This sort of stuff has come up a lot with the Variable Media Network
work that Rhizome is involved with, along with the Guggenheim and a few
other arts orgs in the U.S. in Canada. You can't talk about this topic
for more than a few minutes without running right into some major
philosophical questions about the nature of being. When somebody posts
a funny Google hack and calls it art, where does the art reside? In the
artist's mind? On the artist's server? In the Google databases? In the
audience's client computers? In the audience's mind? Over the entire
internet, from the routers up to the TCP/IP stack to the open standards
of HTML and HTTP? Because if you want to know what exactly to preserve,
maybe you need to figure out what it is in the first place.

My personal opinion on this stuff is that when you're dealing with new
media artwork that is highly dependent on external resources (SMS
networks, Google, eBay, etc.) a good model for preservation is that of
performance, or even historical events. You can't ever capture and
recreate the entire historical context of an artwork, and that
volatility is most evident if you're dealing with technical standards
that are obsolete in 5 years. But you can try to record it in as many
ways as possible. Just like you can't ever recreate the experience of
being on the mall in Washington D.C., hearing Martin Luther King Jr.
give the "I have a dream" speech. But you can collect various
artifacts: audio recordings, textual transcripts, articles about
historical context, video interviews with march organizers or some
random woman who rode a bus up from Baton Rouge to attend the march,
etc., etc. Maybe out of that, some coherent sense of the past can be
inferred.

But then, I'm sort of a proto-Buddhist, so obviously that model is what
works for me. You never step in the same river twice, yadda yadda
yadda.

As Caitlin notes, this isn't an entirely new problem: Installation and
conceptual work have their own volatility issues, and even paintings
and sculpture age. New media gets a lot of attention here in part
because works that are intertwined with quickly obsolescing technical
networks are probably more volatile than anything; it also gets a lot
of attention because it's new and as such has the halo of novelty.

Francis Hwang
Director of Technology
Rhizome.org
phone: 212-219-1288x202
AIM: francisrhizome
+ + +
On Feb 21, 2005, at 7:50 AM, francis mckee wrote:

> I should quickly introduce myself  - Francis McKee, researcher
> examining open source movement at Glasgow School of Art and Head of New
> Media at CCA in Glasgow.
>
> I'd like to second Martijn Stevens point - i've been averse to joining
> this discussion so far as i have felt the conservation projects to be
> far from my own interests or experience.  I understand rationally all
> of the good reasons to conserve and preserve net art or digital works.
> My gut instinct though is to let many of them go - the net for instance
> is essentially such an unstable medium with extinction built into so
> many sites and many of the artists i've enjoyed most seem to thrive on
> that or produce works that are in process and cannot be saved as they
> change from moment to moment, feeding off the web's current activity.
> The first generation of net artists also seemed to have invested
> heavily in an anti-materialist/anti-object sentiment that seems
> inimical to some aspects of preservation though i feel i should go back
> and read Josephine Berry's 'Information as Muse' essay again
>