I remember Kasper Koenig talking about how public art works need a commissioning process and a decommissioning process. (And this was of course not even in the context of new media public art). I think this is a good point, at least for many works, but most public art commissioning scenarios are not structured in a way that works with this idea of limited lifetime.

My strongest personal impressions as an artist in both public art commissioning situations and institutional acquisition is that very few of the stakeholders have any way of grasping the nature of the problem. This either results in optimistic blindness to the real challenges, or under-informed knee-jerk fear of the challenges. This includes the artists in many cases.

Like Simon, I have burned up untold thousands of hours bringing old pieces back to life or keeping them current. And I now find myself mourning the loss of a number of lost works. And practically, it seems like institutions and collectors are starting to pay attention and take the plunge, and as they become informed, they are starting to ask about those older, technically challenging works that lie moribund.

But I also realize that part of the problem of maintaining these older works was amplified by the fact that they were not created with an eye to maintainability. The effort went into getting them to work somehow by the opening. The thought that these things would live on past their year or two of active exhibition could not have been farther from my mind. For much of this time I was also inexperienced enough to not have a grasp of the real meaning of the rate of technological change that would play out over my active professional lifetime.

The result is that, in many ways, these works were cobbled together in ways that make then unnecessarily susceptible to rapid obsolescence. In the preparation of some of these works for acquisition I have gone through the process of refactoring my code to create a clear boundary between the code that gives the work its affective character, and the code that merely implements an easily specifiable function (i.e. functions that can be described to my full satisfaction to an engineer.). I deliver the core code in an operating system agnostic form with functional description and a documented API, and a functional, operating system / computer era specific generic ‘wrapper’ which provides things like display on a screen, input from a camera, etc. (along with source code).

The intention is partly to learn the discipline of creating new works with this modular structure in mind. It does not solve all the problems that might come up, but it is slowly making the task less daunting. I can put complex works in collections with some peace of mind that I have done all I can to deliver a work in a form that could be resurrected at some relatively distant point in time with a reasonable amount of committed effort.

Part of this process also helps to clarify the aspects of a work that will be most likely to require the attention of conservators. i.e.  It provides the beginnings of a job description for future new media conservators… these are the kinds of tasks and technologies that are most vulnerable to change.

In my experience, few if any commissioners, curators, collectors and conservators are in any position to really assess the future viability of a new media art work at this point. I suspect many new media artists are also in that position. At the moment, it almost seems like the less they know the better as some public art commissioners, and collectors, and conservators, will take the leap of faith because they love the work, or they understand its import. This situation is however, completely unsustainable.

I have unconsciously and for pragmatic reasons created a separation in my own work between those pieces that relatively effortlessly move into the future as functional pieces, and those that are left behind, but I am finding that this is creating a shift in the kind of work that I do… avoiding the works that involve more idiosyncratic and complex systems, which are, indeed, what my career and reputation are largely built upon. So I am in a period of reassessment… For an artist like me without a professorship, and as a mid-career artist with a family to support, in a country that is particularly good at supporting emerging artists, and not so sure what to do with older ones, figuring out this quandary is fundamental to keeping my practise sustainable for the next couple of decades.

David


------------------------------------------------------------------
David Rokeby
135 Manning Avenue
Toronto, Ontario M6J 2K6 Canada
(416) 603-4640
[log in to unmask]
http://www.davidrokeby.com
------------------------------------------------------------------