The physical archive of the “digitale Klasse”—accumulated over the 30 years of Joachim Sauter’s professorship at the HdK/UdK Berlin—constitutes a contemporary representation of the development of the still-young field of “new media.”Preserving and processing this material in order to make it accessible to a wider professional audience should inherently have been in the interest of the UdK Berlin. However, since this did not happen, we took on this task ourselves, ensuring that the works would not fall into oblivion.

The archive itself can be understood as a semi-sculptural object, containing a cross-section of texts, documentations, pioneering digital consumer products, and prototypical devices. At the time of their creation, these works could be regarded as enclaves of a then-future that has since become part of our everyday engagement with the digital.A significant portion of the archive consists of student semester and final projects developed over the decades—many of which later led to professorships or recognition as established artists. Early traces of these careers can already be found here, alongside works that often anticipated new approaches to the digital, critically examined developments, or hacked together novel ideas—thereby shaping public discourse around the digital practices and understandings that define our present moment.

The inclusion of extensive documents related to Art+Com, Joachim Sauter’s studio, further illustrates the lived realities of the “Digital Class.” A clear boundary between the “Digital Class” and Art+Com could often not be drawn, as their respective developments influenced one another in a reciprocal manner. These overlaps should be made visible—as the archive does—rather than negated.Joachim always placed great emphasis on documenting the work of his students, which ultimately led to the creation of this archive. He himself was unable to carry out the processing and publication due to his sudden passing. This became the starting point of the project digitaleklasse.net, which set out to continue this endeavor, beginning with a metadata indexing and resulting in the dataset that now forms its foundation.

Based on the dataset collected from the archive of the former “digitale klasse” of Joachim Sauter at UdK, a web-based interactive data visualization was created. The aim was not only to highlight context-based data networks but also to reveal the interconnections between the metadata of the individual entries. It includes more than 1,000 records of projects, artifacts, and publications spanning nearly 30 years of the “Digitale Klasse.”The current state of metadata indexing has been made available as open source and is expected to be published as an independent, open, interactive 3D web-based data visualization by the end of 2025. It is powered by a custom-built engine based ontop of P5.js.