Experimentation and collecting practice: balancing flexible policies and accountability in developing born-digital museum collections

ABSTRACT

This article engages with current approaches to collecting born-digital objects in museums of art and design and reflects on the analysis of two case studies concerned with the respective acquisitions of a virtual reality artwork and a mobile app. The authors point to their non-standard preservation requirements and their unconventional objecthood to advocate for the value of adopting an experimental attitude to collecting. The case studies invite us to reconsider experimentation within the context of sensitive dialogic processes with creators and users who are unfamiliar with the conventions of museum collecting. Hence, the boundaries of experimentations are developed in relation to existing policies, organisational structures and practices, and defined by the stakes of multiple actors. To conclude, the authors argue that collecting institutions should prioritise building capacity and understanding needs and requirements for this emergent type of object, and embrace uncertainty over the imperative of long-term preservation in its fullest sense.

KEYWORDS:

• Born-digital
• museum collections
• collection management
• preservation
• virtual reality
• mobile apps

Acknowledgement

We are indebted to our PI Natalie Kane and Co-I Stephen McConnachie, and our colleague Corinna Gardner, for their constant insight and support. We are grateful to all the interviewees and workshop participants for their generous contribution in the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The two other case studies, not addressed in this article, were chosen to engage with an entirely digital but multipart acquisition (a generative film by collective ZEITGUISED) and to explore legal and privacy issues associated with digital platforms through the speculative case of Instagram.

2 Also a member of the research project team.

3 Experimental and paradigm shifting collection strategies, however, are not new to the V&A and the Design and Digital team in particular. The Rapid Response Collecting programme, led by Corinna Gardner, responds to current events through the immediate acquisition of relevant artifacts and objects. The programme, launched in 2014, has influenced the museum’s overall organisational structures, practices and procedures (Nakajima 2014).

4 These build on a broader set of finding and recommendations outlined in a comprehensive research project report co-authored by the research team (Arrigoni et al. 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the AHRC-grant under the Towards a National Collection scheme.

Notes on contributors

Gabi Arrigoni

Dr Gabi Arrigoni is a Visiting Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She previously held a postdoctoral role at Newcastle University, where she also lectured in the Media, Culture Heritage Department. Her research interests include the process of preserving and remembering the recent past and the heritage of digital culture. She has co-edited the volume European Heritage, Dialogue and Digital Practice for Routledge and a number of articles and book chapters and in the field of digital cultural heritage.

Joel McKim

Dr Joel Mckim is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture and the director of the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology at Birkbeck, University of London. He’s the author of Architecture, Media and Memory: Facing Complexity in Post-9/11 New York (Bloomsbury 2018) and was recently a visiting fellow at the V&A Research institute working on a project entitled ‘A Prehistory of Machine Vision: Exploring the V&A Computer Art Collection’.