In 2017, LIMA initiated a research project to generate attention for digital art, and its history, and to encourage museums to acquire such works. Subsequently, the Digital Canon?! project was conceived to open a discussion on, as well as make, a digital art canon of the Netherlands. The project has been carried out by a core group (‘the expert group’) and in collaboration with numerous experts from the field. The core team consisted of Josephine Bosma (researcher and critic), Martijn van Boven (artist and tutor), Annet Dekker (researcher and curator), Sandra Fauconnier (art historian), and Jan Robert Leegte (artist and tutor). LIMA coordinated the project, and Gaby Wijers (director) and Sanneke Huisman (curator) were its supervisors.

The Digital Canon?! project began with no clear framework or rules. Over the course of two years, there was a collective designing of both the methodology and the results. Since its inception, the Digital Canon?! has, therefore, had two priorities: selecting and highlighting the ‘most important and influential digital artworks’ made in the Netherlands and critically reflecting on canonisation. The project’s main task was to bring digital art to the fore. By highlighting specific works, it increased the possibility for them to be seen, experienced, and – ultimately – remembered and preserved. A canon is a tool for remembering, both representing and shaping our collective memory. However, a canon is also an instrument of power and a means for selection. Therefore, we aimed to be critical towards the authoritarian processes that often inform the construction of a canon and to include this criticality from the outset. Can a canon be a form to highlight digital art? Moreover, if so, who selects, and why, and what criteria should they use?

The project aimed to make a different, more open, and inclusive canon – at least from the standpoint of the selection process. We wanted complete transparency regarding everything we were doing, to maintain a critical assessment of the process, and to talk to as many people as possible. At first, each core-group participant selected their five most canonical digital artworks to ascertain whether we could deduce selection criteria, a timespan, and specific terminology from the subsequent choices. Endless meetings about best-of-lists and many debates followed. The group reflected on the terms ‘computational’ and ‘computational aesthetics’, as coined by M. Beatrice Fazi and Matthew Fuller, as broader definitions of the digital. Ultimately, a wider focus on the influence on digital art and culture was preferred, which allowed for the inclusion of artworks that reflect upon mass media/telecommunications and analogue techniques.

A recurring discussion was on whether to include context and if so, how? There was a strong wish to make a canon that would properly represent the entire field; not breaking it down to individual artworks and artists, but rather showing it as a complex network in which technological developments, institutional history, and groups of people play an essential role. Therefore, we attempted to make a longlist that would map the entire field, including technologies, platforms, experts, and institutes. Even though the task of realising a complete longlist turned out to be too extensive – and, therefore, will be done in a follow-up project – there was a concern this would unnecessarily overcomplicate the current remit of the canon. The canon had to be accessible and understandable for everyone and, most importantly, act as a signal that communicates to an institutional field that has not yet fully embraced digital art and its history. Thus the question arose of how to combine these two aspects.

Various experts from the international field were invited to reflect upon, add missing elements to, and again provide feedback on the lists of works and our methodology. The first meet-up with international participants took place at the 2018 transmediale annual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, where Dieter Daniels, who founded Medien Kunst Netz, advised us on how to compile and frame a project of this ambition. Inke Arns suggested naming the project ‘Unknown Pioneers of Contemporary Art’ to more directly address the museum field. During a follow-up event at LIMA, later that year, there was a greater focus on the Dutch context and works we should not overlook. Here, Darko Fitz, author of The Beginning of Digital Arts in the Netherlands (1955–1980), gave critical feedback on the use of the term digital as well as some suggestions of little-known pioneering digital artworks, one of which we included in the final selection.

One of the key lessons has been that if the act of canonisation is problematic, then the canonisation of digital art is even more so, due to the sometimes-incompatible nature and position of digital art with regards to contemporary art and art history. As Axelle Van Wynsberghe points out in her article ‘Manifesto for Canonisation in a Flat World’:

“The digital art field has created its own relatively insular cultural milieu, which functions based on different principles of collection, preservation, exhibition, and contextualisation than that of the traditional art world. From its mailing lists and surf clubs, to its hosting of artist-initiated web-based curatorial projects, it has largely established itself in opposition to long-held notions of ‘hierarchical’ and ‘elitist’ traditional institutions.”

In this respect, digital art displays similarities to the discourse of institutional critique. Digital artists, however, do not merely criticise the institution from an insider position. By using mass media and digital technologies, these works have been born, and seem to function, outside of the institutional framework; this increased after the arrival of the internet, the ‘promised land’ for a more democratic art field. Artists working with digital technologies have not only used and developed these technologies; they have also questioned the function and role of this pivotal issue for both society and the arts. Can works made outside of, and often against, the traditional field be subject to canonisation and, therefore, institutionalised? The Digital Canon?! project has taken into account this supposedly ‘anti-institutional stance’ in the debate on the possibilities of digital art’s canonisation from an art historical perspective.

After many meetings, debates, longlists, and workshops, and testing the collectively formulated selection criteria, we decided to make a list of twenty artworks and show them online via a dedicated website and also to explicitly consider and present it as a catalyst for further debate. Twenty canonical works, made between 1960 and 2000, feature on this website, which includes images, documentation material, moving image, and text.

South-Korean designer Yehwan Song made the website in close collaboration with Jurian Strik. Manique Hendricks, Anne de Jong, Rachel Miles, Margarita Osipian, Mila van der Weide and Axelle Van Wynsberghe researched the selected works. In some cases, it was challenging to find information about a selected work or the work could only be accessed and experienced via documentation material. Such instances increased the sense of urgency to include the works in a canon.

As well as the presentation of these works, which are presented on the website’s ‘Frontside’, there is also a ‘Backside’ detailing the process behind the digital canon’s realisation – the so-called inner workings of the canon. We have divided this segment into four sections: ABOUT (introduction), PROCESS (documentation of all the meetings, an interview, and a manifesto), REFLECTION (reactions from external experts), and LONGLIST. The title of the interview with the expert group, ‘Canonisation as an Activist Act’, is telling because the traditional form of canonisation is used to initiate a dialogue. The list is also a statement, and yet it is intrinsically part of a canon that is never finished and always in flux. Alternative canons can – or perhaps have to – be made. You are invited to take part in this discussion and the further activation of these works. This canon is a galvanising starting point for the institutional field that digital art has so often opposed. Museums in the Netherlands are invited to acquire these and many other digital artworks so that they can be shown and remembered, also for their anti-institutional stance, by future generations.