Dear Crumbs, Please allow me to share a different view to Oliver¹s perspective. Since I am not a known member of the new/digital media circles, I should maybe give a few pointers to my background so what I write is not by necessity heard as the voice of a disenchanted person, but as coming from someone who has been involved deeply in parts of the field discussed in this list. This background does not pre-qualify my view, but it does give an indication of my continuous involvement in some parts of the field. I have worked in institutions focused on ³digital² and ³art² in two phases. 13 years as a founding member of ZKM in Germany and then 13 years as founding director of EMPAC in the US. And then outside of such institutions in the 13 years before ZKM, I was learning some trades in the field starting with computer music at Stanford, trying to get ³something going² in Germany with a culture deeply averted at the time to the combination of ³digital² and ³art(s)² which is another interesting subject. As part of these positions I curated and organized in 1989 the first MultiMediale festival of ZKM, which then took place up to the opening of ZKM. At ZKM I was able to set-up the structure of ³institutes² for production and research as the first Leiter, ³director², of music and acoustics and a year later Jeffrey Shaw joined us as the Leiter of image media. During the first half of my time at ZKM, I was highly involved with the design and construction of the ZKM building and facilities. And at the same time I was deeply involved in a large archival project of digital data (music) at a time when grants were declined for such endeavors because ³all-digital archives are not feasible² (1990). The discussion, Oliver spearheaded in this forum regarding museums and digital art, would find a trove of materials by analyzing the process, development and turns of the museums at ZKM. Indeed, the ZKM museums did have the largest ³media art² collections at the time and they have invested a lot of energy, work and more or less deliberations into the museumification of such art works. A highly interesting case study some of you in academia might find a Ph.D. student to dive intoŠ An analysis of the productions and directions of the two producing institutes at ZKM might be equally valuable. Both institutes had distinctively different goals, methodologies and cultural perspectives in pursuing their potential. And I think it is fair to say that an analysis of how the production side of ZKM evolved after Peter Weibel took the lead at ZKM and Jeffrey and I left in 2002 may indeed be of high historical interest how it all shifted, where the creation of new works has been positioned in relationship to the agendas of the ZKM museums, how exhibition, retrospectives and preservation activities in conjunction with panels and intellectual activities have shaped the change over time at an institution founded specifically as a combination of production, public engagement and exhibiting museums. Analyzing in concrete terms the activities of the ZKM museums regarding ³media art² works at ZKM will reveal in very concrete terms the needs and necessities, strategies and difficulties, Oliver addresses in his plea for (central European) museums to integrate new/media/digital art into their corpus. I do not believe that so much has changed in the field that an analytical dissection of ZKM museum activities in regard to such art works can be most revealing. (Starting with video monitors for Paik installations all the way to operating systems and ports of ³only digital² works) worth another Ph.D. thesis. Such analysis may yield, that the support system for digital ³stuff² and for the related technologies as it was in exemplary fashion tackled at ZKM is financially unobtainable or not sustainable (people, expertise, machines, budgets etc.). Two pointers: Currently only the western military powers (and maybe the cloud giants???) are most likely in the position to constantly monitor their data, copy it before it deteriorates and port it to other formats and operating systems. There is a reason why banks (certainly one of the most powerful entities on this planet) stick for so long to old generations of machines, languages and operating systems for decades way beyond where the technology industry has moved the rest of the world; or why they even print their data out on acid-free paper and store it deep in a mountain. I was hired to the US to build an ³Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center² (EMPAC) as part of the oldest technical university in the US, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I worked with architects and engineers to define parameters and functionality for an eventually - $220 million project, which did not have any museums, but which was to be focused on ³time-based arts² and creating a common infrastructure and program that would span the digital (computer) and the physical (experiential) realms and that would support arts, science and engineering to use the facilities under the same roof with the hope for serendipity to bridge between the different motivations, goals and methodologies of arts, science and engineering. At the same time I was enabled to create a team of four curators (covering time-based arts from the visual arts to music, dance and theater) years before the center opened its doors. ³All of the sudden² a center was created