In 2006, the year it was formed, the IMAI Foundation acquired an extensive collection of video art from the 1970s to the 2000s. Many of these originally analog video artworks were not only present in various video formats and standards but had already been migrated to Digital Betacam tapes and digitized as MPEG2 files.
In the IMAI Foundation’s current project, whose aim is the long-term archiving of as many video artworks as possible, the decision must be made which works to select for the current digitization effort. For this purpose, criteria must be established that take into account, for example, collection-specific emphases, copyright issues, the scope of a work’s distribution, and the physical condition of the existing video carrier. In the case of video artworks, in addition to preserving the audiovisual content one must also consider the prerequisites for future artistic presentations in an exhibition context.
