Culture Index exists to catalog cultural institutions online, and highlight the best practices that inspire us.
Launching with a focus on museums and building from there, we are a resource for both research and discovery. Browse information about online communications, and discover ideas with examples of what’s possible for cultural institutions in the digital space.
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Websites as Archives for Non-Collecting Institutions
This article was written by guest contributor Elizaveta Yuzhakova.
A storefront, a visitor’s guide, a catalogue, – website serves multiple purposes as an institution’s primary public-facing point, before visitors even arrive at its physical location. To serve this purpose, a website must be visually appealing, up to date, easy to navigate and adapt to audience behaviors. Maintaining the institution’s visual identity, it should evolve as needed and be stripped of outdated content.
While larger museums have no reason to retain on their websites exhibition announcements from twenty years ago or keep outdated directories of past staff and board members, there are certain types of institutions, where maintaining digital records of previous editions can be invaluable. These institutions manifest in cyclical, time-limited formats – biennials, triennials, and the like.
Biennials do not have permanent collections – instead they encourage the production of new art. Biennials often lack a permanent publicly accessible venue, only having offices for staff. Their archives may not be systematically catalogued by a professional archivist or easily accessible to the public. And not every catalogue can cover the breadth of exhibitions and public programming from each edition.
Some biennials have focused on documentation from the outset. For instance, Performa – working with a particularly ephemeral medium – has always prioritized documentation. Video footage, photographic records, publications, correspondence, and ephemera that reveal the production process throughout Performa’s 20-year history, constitute its vast archive, selections from which were made publicly accessible through a dedicated website in 2023.
For biennials that are less focused on self-preservation, past-edition websites can serve as an immediate solution for providing public access to their history. The dynamic nature of the biennial format – emerging as a major event every two years – imposes certain specifics of institutional structure. Between editions, there are no active manifestations of the project in the public sphere. Staff is often minimal, focused primarily on preparing for the next edition, which involves selecting new curatorial and production teams. During these periods, online presence tends to be limited, with several possible scenarios.
One scenario involves a website of a past edition remaining online until a new edition’s website is developed. Misleading an uninformed viewer, this scenario is only indicative of insufficient staff time/funding/attention to the biennial’s identity in the interim. A solution to this has been to consolidate past-edition websites under a single umbrella site. This approach allows for the automatic preservation of content and visual identities from past editions, functioning as a living archive. However, over time, artifacts of the older web from the earliest editions become obsolete and may no longer function properly.
With the release of html5 and the wide-spread adoption of mobile-friendly web design, the previous model began to feel clunky. As a result, many biennials opted to consolidate content from past editions into a single website bearing their current visual identity. This more streamlined approach represents a curated selection of content, akin to an archive inventory (or representing selections from an actual offline archive).
Given the unique institutional structure of biennials – characterized by limited staff and funding between active editions, which is especially true for smaller non-profits, – it is important to keep several digital preservation principles in mind when approaching websites as digital archives. Always ensure you own your domain name, avoid third-party hosting if it means losing full control, and regularly backup online content to an offline storage.
Biennials, at the cutting edge of the art world, reinvent themselves every two years. Their histories are just as transient as the striking, immediate experiences they offer to visitors. Looking into the future, biennials can capture the state of contemporary art at the moment of its inscription into the latest history of art. This can be done almost effortlessly if a website is designed with an archival purpose among others, serving a publicly accessible digital repository.
Images used in the article
- Yonamine, Empty News, 2017. 4th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art. Photo by Evgeny Litvinov
- Interior of Defunct Ural Instrument-Making Plant. Photo courtesy of 4th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art.