thoughtmesh
thoughtmesh
what's this ?
what's this ?
excerpts here
excerpts out
peer review
Click on a tag above to see relevant excerpts from this site.
Click on a tag above to see relevant excerpts from other articles in the mesh.
Search this article for any word:

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. 

Williams' text outlines the preservation and access issues facing Rhizome.org's web-based archive of new media art, ArtBase and an artwork by Mary Flanagan titled [phage].


The Rhizome ArtBase is an artist-driven, Web-based archive of new media art assembled and maintained by Rhizome.org, a not-for-profit organization based in New York City. The goals of the Rhizome ArtBase are to provide public access and exposure to a comprehensive collection of new media art, to provide an online platform for new media artists to present their work within a context of relevant critical discourse and online discussions, and to preserve their work for the future.

The ArtBase currently contains over 650 art objects. Approximately 10 new objects are added each week. We use the term "art object" to refer to the collection of stored metadata, such as keywords and technical information, that relate to a given artwork. Art objects are not physical objects, but virtual ones classified as either "linked" or "cloned." Linked objects include the artist's statement and bio, a description of the artwork, a thumbnail image, keywords and other indexing information, and a link to the artwork (in the form of a URL). Cloned objects include all the above metadata, in addition to an archival copy of the artwork that is stored on the Rhizome server.

 

Over the past several years, we at Rhizome.org have become increasingly concerned with the sustainability of the works in our archive. When I joined Rhizome in May 2001 as ArtBase Coordinator, I became aware of the scale and scope of the ArtBase's agenda, realizing the enormous responsibility our organization had undertaken. Since then, the scope of the ArtBase has been expanded to include software art, computer games, and documentation of new media performance and installation. With these new additions, the problem of preservation has become more complicated.

For the last several years, the question of artistic intention has been at the heart of new media preservation debates. In the case of living artists, we have the benefit of working collaboratively to develop productive preservation strategies. Nevertheless, one of the primary challenges we've identified in preserving new media art in the Rhizome ArtBase is keeping these projects operational on future computer systems. As technologies continue to evolve and change, the hardware, software, and application systems in use today will eventually become obsolete. Moreover, the transformation of the Internet through new protocols and programming languages will considerably impact the future accessibility of the Net art that represents a significant portion of our archive.

Recently, our attention has been directed toward known preservation strategies, namely the documentation method of capturing important elements of an artwork with digital information—in the form of still images, moving images, and/or audio recordings—and developing systems for organizing the gathered material. We have also  focused on the development of viable networks for collaborating with other institutions on more extensive strategies, like hardware emulation. Through these various efforts, we hope to realize our initial goals for preserving the works in the ArtBase.

A cloned artwork by Mary Flanagan currently in our care, [phage] (2000), best characterizes some of our immediate preservation issues. Flanagan's project is a computer application designed to, in the artist's own words, "filter through all available material on a specified workstation . . . place it in an alternate context," and generate, "a visible and audible, moving, three-dimensional, spatialized computer world." A downloadable application for the PC, [phage] must be launched on a Windows operating system. It draws from the infrastructure of this platform's directories, documents, pictures, e-mails, and so on, to produce the work's visual and conceptual content. When running, the program throws fragments of data objects across the viewer's screen.

Because Flanagan intended for the work to be a somewhat abstracted reflection of the viewer's own hard drive and its contents, artwork documentation alone would significantly depreciate [phage]'s conceptual import. To capture the essence of the artwork, the project must affect a subjective experience of one's own digital detritus. Therefore, migration(updating code), emulation (running outdated software on new platforms), or reinterpretation(re-creating the work in new technological environments) may be the best options in terms of keeping our archival copy of this project available for future audiences. It could be argued that if the fragments of another person's hard drive were excavated by the program and documented in snapshots, [phage] might further engage the issues of privacy the artist initially found integral to the work. Nevertheless, it's clear that documenting the project merely through screen captures and other documentation methods has the potential to alter the artwork's original intent.