The ZKM Digital Art Collection
Morgan Stricot and Beatrice Zaidenbery
Summary
In this Computer Arts Society talk, Morgan Stricot and Beatrice Zaidenbery from ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe outline the museum’s digital art collection and the challenges of conserving and exhibiting software-based works. Stricot explains that ZKM holds around 12,000 works, including roughly 1,000 digital pieces and about 200 software-based artworks, which demand disproportionate conservation resources. She highlights key works from the 1990s onward—such as laserdisc-driven interactive installations, SGI-based virtual environments, touch- and body-tracking pieces, and speech-recognition works—showing how artists have repurposed consumer and specialist technologies. She also notes efforts to improve the representation of women artists through recent acquisitions and restoration loans. Zaidenbery then introduces the curatorial perspective, describing how recent exhibitions, including *BioMedia* and the late Peter Weibel’s *Renaissance 3.0*, shape the selection and presentation of artworks. Together, the speakers demonstrate how preservation concerns influence ZKM’s collection concept, research projects and international outreach, and they stress the continuous maintenance required to keep complex digital installations accessible in a rapidly changing technological environment.
This AI summary was generated by kimi-k2.7-code (13th August 2026).