that stands in contradiction to the main stream of how culture is viewed in this society (which is detrimental to the European perspectives and that is one reason why Oliver¹s arguments sound totally different here in the US). And this center for some mysterious reason has developed in a first phase the ³arts side² to its full potential with residencies, commissions, technical development and events and installations, while the ³research side² (science) is now catching up - quite the opposite to other such projects at universities. (It should be mentioned that EMPAC is a university-wide center and is not part of any department or school and there are no regular classes or teaching at EMPAC as there is no faculty, but a staff of professionals dedicated to the mission and program of EMPAC). This now brings me to my ³different perspective² in contraposition to Oliver¹s. Indeed culture is only possible by tradition that which is passed from one to the other. And there are different paths for passing things, for changing histories, for preserving that what was done, for re-interpretation etc. like oral, making objects, symbolic (writing or math or digital encoding), and there are different media that are or carry that what can get passed on (from papyrus to stone to paint to engravings, etc), digital being the latest addition. And the major difference being, that digital ³stuff² is not an object we can perceive without it being ³brought back² through intermediary materials (machines) into the realm of our senses the only way we can perceive and interpret that which is encoded in the ³invisible, mute, intangible² mode of the digital is the mapping of the ²invisible² into the realm of our senses, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting Š So it might be worthwhile to regard all art that involves digital technology as time-based art. It is not ³an object², it needs at least conversion from the ³intangible² into the realm of our perception. So even a digital image or just a text that gets displayed on a monitor or screen would be time-based (remember flickering screens that might interact with fluorescent lights); time as a constituent of the machine and of the conversion (I/O) and of what appears. And most certainly all executions of any computer program are time based. Because the computer is time-based not on a perceivable way for sure, for if you want to see if a chip functions on the electrical level you have to use a logic analyzer which slows ³things² down for our senses so we can figure out if a transistor functions properly again the digital operations needs to be converted to the bandwidth / resolution / speed of our senses to be able to determine ³what it is doing². Every piece of net-art is time-based art. Every digital video is time-based art in a dual sense it is something moving that needs to get moved (converted) to be perceived, experienced and interpreted as moving. (Movies on acetate substrate are time-based in a single sense, since we can look at each individual frame and they are meant to get accelerated). Every work that involves digital technology is not only time-based because the machine itself is time-based in its operational mode, but also on the next higher level in the sense that the machine itself (including operating systems, programming languages, video or audio standards etc.) is time-based in an economic sense. Its ever-changing ³embodiment² gets changed continuously by powers outside of those who use it (us). This is different from a sculpture deteriorating over time or a painting building up grime on its surface or an acetate film fading. It is also different from printing technology moving to the next generation of printing machines. The book once printed, is an object. But a new computer system may render that, which previously could be executed and converted for our senses as being impossible to get done. The ³instructions² need to be ³executed². To look at ³digital² art as tangible objects misses fundamentally the properties of computers and thus of the work itself. (I am using ³digital² in this context as short hand for ³computer based² certainly there are non-computer based digital modes). The declaration or viewing of all ³digital² art as time-based arts changes the perspective on such art radically. It is now part of ³performing arts², it needs to be ³performed² or in the digital realm ³executed² (i.e. put on a time-line) to ³come to live², to be perceived, experienced and interpreted. (Just to not get side-tracked too much: certainly viewing a painting is also ³time-based² as is the deterioration of a sculpture but I am referencing the mode of the ³object² and ³non-object² and not the mode of us as living beings who cannot be but time-based and are born and will die, with many heart beats in between.) So museums as institutions based on collecting art in the form of tangible objects may or are not be the appropriate place for time-based arts. As for exhibiting time-based art museums certainly have a ³function² and offer opportunities. But the recent boom in tying performing arts and performance art into the program of museums shows the great, well: incapability, lack of expertise and understanding of museums to deal with time-based art. Museums built in the past decades do not meet any criteria for ³time-based media art², ³digital² art or leave alone for ³performing arts². Even at