SESSION 4: IT'S NOT A DEAD COLLECTION, IT'S A DYNAMIC DATABASE

NThis presentation surveys Canada’s three largest online video art repositories, all of which encountered severe setbacks in defining, creating, and maintaining an online presence. Of the three, two remain indefinitely defunct, traceable only through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and local files stored at the various organizations. These examples serve as a case study and springboard into discussions about the larger issues that surround the context of online video art archives, nationally and beyond. Reversing the conference theme ‘It’s not a Dead Collection, it’s a Dynamic Database’ this paper is intended as a provocation about the potential and limitations—dynamism or death—of the web within an archival framework.