Collecting, Documenting, and Exhibiting the Histories of Digital Art: A V&A Perspective

Abstract

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is the UK’s national museum of art and design. In its early years as the South Kensington Museum, the institution was involved with various initiatives that bridged art and science. The modern V&A acquired its first computer-generated images as long ago as 1969. Following the acquisition of the archives of the Computer Arts Society (CAS) and the Patric Prince Collection in the mid-2000s, the Museum now holds the UK’s national collection of early digital art. The V&A’s computational art collection includes some 2,000 prints, drawings, photographs and born-digital works, created from the 1960s to the present day (Dodds and Beddard 2010). Pioneering computer artists include Georg Nees, Frieder Nake, A. Michael Noll, Vera Molnár, Manfred Mohr, Colette and Charles Bangert, Harold Cohen and Paul Brown, who were followed by Roman Verostko, Mark Wilson, Barbara Nessim, William Latham and others. The Museum also holds recent born-digital artworks by artists such as Casey Reas, Aaron Koblin, Daniel Brown and Andy Lomas. V&A exhibitions and displays include Decode and Digital Pioneers (both 2009/10), plus Chance and Control: Art in the Age of Computers (2018). This chapter outlines some of the issues involved in acquiring, maintaining, documenting and exhibiting a diverse range of physical and digital artworks created with code.