Introduction
  Research approach
  General documentation theory
  >Current documentation strategies for installations
  Research results

Video documentation of installations

Requirements for video documentation of installations

Conclusion

Glossary

Literature

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Introduction – Current documentation strategies for installations

Documentation strategies and metadata schemas for installations have been explored in various ways. The following systems are currently in use by partners of the Inside Installation project:
— Museum Collection Information Systems such as The Museum System / TMS.
— Systems to document artist participation, i.e. interviews with artists or assistants, documentation of behaviours such as the Variable Media Questionnaire. The Variable Media Questionnaire is an interactive form linked to a database and designed to assist artists and museum staff in writing variable media guidelines. It is based on the Variable Media Approach, in which an attempt is made to describe the work independently of its media. The questionnaire is not intended to be exhaustive, but is intended to spur questions that must be answered in order to capture artists’ desires about how to translate their work into new mediums once the work’s original medium has expired. In its current interface, the questionnaire prompts questions for each inherent artwork, behaviour that requires preservation.
For more information about the questionnaire look under ‘Tools’ on the Variable Media Network website.
— Process documentation systems like Media Matters. Curators, conservators, registrars and media technical managers from the New Art Trust, MoMA, SFMOMA and Tate, have formed a consortium to establish best practice guidelines for care of time-based media works of art, and in particular the loan process. >>>Tate
— Document oriented documentation system like the Tate and S.M.A.K. system. Conservators from these museums are developing an index (represented by an html or Word document) linked to a hierarchical document structure.
— Checklists for describing the work like the one used by the Restaurierungszentrum Düsseldorf which helps to describe different media.
— Registration models like the one developed by Montevideo (currently LIMA). Since 2002 Montevideo started case-based research about data registration of installations, which has resulted in the development of a model for registration of installations. This model was shaped out of existing models, developed during the project Preservation of Video Art (2000-2003) and the project Object 404 not found.