This article examines how presence and participation in contemporary installation art is reconfigured in online documentation. Considering documentation as an essential component of the art experience, it discusses its ramifications from an artistic as well as an institutional perspective. Using internationally renowned installation artist Olafur Eliasson as example, the article focuses on the documentation of his large-scale installation works in the ongoing art project “Your Uncertain Archive” (https://olafureliasson.net/uncertain). This online archive gathers Eliasson’s artistic output in one (virtual) place, using various techniques to capture and expand on the original on-site art experience. Special attention is devoted to the video documentation of the recent exhibition Life (Fondation Beyeler, 2021), which uses subjective shots, masking and optical filters in order to make the claims of the exhibition more accessible to online audiences.

In this text, we consider the documentation of festivals of media arts and the relationship between an expanded sense of documentation and the writing of art histories against traditional institutional contexts and discourses. The essay starts by drawing the context in which festivals of media arts are considered historically, their activities, and how they relationship to media arts informs their position in relation to institutional discourses. Secondly, the text maps out the kinds of records of festivals that exist, considering private and public and internal and external documents which serve as artefacts of exhibitions and programmes. Thirdly, it considers how we might value and historicise media arts prior to their entry into institutional space.

This essay is initially motivated by the need to describe my research process on Péter Forgács’s Looming Fire, a multi-screen installation exhibited at Eye Filmmuseum in 2013. The artwork, based on Eye’s colonial film collection, seems a difficult object in moving image studies: audiovisual components inaccessible to the public, exhibition setup dissimilar from the neutralized movie theater, as well as the scarcity of detailed written reviews. The aim of the essay is thus to inquire what remains after this film-related exhibition: How to conceive an alternative analytical approach when films or videos are no longer autonomous, but part and parcel of an installation in the museum? Moreover, what insight can we gain on found footage filmmaking from a project at the same time artistic and museal?