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.

The following conversation merges excerpts from an interview via e-mail in January 2002 and from "Preserving the Immaterial: A Conference on Variable Media," which took place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, on March 30-31, 2001. The introductory text by Jon Ippolito describes Mark Napier's Internet artwork, net.flag (2002).

To view the Internet through one of Mark Napier's interfaces is to glimpse a landscape of unlimited visual possibilities. Often premised on the collaboration of an online community, Napier's work is far richer and more complex than the familiar print-inspired pages offered by corporate browsers such as Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer.

For a 2002 Guggenheim commission, Napier created net.flag (2002), an emblem for the Internet as a new territory, one composed by people from various geographical regions and ideologies. Net.flag's design changes constantly, manipulated by users who make selections from menus of familiar flag motifs: stars, fields of color, insignia, and stripes. As viewers add their contributions to the palimpsest, the cumulative identity of the flag changes as one country's insignia or symbols temporarily overlap those of another. Since each element of a flag generally represents a symbol chosen by that country's founders, net.flag also includes a "browse history" feature that permits access to the evolution of its total symbolic value—that is, the percentage of signs indicating "peace," "valor," or "blood" present in the flag at a given moment by its aggregate components.

In the language of the variable media questionnaire, net.flag is interactive, duplicated, encoded, and networked and, thus, offers a handy demonstration of this innovative conservation tool.

The following conversation merges excerpts from an interview via e-mail in January 2002 and from "Preserving the Immaterial: A Conference on Variable Media," which took place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, on March 30-31, 2001.

Jon Ippolito: As part of the commission process for net.flag, you have enthusiastically entered a dialogue about the way your work might be translated into new media once its current technology becomes obsolete. And yet the variable media paradigm runs counter to the medium-specific training artists traditionally receive. I can imagine many artists feeling threatened by the notion that someone might re-create their work after they're dead. Why aren't you threatened by this idea?

Mark Napier: I have worked in software development for 15 years, and during that time I've seen a lot of software come and go: applications, operating systems, languages, and standards. I've written a lot of code that was discarded within a few years, only to be rewritten in a new language for a new platform. In many ways, this is refreshing. Software products can always be improved and changed. There is never a final product. This encourages experimentation and growth.

In music, a song can be played on different instruments. The song is not diminished by this experimentation, and the author may very well benefit from hearing a new approach to a composition. We hear Beethoven symphonies played on a variety of instruments, perhaps slightly altered by the interpretations of the musicians, but they are still recognizable as works by Beethoven.

Software-based artwork is similar. The computer language, operating system, and hardware form an infrastructure that supports the artwork, but they are not the artwork. The artwork is an algorithm, a design built on this infrastructure, which is constantly changing and rapidly aging. To hold onto that technology is to tie us to a sinking ship. We have to be nimble enough to jump to the next boat, and our artwork has to be adaptable enough to do that gracefully.

  

JI: Net.flag is going into the Guggenheim permanent collection. What is the museum's responsibility given that this work is meant to be viewed 24/7 over an Internet connection. Can it be loaned? Could it diverge into different versions? I should preface by saying these are questions that are applicable to any networked artwork. There's a whole spectrum of answers, and I'll lay it out according to the four possible preservation strategies.

To store the work would be—in the metaphoric sense—to prevent simultaneous exhibitions. There is one copy and everyone accesses that one copy, which is possible with the Internet.

To emulate the work might be to take advantage of unequal distribution of Internet access; different sites get different readership. If we loaned net.flag to, say, ZKM (Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe), there might be a different selection of flag components, because perhaps more German people go to that site, or a different kind of person goes to a German Web site. In that case, what do we do about all the flags that people in the New York venue added? For the larger sense of emulation—re-creating the look of the original—we would clean the slate, start with a blank rectangle and let people start adding flags from zero. That would recapitulate the experience of the first person who looked at the New York version. So essentially, there would be two clones, but those clones would look different.

To migrate, or bring the work up to date, might be to give a clone of the project to ZKM, but to keep all of the changes and additions made to the flag in New York up to the point of the loan. The clone inherits all of the flag that's been created to date. The two clones would then diverge, so they are, in a sense, unfaithful to each other after the initial New York set. The New Yorkers continue to add to the original set of New York flags, and the Germans add a different set to the original New York flags.

The final strategy, reinterpretation, is a sort of coming full circle. To reinterpret net.flag might mean using a data loop to create and then force an integrity between two clones. The New York flag gets the German components, just as the German flag gets the New York ones. This odd beast would change simultaneously in different venues, yet give you the necessary redundancy to preserve data against an individual server going down. I don't see one strategy as necessarily better than another. I think it's up to the artist to decide.

MN: That's what I love about the Web—nothing is final. It's very difficult to say what is final, what is the right way, or what is the only way. I have always thought of net.flag as one piece. It doesn't have to be limited physically in terms of synchronizing databases—who knows what's going on in the technology? As Jeff [Rothenberg] said, it's a logical issue. If you create the illusion through software that there's only one work on the Internet, then there is only one work on the Internet.

net.flag creates a parody of what flags try to be. Flags try to fly over one territory and to unify people, when in fact the tendency is for people to diverge and to tear down, change, or negate flags. It's interesting to have one location, one address. The museum contract says that the work is on the Web at a permanent location, easily accessible to people through a bookmark. It's not going to move around, be taken down, or put on mothballs. The work is essentially a public piece that should be visible as long as technically practical. It's location, reached via a certain text address, is a real place— the place to see the flag for the Internet.

I'm not completely opposed to people playing the piece differently. It might be interesting to see what happens if you stage it in Germany with a blank slate. As long as it's understood as another iteration of the piece, in effect, a different performance. The piece has a performative nature. The original net.flag has one timeline to it  that could go on for years. If you want to diverge from that and create a sort of subculture, it needs to be understood as another "performance," with its own history and timeline. I tend to leave things fairly open. I like the idea of playing and using the piece, and I would like seeing the results as long as I have mine [laughs], which is the original.

JI: How about the geopolitical variability of the piece. The flags aren't universal platonic symbols. Nations are born, die, and change their flags. Have you thought about emulation or migration when this work might need to be reprogrammed, keeping the original selection of flags, versus say, deleting obsolete and adding new flags?

MN: At what point is the work alive? At what point are we replicating something that's passed? For the work to be alive means that the flags that are in it are up to date. This implies reinterpretation; at some point, the piece would have to be regenerated. Working on the assumption that we have some record of the piece, either a functioning interface or a video of a functioning interface, perhaps a video showing a timeline of people responding to the piece, we have enough information to give to a programmer of the future to replicate this piece in accordance to the existing technology of the current Web and programming languages with the current flags of the current countries.