This text 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.

This text by Jessica Ludwig from Franklin Furnace Archive addresses the challenges of documenting and preserving performance art, and the subsequent challenges in preserving and accessing the documentation.

Franklin Furnace, whose stated mission is to make the world safe for avant-garde art, might now also read, Franklin Furnace, on a mission to preserve what no other organization would preserve. That's kind of funny, but accurate. Franklin Furnace Archive comprises 26 years of papers, press releases, videotapes, ephemera, photographic documentation, and, more recently, digital art. Although the archive began years before digital technologies were ubiquitous in arts organizations, the most fragile art arrived with the digital revolution. Its arrival happened to coincide with another urgent preservation priority: the oldest of the videotape documentation from the 1970s, sometimes the only records of these works of avant-garde art.
 
Perpetually the most overwhelming obstacle for a not-for-profit arts organization is funding; the next obstacle is dedicated staff time. These two factors have prohibited much archival work from happening before now and have suddenly propelled new and ambitious archival projects to finally begin. It is our goal to preserve every video-tape, slide, announcement, calendar, and phone message in a digital, searchable, online archive, with supplemental originals tethered to the paper files. We have only just begun working toward this goal. Open-reel 34-inch videotapes from the 1970s have little time before disintegration or demagnetization renders the tapes unplayable.

Our first step has been to restore these tapes and to continue the preservation process with funding help from Video Data Bank. Duplication is the second phase of our archival process. We're systematically cataloguing and creating a database for over 600 videotapes and then dubbing them onto MiniDV. Is MiniDV the ultimate solution? No. It's an interim solution, a compressed digital format, but one that allows limitless duplication without generation or analogue loss over time. This solution fits into our extremely limited budget, and can be done in house with a high-end VCR, a quality MiniDV camera, and loads of precision, intern assistance.

Live events, a part of our programming, ended about five years ago when Franklin Furnace sold its loft space and went virtual. Since that time, we've been presenting live art on the Internet. This live art began strictly as netcasts, using the RealPlayer plug-in, designed for viewing with a dial-up modem. Over the past three years, this technology has outdone itself, and we reflect this progression by offering artists as much of the technological spectrum as possible. The diversity of works include encapsulated, streaming files, complete Websites, animations, Net art, and avatar performances online. Works that do not rely on a networked environment can be archived more easily. Projects of streaming media, HTML, Flash, or other stand-aloneapplications are preserved on a CD with necessary viewing software for a Macor a PCplatform (our limitations), "read me" files on the CD and in hard copy with descriptions of the project, how to operate it, and what's required.

Also contained on the CD and in the paper files are support materials for these projects, hopefully mirroring the abundance of easily identifiable ephemera from the first 20 years of Franklin Furnace's history. The more knotty preservation issues become clear when the Internet is used as the performer's body. Without the Internet, or the use of Internet space, these works fall listless and unrecognizable. Our first residency collaboration with Parsons School of Design describes these pitfalls well.

In January 2000, while in residence at Parsons, Jack Waters began work on an interactive gaming project, Superschmoozio: The Game of the International Art Market. Superschmoozio replicates the aggressive drive it takes to climb the ranks of a high-profile, top-dollar art career from the perspective of a professional artist. Waters's original idea was to create a fully interactive game with limitless preprogrammed actions and responses. This programming feat was unattainable under the economic scope of Franklin Furnace's residency program, but Superschmoozio was created as an online game, performed by avatars in a graphical chatroom. Waters worked with Desktop Theater's creators Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis to create unique performance environments in The Palace (an online graphical chat software).

Although this performance environment worked wonders for Waters's live event, archiving this work was much more difficult. The nature of this work now closely reflected that of 1970s performance art, in that once captured it lost important aspects unique to live performance, such as chance and interactivity. Waters's solution is to capture QuickTime videos of real online performances by taking a real-time, moving image of the performer's desktop and accompanying text files of the chats (transcriptions of the written or spoken dialogue). These files were then archived on CD (which must be migrated, like the MiniDV, every 5 to 10 years) with the software to run the game on both Mac and PC platforms.

Is this an ideal solution? Again, no, but it is a better solution than we had in the 1980s—preserving performance in-house on VHS, perhaps sacrificing some of the quality a Beta would afford. But had we waited for a perfect solution in keeping with our budget, we might have missed the opportunity to acquire the breadth of works we now have on VHS tapes. As for the digital works, we foresee future migration and compatibility issues. A large portion of the Franklin Furnace program has become not just the details leading up to the creation of artworks but also the preservation steps that follow in their wake.

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