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Dear list, Thanks Sarah for a theme that seems to engage a lot of people and I feel it is definitively a topic in the air. I am working as curator at Mejan Labs (www.mejanlabs.se) and in the spring we arranged a seminar on new media and art together with the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm on new media and art, the Verge seminar at the Modern Museum this spring (www.kkh.se/newmedia). I guess some of you heard of it. However, at the seminar Benjamin Weil took the chance to discussing new media and preserving and the example of some of Paik's works. What would happen to them when the TV-sets of Paik's installations had to be exchanged? And even a more important question what would happen to them when a younger generation, brought up with flat screens, would look at the Paik's installations laughing "that were these days when he tellies were that big"... Bruce Sterling summarized the seminar in an article in the June issue of Modern Painters(!) well worth reading, taking the Sabrina Raaf exhibition at Mejan Labs as an example. It reminds me of the Culture 2001 seminar in Copenhagen to which I was invited as a key note speaker (together with Howard Rheingold) where I suggested we should delete all web and net art files since I felt it was the production that I enjoyed and the preservation only meant costs and money I would never see. At the time I was curator of the nonTVTVstation in Sweden and I suggested at the seminar that I would go home deleting all the files. I didn't (stupid me) and today I have them all on tape in my attic. No one have been asking for them and I guess it will take another twenty years before anyone got interesting in the tapes, when they will try to make research on streaming etc. And then they will be almost impossibly to play... I am not sentimental at all. Definitively I wouldn't spend a penny on preservation if I had the choice to spend it on production. If some of my old productions disappears I am fine with it. I have been working within museums for more than ten years and I have understood that sooner or later we will come into more practical and economical discussions what will be reasonable to preserve of our heritage, which institutions will be worth to keep etc. Collection costs a lot of money and we should ask what is worth to preserve. Preservation and museums is an idea of the 19th century very much and this means that late 19th century and later is the most preserved ages. But does it mean that our age are the most important of the humanity? As I stated, I am not sentimental at all, still if there is any interest in preserving any project, might it be commissions, I am fine with it as long it isn't my money. For the institutions still trying to collect things I would like to say: -Take a look at your collections - what story do they tell? And what story would you like to tell? Maybe documentation is better that preservation. New media and public commissions is a topic for a seminar planned early 2007 arranged by Interactive Institute (where I am working part time) and also an exhibition produced by Electrohype and Llars Midboe in Sweden in December. Anyone interested, please mail me. Yours, Björn Norberg Curator at Mejan Labs in Stockholm