Dragan Espenschied is a media artist, digital conservator and 8-bit musician living in New York. As an artist, Espenschied focuses on the historicisation of Digital Culture from the perspective of computer users. Together with net art pioneer Olia Lialina, he created a significant body of work about writing a culture-centric history of the networked age. Since 2011, they together have been restoring and analysing the deleted online community GeoCities. Espenschied worked with the transmediale festival’s archive and the Vilem Flusser Archive. Since April 2014, he is leading the Digital Conservation Program at Rhizome. See Dragan’s full bio here.

The Networked art practice after digital preservation project seeks to explore conservation methods in practice as well as philosophies and theories of networked art. We’re delighted that Dragan will participate in our ISEA2020 workshop to discuss the state of the art in net art preservation and web archiving as its available techniques through introducing Rhizome’s free-to-use web archiving platform, Conifer. Workshop participants will be able to register for a Conifer account and try some web archiving in practice in a breakout session.

When Dragan joined Rhizome as a conservator in 2014, one of the complex questions that he faced was how to archive and ensure access to content on Facebook that might be of art historical value. His effort to address this led to a collaboration with then-independent developer Ilya Kreymer on a prototype web archiving tool called Colloq. With the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, the adoption of Ilya’s prototype of Webrecorder and related tools launched as a major software and service development project at Rhizome in 2015.

In June 2020, Rhizome rebranding webrecorder.io—the free-to-use web archiving platform hosted by and developed at Rhizome since 2015—as Conifer, located at conifer.rhizome.org. Find out more here.