the web have blurred the lines between what constitutes an exhibition and what does not. Moreover, the enduring emphasis on the ‘digital divide’ between digital art / online exhibitions and more conventional art forms, as well as physical (museum) spaces, further deepens the gap between these realms. This division more than anything complicates efforts to bridge the discourses and leverage their potential intersections.

JPP: 8. Recently, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi wrote in e-flux that “because of instantaneity and virtualization, the relationship between conception and execution has changed so profoundly that the behaviour of those who grew up in the last three decades is more and more inexplicable to psychological science and psychoanalytic therapy.” Before he stressed that there has been “a digital reformatting of the psycho-neurological system” (Berardi, 2025), making all critical thinking and empathic behaviour inoperable. Has this been an issue within this field of investigation? Are we doomed to a short-span experience of art, where the understanding and fruition of art are flash-like phenomena?

AD: I can’t really answer this, as it hasn’t been my primary focus, but it seems like a conventional approach to view new developments, which are often regarded with suspicion. Regarding documentation, as part of the research project Documenting Digital Art, we have been exploring the evolving habits and creation of documentation, particularly beyond the institutional perspective. In doing so, we’ve observed how the diversity of documentation enriches not only art history and preservation but also audience engagement. Of course, as mentioned, there has been a trend toward the 'Instagrammability' of exhibitions and artworks, much like the increasing pressure to perform on social media. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that attention to art has diminished. In fact, one could argue that there is more attention for art than ever before. So, rather than mourning a demise of critical thinking or emphatic behaviour, a more interesting question is, how can – or better when will – museums and the cultural sector as a whole (including their audiences) take back control. Not in an effort to reclaim their institutional authority, but by leveraging the larger audiences they've gained in this era of platformization and recognizing the values these audiences can bring to improve the contextualization of their collections, as well as the work in these places. Social media platforms have thrived off institutional failure, it’s time for institutions to collect the fruits and reform into reliable and equitable stewards of the present.

JPP: How do you see the partnerships between public institutions and tech companies regarding digitization?

AD: Museums are often seen as the “glue of history”, serving as vital spaces for achieving broad art historical recognition. One of the prevailing beliefs is that it is the context or space of the museum that validates a work of art. The role of the museum or institution continues to be seen as an essential filter and gatekeeper; entering the canon, being collected, and being exhibited by a museum is still considered important. At the same time, an increasing number of voices are calling on the tech sector’s responsibility to give back to those who have visualized its fruits. While I think it is worthwhile discussion to have, initiatives like Google Arts & Culture aren’t very promising (Dekker, 2025). In the end, a company will always have other interests at stake that may not necessarily align with the user’s best interest. Others are developing their own algorithmic methods to uncover and preserve old data, with one individual stating that their idea is to "drill ‘Ice Cores’." Yet, many still believe that it is the museum's responsibility to represent both what is happening and what has already occurred, though they emphasize the need for these institutions to adapt. Digital art should be preserved by museums, but this requires a shift in both infrastructure and mindset, which is still largely absent. To meet this challenge, museums must cultivate a mindset that understands the contexts, environments, references, and purposes of digital artworks. Ultimately, this involves an ongoing translation process, where form and technique are just as crucial as concepts and aesthetics.

References: • Arreola-Burns, P. and Burns, E. (2020). ‘Volume, Social Media Metrics in Digital Curation’. • Berardi, F. ‘Bifo’ (2025) New heroes - notes - e-flux, e-flux. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/notes/649956/new-heroes (Accessed: 03-02-2025). • Dekker, A. (2020) Breathing Life into the Living Dead [Conference presentation] The Dead Web – The End, Ludwig Museum, February 2020, Budapest. [Youtube access] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cih0VNT5jxg&t=212s (Accessed: 30-02-2025) • Dekker, A. (2025) "Refiguring Digitization: Experiments in Heritage for Shared Futures." In Alternative Economies of Heritage, edited by Tracy Ireland, Denise Thwaites, Bethaney Turner. New York/London: Routledge, 2025: 124-136. • Dekker, A. (2021) ‘The Art and Care of Online Curating’, in Barranha, H. and Henriques, J. S. (eds.) (2021) Art, Museums and Digital Cultures – Rethinking Change. [E-book] Lisbon: IHA/NOVA FCSH and maat. DOI: 10.34619/hwfg-s9yy • McKemmish, S. (1994) ‘Are Records Ever Actual?’, in McKemmish, S. and Piggott, M. (eds.), The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years. Available at https://doi.org/10.4225/03/57D77D8E72B71 (Accessed: 31-03-2025) • Pepi, M. (2014). ‘Is a Museum a Database?: Institutional Conditions in Net Utopia’, in Journal #60 December 2014 - e-flux. [online] E-flux.com. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/60/61026/is-a-museum-a-database-institutional-conditions-in-net-utopia/. (Accessed: 31-03-2025) • Wei, E. (2020) ‘TikTok and the Sorting Hat’. Remains of the Day, August 04, 2020. Available at https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat (Accessed: 31-03-2025) • Rouvroy, A. (2013) ‘The end(s) of critique: Data behaviourism versus due process.’ in Privacy Due Process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology. Taylor & Francis, pp. 143-167. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203427644