ZKM where it was the program of the museums to show such art, it was extremely difficult during the design process to integrate at least a few elements that would allow the exhibition of such art in an appropriate and easily manageable way. The lack of understanding came from those in power who had little of an idea or experience with ³media² art even of the eightiesŠ leave alone interactive installations and their conditions And most of you who are curating ³media² or ³digital² art in such institutions will know best the difficulties you are up against on the institutional-political as well as on the production side to for instance get that large spaces can be dark, that projectors are not noisier than the potentially subtle sounds of an installation, that there is no sound spilling over form a neighboring installation, that adequate projection surfaces are installed, that the lighting does not interfere or does supports sensor technology etc. It is ³absolutely maddening² for people who are coming from the time-based arts to realize how little sensitivity and expertise such institutions have allowed to grow within their walls to show time-based art, not mentioning the design of new museums integrating these arts. Likewise the arts market: time-based art does not accumulate ³added value² over time. Musicians, dancers and actors have understood that forever their art is gone as soon as it is performed (²executed²) and experienced and it is needs a new performance to enter the realm of perception, to meet an audience. ³Media², ³digital² art falls into the same category. Only tangible objects accumulate value and can be market driven. Why does a major museum like MoMA pay a pittance for the screening of a video or for acquiring videos (unless you are a star)? Because the value is time-based and ³expires after use². It cannot accumulate value wile sitting on a shelf, because time cannot sit still. So the argument that museums have a cultural mission and one could pressure them to accommodate and preserve ³digital² art, can at best be valid for central European countries. But even that direction of thought may be flawed because as I tried to point out museums are not institutions that were ever meant to deal with time-based ³entities². They are deeply rooted in the 19th century as a successor to arts collections by the courts and churches. And as containers for the trophies of colonial enterprises. Before, courts and churches had, besides their arts collections and libraries, a separate entity for time-based arts their musicians, composers, dancers, actors, writers. And under an institutional perspective, the visual and the time-based arts were all part of the same entity and were paid from the same source. But then these organizational structures were separated out in the 19th century when the museums took over the public viewing of objects and viewing of time-based arts moved to ever growing numbers of opera houses and theaters, and then to movie theaters, and then to Biennials and Š Disney Land : ) So we can view and position all ³digital² arts as time-based arts and as being connected to the cultural and economic model of the ³old² performing arts and NOT as being part of the traditional visual arts canon and the related institutions. If museum show such ³digital² art great for whatever reason they might do it. As it is equally ³great² if they put on performances. We wish all time-based artists to find such opportunities. But one will observe that, as mentioned before, there is little observance of the needed requirements in details (which are carefully observed when presenting ³static² art) to put such works or shows on. ³Digital media artists² produce time-based arts as their art needs to be ³executed², ³performed², with machines, operating systems, programs and I/O devices and maybe by the audience in ³interactive² and ³participatory² art or be it in performing arts integrating digital technology or be it as a large slide show on the side of a building. (This certainly does not apply to all artists using digital technology, like those creating ³still² objects with prints of digital photographs or 3-d printing or algorithmically developed static objects). And indeed I think such artists and their work do underlie the same economic conditions like all time-based arts. I have not heard of many artists who made a fortune from such a time-based ³digital² works being bought by museums or individuals (besides video installations from a few stars). Now to take this a step further: ³digital² art works will have to die, fade away, maybe being restored at some later point in time but they are an acceleration of the changes traditional performing arts undergo. It is the signature characteristic of ³digital² art that it¹s life cycle is indeed very brief. It almost approaches the time-scale of oral tradition. The survival in the ³cloud² is a myth once any kind of programming is involved in the ³performance² of a digital art work. The documentation of such an artwork may be around for a while in the cloud (or on your computer) that is why documentation is the only way to keep such works in some way accessible in the future. This documentation may include program code, screen captures or video documentation with maybe multi cameras, either edited into a single video or where the material form each camera is kept. But the documentation is not ³the