Media Art Archives as Data: Distribution of Artworks in Two Major Archives

This paper examines media art archives as data sources for cultural analytics, an interdisciplinary field that applies computational methods to the study of cultural heritage. Although cultural event data is increasingly used to analyze artistic production and circulation, media art collections are often poorly suited for large-scale analysis due to metadata gaps, inconsistent indexing practices, and uneven representativeness. We present a comparative cultural analytics study of two long-term media art archives: the File Festival Archive in São Paulo, Brazil, and the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Drawing on concepts from corpus linguistics—representativeness and balance—we analyze how media art forms, geographies, and categories gain visibility through institutional documentation. Focusing on artworks accessible via online platforms, we identify patterns and biases introduced by selection, digitization, and publication practices. We argue that quantitative frequency analysis must be complemented by qualitative approaches when using media art archives as data.