EAI media art archives undergo shiny new makeover

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Tony Martin, The Game Room
Non-profit arts organisation Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) recently announced that their media art archive is undergoing a major advancement in its long-term digital preservation and storage capabilities.

 

Funded by a generous donation from the Ostrovsky Family Fund, the updates will include the infrastructure, software and hardware elements necessary to sort and look after digital information, creating a “world-class digital media archive for bit-level presentation, internal redundancy, and mirrored offsite storage”.

 

The improvements will “ensure the future viability and accessibility of the EAI archive for generations to come”, enabling the near 4,000-strong collection of new and historical video works dating from the 60s to the present day to remain a vital international resource for video and media art.

 

Founded in 1971, EAI’s collection spans the evolution of experimental video and media art, from ground-breaking analogue videotapes to newborn digital works; the “singular, irreplaceable history” it documents includes some of the most iconic media art works as well as some of the rarest of video and performance art pieces.