This introductory text by John Hanhardt is from the publication Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach, published in 2003 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology.

The physical fragility of film, the changes in broadcast media, the interactive experience of the Internet, the expansion of digital media: a rapidly transforming, mutating  media environment challenges us as we seek to maintain a fundamental intention—preserving the integrity of an artwork. This publication describes one approach to this problem. This publication is not a how-to guide to new media preservation but a collection of perspectives on an emerging paradigm, written by the people who developed it.

The Variable Media Network has its roots in the Guggenheim's Film and Media Arts Program, which sees the histories of film and the media arts as fundamental to understanding the visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. The program's goal is to engage the museum as a critical and intellectual space able to embrace diverse histories of the moving image while responding to new developments within artistic practice globally. The Variable Media Network aims to establish a process and means to address artworks created across a variety of media and materials, to determine protocols and initiatives that will bring a flexible approach to the preservation of a range of creative practices. The variable media paradigm has been designed with extraordinary resourcefulness and intelligence by Jon Ippolito, Associate Curator of Media Arts, whose knowledge of new media, belief in the integrity of the artists, and development of innovative methodologies informs an important contribution to our preservation initiatives here.

It is essential that late 20th-century art as well as new art practices be understood and contextualized through a conversation with artists, giving rise to critical histories that inform and deepen our understanding of our visual culture. The Variable Media Network relies on the sharing of stories and individual experiences told by artists and related participants in the creation, exhibition, and collection of art. For this reason, it was a special pleasure to have master storyteller Bruce Sterling as keynote speaker for "Preserving the Immaterial," our first conference on variable media. Author of The Difference Engine (with William Gibson, 1991), Holy Fire (1996), and numerous other novels, Sterling has created a richly informed speculative fiction that gives us the means to reflect on what we take for granted in our material culture and everyday lives. We are proud to include Bruce's voice in this publication as well as those of numerous experts from the field of media preservation.

For its own part, the Guggenheim Museum has an extraordinary staff of professionals deeply committed to linking issues of preservation to international histories and current art practices, and to the proper maintenance of a vital, expanding, and responsive collection for the present and future exhibition program. I want here to cite Lisa Dennison, Deputy Director and Chief Curator; Nancy Spector, Curator of Contemporary Art; Maria-Christina Villasenor, Associate Curator of Film and Media Arts; Carol Stringari, Senior Conservator, Contemporary Art; Paul Kuranko, Media Arts Specialist; Lynn Underwood, Director of Integrated Information and Management; Ann Butler, former Archivist; and curatorial interns Caroline Aubin and Starr McCaleb. This publication would never have been possible without our 2002 Daniel Langlois Fellow Caitlin Jones, who deftly and tirelessly coordinated the numerous departments and organizations involved in the many initiatives of our Variable Media Network in the past year. The efforts of these staff members, those of their colleagues in the Variable Media Network, and the creative insights of artists help us see this complex history of film and the media arts as tied to the larger visual culture, as well as to the diverse practices and histories of art, as artists fashion intertextual discourses out of a variety of media and materials, challenging the traditional language and conventions of art making.