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Dear List, it's a great opportunity for me to be invited to participate in this discussion. The issue of collecting has obsessed me for a long time, and still does. At the same time, I'm a little bit overwhelmed by the need to reduce my ideas about this issue, which are very layered, to the form of a short statement, in a language that is not my native one. Hope it will work.... For the sake of clarity, I will try to divide the topic in three different areas: 1. collecting new media art; 2. collecting unstable media; 3. collecting the digital. 1. Collecting new media art. New media art IS collected, by private collections and institutions, as long as its cultural relevance is accepted in the art market field. That is, not so much, because galleries, art critics and curators didn't do a great job so far in making this cultural relevance a widespread truth in the field of contemporary art; and yet, enough to allow anybody to make a nice "new media art show" with collected or collectable works provided exclusively by private and institutional collectors or commercial galleries. That's what I - together with Yves Bernard - tried to do in 2008, with the show Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age (iMAL, Bruxelles, <http://www.imal.org/HolyFire/>). Budget limitations didn't allow us to provide a veritable snapshot of new media art collecting all around the world at the time, but I still believe that the exhibition was quite well representative of the forms in which new media art entered art collections: mostly in traditional, accepted, stable forms, such as digital prints, editioned videos, byproducts, and sometimes well crafted, artist's designed, plug-and-play "digital objects": from John Simon's art appliances to Boredomresearch screens, from Electroboutique's self-ironic works to Lialina & Espenschied's touch screen version of the web piece Midnight (2006). This is no surprise. Like it or not, digital media - like all unstable, variable media - challenge collecting in many ways. And along the XXth century, radical forms of art had always to face this conundrum: either accept compromise or stay out of the market. Performance art entered the market through documentation; video entered the market through video installations and editioned VHSs or DVDs; conceptual art entered the market through objectification and autenticity certificates. Many of my friends think that compromise is a bad thing, and they dismiss these "products" as just a bad way to make money. If this argument was true, it would only mean that 99% of new media / performance / video / conceptual artists are just idiots, because they sold their soul to the Devil without actually changing their financial situation at all. The truth is that traditional artifacts often work as a preservation strategy for the artist himself, who doesn't know any other way to ensure his own (digital) artwork to the future. They are also means of dialogue and mediation, that help artists approaching audiences and collectors that may be unfamiliar with digital technologies, but also different spaces and different contexts: a clever choice, when technology is not the core topic but just a tool, or a display, or one of the many possible interfaces to a content. In terms of quantity, when (in 2009 and 2010) I was curating the Expanded Box section for the Arco Art Fair in Madrid, I counted around 50 commercial galleries all around the world working with at least one out of 136 artists that could be connventionally described as "new media artists", from Vera Molnar to Raphael Lozano-Hemmer. Either these dealers are bad businessmen who find a perverse pleasure in failure, or they have a small but brave network of collectors interested in new media art. So, again: new media art is collected. 2. Collecting unstable media. New media art CAN ALSO BE collected in its unstable, computer based, digital form. This is difficult, but not impossible. And it already happened, quite a few times. Why not? In the past, collectors bought conversations, candies, fresh fruit, living and dead flies, dead and badly preserved sharks, performances: why should they be afraid of old computers, interactive installations, websites, softwares, etc.? Also, collectors (expecially private collectors) are the kind of people who love challanges and risky businesses. Paradoxically, in the art world it seems to be easier to sell challanges than compromises. What they want in return is cultural and economic value. Collectors can buy almost anything, if it is interesting, highly desiderable, and if it can be sold back to somebody else at an higher price tag (not necessarily in this order). In collecting, the preservation issue always comes later. But both cultural and economic value are not a given. They have to be created, in a convincing way. That's why collecting new media in its unstable forms is going to be just a funny experiment, and an innocent game, until artists won't start talking to the right people, and until galleries, museums, curators and critics won't be able top persuade the art world about its cultural relevance. 3. Collecting the digital. The digital is challenging collecting in many ways, but the biggest challenge is probably connected to its reproducible, sharable nature. This turns scarcity into something completely artificial, and abstract. You can keep making limited editions, but you can't lie to yourself: there is no difference between the five certified copies of that video and the sixth one, that somebody uploads to YouTube and that hundreds of people all around the world download on their desktop. No difference except an abstract, ritual act of transferral of ownership. And there is no difference between the 5 collectors who bought the video and the 500 ones who downloaded it for free: the latter don't own a bootleg, a bad copy, but the same file; they just don't own a certificate. The other problem is sharing. A collector can accept almost everything, if he is rewarded with cultural and economic value. Yet, what most collectors can't still accept is to be the owners of something that is available for anybody else for free. Why should I buy a website and leave it publicly accessible to anybody, as Rafael Rozendaal suggests in his beautiful contract <http://www.artwebsitesalescontract.com/ >? Why should I have no privileges and no rights, only duties? Why should I buy an animated gif (or a video, or a sound file) and allow it to circulate freely on the internet in the very same form? It would be easy to conclude that, because of this, traditional forms of collecting won't never apply successfully to digital art forms. Brad Troemel recently wrote: “The commodification of internet art is not going to happen in the way the art market has traditionally operated or in any way currently being attempted. This all comes down to a simple square-peg-in-a-circular-hole economic dilemma, which is that digital content is infinitely reproducible and free while physical commodities are scarce and expensive.” <http://thecreatorsproject.com/blog/digart-why-your-jpegs-arent-making-you-a-millionaire >. What's true in this is that the digital allows another form of collecting, free of any money investment and available to anybody: downloading. This form of collecting has been widely practiced for any kind of digital content: from animated gifs to amateur photographs, from videogames to pornographic pictures. For example, a collection that is highly valuable to me is Travis Hallenbeck's Windows Meta File Collection, that can be downloaded from here: <http://anotherunknowntime.com/wmf.html >. Hallenbeck collected more than 3,000 cliparts in an obsolete file format, that doesn't work properly on most modern computers. Most of these images – designed by amateur and professional designers along the 90s – are now rare, so Hallembeck's collection has an high cultural value. But any time anybody downloads his collection, he becomes the owner of a perfect copy of it – thus making these images less rare. Furthermore, since Hallenbeck is an artist, we should consider his collection a work of art: a work of art we can “collect” just clicking on the zipped folder. Is my act of collecting less legitimate because I didn't pay, and I didn't get a certificate in return? Hallenbeck is not selling his work of art on dvd, and he is not writing certificates of authenticity for those who buy it. There is no other way to collect this work of art: you can just download it for free. Suppose that, in 50 years, Hallenbeck website won't be online anymore. Net art will be an highly respected form of art. And you, who downloaded this file and made your best to preserve it, will be the unique owner of a great net art masterpiece. Will museums consider you a legitimate collector? What I mean here is that, even if a digital file can be reproduced infinite times with no loss of quality, scarcity is always around the corner. With the digital for the first time, art preservation can become a social, distributed thing, not something regulated only by those in power, such as institutions and economic elites. And thus do collecting. And yet, this doesn't mean that traditional forms of collecting won't never apply successfully to digital art forms. Art collectors should be brave enough to confront the challenge, and accept the idea of a shareable property. When they will, they'll realize that becoming the legal, unique owner of something that can still be enjoyed, played, stolen, remixed by hundreds of people every day is an immense pleasure. Owning and sharing: isn't it what God is doing with his own property, after all? Thank you for your patience, My best, Domenico --- Domenico Quaranta web. http://domenicoquaranta.com/ email. [log in to unmask] mob. +39 340 2392478 skype. dom_40