The Relationship Between the Digital and the Ephemeral Within the Framework of Archiving the Transient

Abstract

Technological innovations have influenced the development of digital media and digital artistic production, while the contemporary tendency toward digital archiving aims to preserve materials and rescue them from oblivion. This is opposed to the aspect of transience and ephemerality in art. This paper explores the seemingly incompatible aspects of ephemerality in works of digital art. It begins by establishing a theoretical framework, defining key concepts, and analyzing ephemerality in digital art through case studies in the form of digital archives in art – specifically, The Archive of Dreams by Croatian artist Kata Mijatović and Pockets Full of Memories by Hungarian artist George Legrady. These digital artworks exemplify the intention to digitally archive content of an ephemeral nature, mostly taken from the realm of the unconscious, the intangible, yet deeply rooted in real life experience. In the aforementioned works, the audience is the creator of the ephemeral material from which the digital artwork evolves.
In the mentioned artworks ephemerality is affirmed in the context of the process-oriented character of digital art, in works created in a relational relationship with the public, in the procedures of remediation of art, and, ultimately, in the very act of archiving the intangible aspects of human memory.