The ZKM Digital Art Collection
Morgan Stricot and Beatrice Zaidenbery

Summary

Morgan Stricot and Beatrice Zaidenberg outline the ZKM Centre for Art and Media's pioneering role in collecting and preserving digital art, explaining how its holdings of roughly one thousand digital works, including around two hundred software-based pieces, demand constant curatorial and conservation attention. Stricot surveys landmark works from the collection, spanning laserdisc installations, SGI-based virtual reality, body-tracking interfaces and biological art, while noting ZKM's commitment to redressing the historical under-representation of women artists. Zaidenberg then discusses recent exhibitions such as Biomedia, The Beauty of Early Life and Peter Weibel's final project, Renaissance 3.0, which bring living organisms, robotics and scientific collaboration into the gallery and stretch conventional museum practice. Stricot details the institution's proactive acquisition workflow, gathering source code, hardware specifications, spare parts and artist know-how to future-proof complex works, and illustrates the challenges through case studies including Interactive Plant Growing, Empathy Swarm and A.rot. She emphasises that exhibition itself is a form of preventive conservation, since dormant technological systems often deteriorate beyond recovery. Throughout the conversation, the speakers stress collaboration across conservation, computer science, engineering and artistic communities, and acknowledge that questions of authenticity, migration and obsolescence remain central to the long-term stewardship of born-digital and bio-digital artworks.

Generated by AI using kimi-k2.7-code (3^rd September 2026).