Abstract
“Media Art on Wikipedia” is a collaborative project launched by Amsterdam-based platform for media art LIMA (Living Media Art), conducted in partnership with national and international art collections, national universities, and Wikimedia Nederland. Involving coordination of edit-a-thons and ingest of collection metadata within the structure of Wikidata, the project aims to bridge and mobilize the domain knowledge of media art beyond the institutional silo through engagement with the ethos, procedures and affordances of the Wikimedia ecosystem. This article profiles and situates this attempt within the particular institutional context of media art and the broader turn towards open, participatory, and distributed configuration of public institutions. Comparing infrastructural topologies identified within the discourse of media art by mapping them to tensions between centralized and distributed approaches, this article positions the project as a composite of models blurring their unambiguous theoretical distinction. This analysis serves to investigate ways in which the project responds to the conditions underlying the field’s modes of knowledge production—on one hand the demand for the reimagining of methods of documentation, preservation, and historicization stemming from the specificity of media art; and the systemic precarity of media art’s knowledge infrastructures on the other.
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