Dragan Espenschied

👥 1 conference
🎤 2 talks
📅 Years active: 2022 to 2022
📊 Wikidata: Q111053

Biography

Dragan Espenschied is director of the Digital Preservation at Rhizome, a digital arts organization headquartered on the web and in New York, where he designed and built online infrastructure to keep accessible the institution's collection of more than 2000 pieces of net art, software art, and digital art, all based on open source tools.

Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome’s lead Digital Conservator and director of the Digital Preservation program, has been involved in several highly visible and influential projects concerning digital conservation and mass curation.

Since 2011, Espenschied has been restoring and culturally analyzing one terabyte of Geocities data saved by a community effort before its deletion by Yahoo, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2012), and the Photographers' Gallery, London (2013).

From 2012-13, while working at the University of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe, he led on a renowned research project to conceptually and technically integrate the Transmediale Festival's collection of CD-ROM art into the Emulation as a Service framework, developed at the University of Freiburg. In 2013, with the University of Freiburg, Espenschied helped preserve a personal computer from the legacy of media philosopher Vilém Flusser, and in 2016, together with computer scientist Klaus Rechert, developed a technical and conceptual framework for exhibiting legacy software art in gallery spaces.

When starting at Rhizome in 2014, Espenschied commenced to build cloud-based preservation infrastructure unifying web archiving, structured emulation, and linked open data. In Rhizome's 2017-2019 online exhibition program showcasing 100 pieces of online art, Net Art Anthology, Espenschied oversaw and executed preservation efforts on 74 artworks. 2015-2019, Espenschied served as Co-PI on the widely recognized Webrecorder project at Rhizome. 2020 he led on the restoration of TheThing, a 1990's artist BBS system, and the relaunch of Rhizome's ArtBase, a collection of more than 2000 works of born-digital art, as a linked open data system. 2021 he was a founding member of the Wikibase Stakeholder Group.

In his related artistic career, Espenschied focuses on the historicization of digital culture from the perspective of computer users rather than hackers, developers or "inventors", and together with net art pioneer Olia Lialina, has created a significant body of work concerned with how to represent and write a culture-centric history of the networked age. He has a background as a recording and performing musician including an album release on Aphex Twin’s renown label Rephlex, and used to be engaged as a net activist in the context of German and EU regulations.

— biography from FOSDEM 2022
https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/speaker/dragan_espenschied/

Conferences

1 known conferences

👥 FOSDEM 2022 📅 05 Feb 2022

🎤 Knowledge management communities panel
05 Feb 2022 show details

🎤 Sustainable community building with the Wikibase Stakeholder Group
05 Feb 2022 show details

The Wikibase Stakeholder Group is a new initiative testing alternative approaches to governance, decision-making and community-building for open source digital knowledge management. It aims to facilitate collaboration across various institutional and individual partners in order to ensure the continued development and long-term sustainability of Wikibase, a suite of tools for data management within a linked open data environment. Wikibase is currently developed and maintained by Wikimedia Germany, a chapter of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikibase is vital infrastructure for the public linked data project Wikidata, but since its open release in 2015 it has been increasingly taken up in research, cultural and institutional contexts due to its flexible, open and collaborative architecture. Rhizome have been piloting the use of Wikibase within GLAM contexts since its release, and have co-organized the first set of public meetups and events around the emerging Wikibase community and ecosystem of decentralized Wikibase instances. Following the success in bringing the community together through these events Rhizome and a few early adopters started the Wikibase Stakeholder Group at the end of 2020. In this talk, we will present the activities of the Group to date, lessons learned from our experiences in collective decision-making, funding for collaborative development efforts, and negotiating between individual project requirements towards a common roadmap in line with ongoing efforts of the Wikimedia team.

Expected prior knowledge / intended audience: No prior knowledge is required for this talk, except general familiary with open source community contexts and open data management tools. The intended audience is other practitioners actively involved in open source communities, in the governance and organization of communities, and/or the development of tools for linked open data management.

Other people: Lozana Rossenova