transmediale has been accepted into DCA (Digitising Contemporary Art), a project funded by the European Commission , comprising 25 partners from 10 EU member states and 2 associated countries, Croatia and Iceland. The goal is to initiate a significant increase in the presence of contemporary art in the online database Europeana, the single access point to Europe’s cultural heritage. Over 30 months 21 museums and art institutions will digitise approximately 27,000 contemporary artworks and 2,000 contextual documents, making them available through the Europeana portal.

With the co-funding of the European Commission under the CIP-ICT PSP programme and the commitment of the 25 partners, the DCA project aims to create high-quality digital reproductions and assure the long-term preservation of and online access to such reproductions and their data. To support similar future digitisation projects, it will also publish guidelines and documentation on best practices regarding the digitisation of contemporary art.

transmediale will digitise important works from its 25 year long history and use the DCA project as a platform for building and disseminating its online archive.

DCA is coordinated by PACKED vzw, a Brussels-based organisation that, since its oundation in 2005, has grown from a platform organisation for the archiving and preservation of audiovisual arts into a centre of expertise for digital cultural heritage.

The museums and art institutions are:

Austria: Ars Electronica (Linz)
Belgium: argos – centre for art and media (Brussels), MAC’s – Museum of Contemporary Art of the French Community of Belgium (Grand-Hornu), Mu.ZEE – Collection of the province of West Flanders and the City of Ostend (Ostend), Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium (Brussels)
Croatia: MMSU – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (Rijeka)
Germany: EMAF – European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), HfG – Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe), transmediale (Berlin)
Greece: Frissiras Museum (Athens), MMCA – Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), National Gallery-Alexandros Soutzos Museum (Athens)
Iceland: National Gallery of Iceland (Reykjavik), RAM – Reykjavík Art Museum (Reykjavik)
Latvia: Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga)
Netherlands: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam), NIMk – Netherlands Institute for Media Art (Amsterdam)
Poland: WRO Art Center (Wroclaw)
Portugal: Fundação de Serralves (Porto)
Slovenia: MG – Moderna Galerija (Ljubljana)

Spain: Antoni Tapiès Foundation (Barcelona)

The technical partners are:

NTUA – National Technical University of Athens (Athens, Greece)
Multimedia Lab Ghent University – IBBT Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology (Ghent, Belgium)

Ubitech – Ubiquitous Intelligent Technical Solutions (Athens, Greece)

DCA is co-funded by the CIP-ICT Policy Support Programme of the European Union

This text reflects only the author’s views and that the Union is not liable for any use that might be made of information contained therein.