On preserving new media

I was recently sent a beautiful site with a ShockWave animation I was still able to retrieve the player, install it, go back to the site and watch it. In 2010 though, will I be able to see net art created with Flash 4? 

What steps are being given to preserve new media?

Screenshot of Michael Mateas' interactive drama 'Façade' (http://www.interactivestory.net/). Façade is in exhibition along with work by the other Grad Text Auto members, at the Krannert Art Museum. The exhibition is curated by Damon Baker and oficially opened during Hastac III.

I was recently sent a beautiful site with a ShockWave animation. I was able to retrieve the player, install it, go back to the site and watch it. In 2010 though, will I be able to see net art created with Flash 4? And what if Michael Mateas' "Façade", the first (only?) interactive drama depicted in this FlickR image, disappears forever?... Arrgh! Horror!

What steps are being given to preserve new media?

This  was the topic of a heated (as in ''animated") debate during the Image Analytics workshop at Hastac III. The debate was suggested by Virginia Kuhn's presentation, pursued after Jodee Stanley's on the Ninth Letter, and later with Susan Noakes' and my own presentation on the Global Middle Ages project. All our talks suggested the importance of preserving new media, though from one talk to the other, the objects to be preserved vary between art and artifact. Robert Baird (CITES, UIUC) made some very insightful comments on the debate as well. I hope he can contribute here.

I would like to focus on the preservation of new media art here, on one hand as a follow-up to my previous posts on Paik's collection now at the SMithsonian and the Blanton's acquisition of one of the earliest examples of conceptual film. On the other hand, I am drawn to that focus by the excellent tour that Damon Baker gave the Hastac group of the exhibition of new media artifacts by the Grand Text Auto artists (and bloggers). Nick Montfort talked about the pieces. During that visit Baker and Montfort discussed the challenges of displaying the art work in a way that draws the public to *interact* with the art. 

The sense of urgency in dealing with new media preservation was probably best translated by Richard Rinehart, who managed the NEA-funded project, 'Archiving the Avant Garde':

"With digital art, there's no room for things to fall between the cracks," [...] "If you don't do something to preserve it within a span of five years, it's not going to survive." (Interview for a 2002 Wired "How to preserve Digital art")

Lev Manovich, whom I hope to attract to this discussion (even if i need to send him 20 emails... so beware, Lev) wrote in the Introduction to the excellent 'New media from Borges to HTML, The New Media Reader'

[...] the logic of the art world and the logic of new media are exact opposites. The First is based the romantic idea of authorship which assumes a single author, the notion of a one-of-a-kind art object, and the control over the distribution of such objects which takes place through a set of exclusive places:galleris, museums, auctions. The second privileges the existence of potentially numerous copies; infinetly many different states of the same work; author-user symbiosis (the user can change the work through interactivity); the collective; collaborative authorship; and network distribution (which bypasses the art system distribution channels)* (In Manovich, Lev.  ?New Media from Borges to HTML? in Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Montfort, Nick. The New Media Reader. MIT Press, 2003.)

This different logic, this Romantic idea versus of a single-author versus an author-user symbiosis can be used to explain the shift paradigm that culture theorists and Art historians see in the preservation of old to new media. Just last week in Yasmin (mailing list on Digital Arts in the Mediterranean Rim) where the topic of discussion was 'Oral traditions in New Media', Roger Malina stressed the idea of oral tradition as fundamentally ('unscored'), and as such, fundamentally different from the socially engaging logic of new media.

Prior to the 21st century, new media artwork was just 'allowed' to enter the museum much to the dismay and critique of those who believe its strength lies in staying as further way from those 4 walls as possible. However, the 2000 Whitney Biennial and the 0101010: Art in Technological Times exhibition at  the SFMOMA arguably pushed 'variable media art' (more on this designation next)  into the museum arena and it seems to be a point of no return.

And the corollary of this institutional embracement of new media (though with many new media artists kicking and screaming) is likely to be the project 'Archiving the Avant Garde: Documenting and Preserving Variable Media Art' , the most important attempt to address the preservation issue in the last decade. The project included the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art  Center, Rhizome.org, the Franklin Furnace Archive and the Cleveland Performance Art Festival and Archive. The group proposed a set of rules to document and preserve what has identified as 'variable media art'. 

Guggenheim's Variable Media Initiative (preservation of performance, installation, conceptual and digital art) put forward four strands or strategies for preservation of digital art: documentation, migration, emulation and re-creation. 

Of these, only documentation familiar to archivists of traditional media. All other three pose unique challenges and opportunities.

I will stop now, hoping that those that inflamed the discussion at Hastac III jump in. 

One last (foot)note if anyone wants to expand on this... While writing specifically on moving image preservation, Howard Besser noted that there were two likely paradigm shifts when going from old to new media preservation: from 'artwork as a whole' to 'asset management', and from 'artifact' to 'disembodied content'. Interesting point, no?

If you like the topic, you may want to read: 

Besser, Howard. Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material? Available at: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Papers/amia-longevity.html

Manovich, Lev.  ?New Media from Borges to HTML? in Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Montfort, Nick. The New Media Reader. MIT Press, 2003. p13-25 Available at: www.manovich.net/DOCS/manovich_new_media.doc

Montfort, Nick and Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Acid-free Bits Recommnedations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature Available at: http://eliterature.org/pad/afb.html

As well as...

on the project 'Archiving the Avant-Garde: Documenting and Preserving Variable Media Art" check  http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about/avantgarde

on the Variable Media Initiative, check http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/conservation/conservation-projects/variable-media