work² and it will hardly ever lead to anyone reconstructing a work from its documentation. Looked at from the traditional perspective, the artist of ³digital art² is confronted with being the most vulnerable artist. We know that texts only survived if they were copied by hand on sturdy material or printed on (hopefully) acid-free paper. We have no idea how music pieces from the 12th or 17th or 19th century sounded, where we still have a symbolic notation, but where tradition has changed ³the sound² once it gets performed. Dance tries to cope with their specific problem that there is no common notation they try it now with the help of digital technology. And theater (words) never minded to have all their texts being edited, augmented, cut for whatever performance a director was aiming for. Or the artist of ³digital art² is the most avant-garde because the inherent properties of the work make clear what digital technology offers us contrary to what we are told: The reality of a fast and quick obsolescence and disappearance of ³anything digital² that does not get maintained continuously (!) by a highly expensive and labor-intensive system. And such systems as mentioned before are in our world only created by those who see a financial or military interest. Even one of the greatest (largest and of high importance) collections of data, the one in the scientific community, has no way to be all ³saved². Not to speak of the programs and algorithms, which are used and modified and programmed to create art as part of an interactive work or of live-processing. Again, here we have an important example in music with live-electronics, be they analog or be they digital. They simply disappear very rapidly unless an institution (like IRCAM) invests to port programs and patches to new system, to keep old computers alive or to document in flow-charts and with mark-ups in the scores what actually is supposed to happen. And the decisions, which works will be elevated to this level of care, is a matter of politics, of money and of ³stature² and of power like in the old days, when it was decided, which manuscript was worth to be copied by hand on a new set of vellum with new ink. Maybe the ³digital artist² has to understand her/himself like performing artists do: once you cannot perform a piece anymore, once the hardware or software does not run anymore, once you cannot dance anymore, once you die, your work disappears with you. Is that not a great perspective? Being freed from reaching eternal relevance creating for the ³here and now², the actual realm of the arts of the performing arts? And this will not make culture get less rich and will not result in tradition being eroded. It is the indication of what digital culture actually means and does contradictory to what seems to be the standard anthem sung by the choir: Digital culture makes it incredibly clear that it is the owners of resources who determine how history and tradition are shaped, interpreted and used. (You might say: Nothing has changed. And indeed digital technology has not resulted in a change in this aspect, but has made it sharper, more apparent: digital technology maybe democratizing a wide range of areas, but it certainly closed off an after-life for more and more people. I am not sure this makes a difference but it does make a difference if we are told and we believe it IS different). We all have digital ³devices² but we do not have the power to even port data and programs through more than 3-5 generations of devices or through 2-3 generations of new operating systems. As we know from theater, music and dance, most works disappear with their creator or performer they still continue to live for a while in ³trans-substantiated² form in some individual or collective memory, they may contribute to a fertile ground for new works. But they will disappear eventually. Which indeed is not bad at all. Was that not the goal of performance art to get out of the white cube, to put things on a time-line, which could not be replicated? And is it not amazing that we now revive inside the white-cube that which was meant to be outside of the institutional-temporal structure of museums? Are we building mausoleums? How great (seriously) now we have digital art, which has an inherent expiration date. Maybe that is what is meant by ³artificial life². We should welcome the ³digital² artists to the performing arts world and work on the unifying understanding of time-based arts. And you ³digital² artists, you may dive deep into the tradition of performing and time-based arts from a new perspective namely that here may be your (new) roots. The gatekeepers to history and museums need not be convinced to take on ³digital² art. Either they get it or they don¹t. They have the power to support me or to turn me away. But, once again, that is the fate in performing, in time-based arts, that cannot accumulate value but lives only with and through the audience in the moment if enters time. It is a necessary luxury that we have academics, thinkers, writers, curators who reflect on all this we do need this intellectual work because it keeps culture alive as a complex environment and it enables to go into different directions within a cultural context. To stop and then continue to stumble, walk or run. What I am proposing is that we need to support the artists even more so because what will the academics, thinkers, writers, curators