Short bio
Dragan Espenschied is Preservation Director at Rhizome, stewarding ArtBase, an archive of more than 2,200 pieces of digital art. With a background in net activism, net art, and electronic music, Espenschied’s work as a conservator focuses on infrastructure and field-wide action concerning web archiving, emulation, linked open data, and open-source software.
Long bio
Dragan Espenschied (*1975, Munich) has lead Rhizome’s Preservation program since 2014, and has been involved in several highly visible and influential digital art and culture conservation, preservation, and mass curation projects.
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 2012–2013, 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, at the time 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, established a technical and conceptual framework for exhibiting legacy software art in gallery spaces, still in use today.
When starting at the digital arts organization Rhizome in 2014, Espenschied began to build 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. In 2020, he led on the restoration of TheThing, a 1990’s artist BBS system, and the relaunch of Rhizome’s ArtBase, an archive of more than 2,200 works of born-digital art, as a linked open data system. In 2021, he was a founding member of the Wikibase Stakeholder Group.
2025 saw the release of a years-long effort to restore the working laptop of late painter Michel Majerus, supported by the Michel Majerus Estate and guided by long-term collaborator Cory Arcangel.
Since 2025, Espenschied has taught Foundations of Software Conservation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
In his function at Rhizome and independently, Espenschied consulted and directly worked with leading museums and memory institutions, including Belvedere 21, Espace Multimédia Gantner, HEK, LI-MA, Schirn, Tate Modern, Vienna Museum of Technology, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, and ZKM.
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 renowned label Rephlex, and in the early 2000’s was engaged as a net activist in the context of German and EU internet regulation.