Digital narratives at the International Museum of Electrography of Cuenca. A case study: Sotos, an interactive multimedia creation from Fred Adam

At the beginning of the decade of the 90’s of the last century, through the commercialisation of the first infographic programs to produce digital art, the first creative proposals that renew classic narrative forms were developed. The International Museum of Electrography of Cuenca, through its artists-in-residence program and its openness to new proposals, welcomed during this historical era of Media Art artists from all over the world who experimented with these new media. One of the first to visit the MIDE was Fred Adam, a French artist and still a student at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Nantes, who carried out during his stay countless research projects in this creative field. One of the ones that had the greatest repercussion was the creation of digital narratives in interactive multimedia.

Unfortunately, even today, almost thirty years later, these pioneering creations of digital art not only do not have their own historiographical account that recognises their value and contextualizes them among the artistic practices of the period between centuries, but, due to the obsolescence of the technology with which they were created, are no longer accessible. This work seeks to recognise the value of some of these pioneering works, building and telling their story while trying to recover, preserve and update their languages to make them accessible again. Only through this institutional and personal commitment to history can we recover, divulge and give access to the immense artistic heritage that generated and continues to generate the art that uses or has the new media as a reference. The present work develops this investigation under the new discipline called Media Art Histories, which uses Media Archeology as one of its methodological tools of normativization.