22 September 2002

Collecting and preserving digital media art works for the next century Richard Rinehart identifies some of the challenges in preserving digital/variable media art, and notes that the artworks and related art activities unsettle the historic notion of museum-as-storehouse-and-shopfront for objects with clearly defined edges. Quoted from his abstract and concluding thoughts: Digital media-based art works immediately raise issues of long-term preservation. As these works are increasingly being collected by museums which have a strong preservation mission, these issues warrant exploration by artists, museums, academics, and information scientists. Such issues have a special urgency because these digital works cannot be allowed to wait for even a few years while solutions are found due to the extremely compressed obsolescence rate and fragile nature of digital media formats. The art community also cannot rely entirely on the computer industry to solve this problem as digital art implies specific problems distinct from many other types of digital information. [...] [I]n creating works which prompt museums to consider classification terms that describe events rather than objects, record structures that allow relationships rather than segregation, emulation as a form of preservation, and the fecund nature of information wanting to impregnate as many organizations as possible, artists may be nudging museums on more levels toward the dynamic rather than static aspects of art. Abby Smith, cited by Rinehart, is particularly telling: When all data are recorded as 0s and 1s, there is, essentially, no object that exists outside the act of retrieval. The demand for access creates the 'object', that is, the act of retrieval precipitates the temporary reassembling of 0s and 1s into a meaningful sequence that can be decoded by software and hardware. See also his Archiving the avant-garde: Documenting and preserving variable media art. Related: The Long Now library projects [via eu-gene list] 6:22:40 PM     comments