Prof. Ludger Brümmer
At last, a long-cherished dream can now come true: a wide range of films, Media Art and electronic music has been digitised, documented and integrated in the Mediaartbase.de archives. Since August 2008, the ›documenta Archive Kassel‹, the ›European Media Art Festival‹, the ›Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival‹ and the ›Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe ZKM‹ have been collaborating to preserve works of art for the future and to make them accessible to the public. Made possible by the joint project KUR — Programme for the Conservation of Moveable Cultural Assets of the Federal Cultural Foundation, Mediaartbase.de strikes new paths by not only developing a database to present videos, music and metadata, but by making the database available to all interested partners as an open source project. The database is geared towards all archives and institutions of the arts that wish to feed their collections into the new art network with a professional high-capacity database. Mediaartbase.de is in the process of establishing a cross-media memory of art and a search engine for a multitude of institutional collections. The database already contains thousands of works from all kinds of genres; in future, the ZKM will feed its entire Media Art collection into the project, and Tanzplan has already started working with a variant of Mediaartbase.

Professor Ludger Brümmer is Head of ZKM|Institute for Music and Acoustics, Karlsruhe, and responsible for the project mediaartbase.de.