do if there are no artists creating new works :) The ³digital² artists wake up as time-based artists, as part of performing artists and the authors in these fields. The real challenge is not how we enter institutions, which are petrified or have an ³incompatible agenda² I have been trying that approach for ever and I will continue to do so for the sake of creating new opportunities for new works and their reception, to support the artists and their work but not for the sake of these institutions or for the sake of history or my contribution to history (haha). It¹s only for the moment I want to experience with an art work someone created to share time with me in its own moving through time. ====================================== On Restoration, Preservation and Documentation As I mentioned above, dealing with vanishing media has absorbed quite a chunk of my professional life and keeping works afloat that are inherently based on digital technology. These experiences have contributed greatly to the thoughts I sketched above. The earliest experience was using the then new technology of Audio-CDs to create the first CD series, which pulled ³digital music² (music only possible with a computer) together and made it available in digital format through a label which had started to move form vinyl to CD. At that time there were a wide variety of digital audio formats. So the actual mastering process was to convert all the pieces submitted in a variety of formats to the Audio-CD standard. A nightmare. This taught me what everyone knows but does not want to consider when they are creating new works: The actual digital formats dictate how long we can keep ³the work². The only way out is to analyze which format will most likely survive the longest and which format will be supported by mass-market devices in millions of clones (which one may cheaply buy and which one will find on dumps even in a hundred years to reverse-engineer them). The Audio-CD format fulfills this criterion. With compatible DVD players (and maybe, maybe Blu-ray players) extending this strain of devices. As part of this process I had to re-create a piece form the early seventies, which had never existed in a digital copy, but only spliced on analog tape. We dug up an old 9-track data tape on a dusty attic and then found a still existing digital tape drive, to get the bits off not the audio bits, but the program that created the audio. The compiler for this program did not exist anymore, but a more recent version. The composer and I had to sit together and adapt the old program structure to the new compiler and then we had to go by the memory of the composer if what we cobbled together was the ³original² piece. This taught me that there is absolutely no way to maintain programs (leave alone specific hardware) to reconstruct pieces later on. Many experts are involved in porting programs to new machines and operating systems. The ³arts world² cannot support such approach but has to rely on individual fanatics who dedicate their life to such endeavor. An example of pre-digital machines is the Labor für antiquierte Videosysteme at the ZKM, which has more than 300 pieces of equipment to be able to play videos from the fifties to the eighties and to digitize them. Which is important but it reveals that the next question will be how to preserve and copy now the content in the digital domain. A continuous effort without end. Which does not mean one should not start. But it shows clearly how time-based arts underlies different conditions than non-time-based arts. The next larger project was the International Digital Electronic Music Archive (IDEAMA), collaboration with Stanford University between 1989 and 1996. More than 600 works of electro-acoustic music were collected worldwide. Besides the mountain of collecting the pieces, the information and the legal issues, the question was how to store the digitized data. At the time the first professional CD-Writer had entered the market with a professional program to edit and burn Audio-CDs on writable CDs that would not get destroyed easily by UV-light, temperature and humidity. Already then it was known how ³regular² writable CDs would get destroyed over a rather brief period of time because of the organic material used in them. The archive was distributed world-wide on such archival CDs. Then later on the distribution was switched to hard discs because it was easier to copy than to produce individual CDs. This was actually a step in the wrong direction, because hard discs do not have the longevity of CDs. I do not know how many of you have experience with keeping a rather large complex installation alive over an extended period. Here at EMPAC we produced between 2003 and 2008 an interactive film installation with the Wooster Group / New York City. The work is based on Jeffrey Shaw¹s panoramic screen system having augmented some parameters. This installation consists of a very large panoramic screen (12m diameter, 4.5m high), panoramic projection with first 6, now 5 video projectors, an interactive chair, 32 channels of audio and a 20 minute video the viewer can navigate through. To maintain the hardware and software over just the past 6 years, to port to new systems etc. has been a major challenge and demanded expertise, labor and finances, which I cannot imagine many institutions would invest (Jeffrey certainly is probably the most knowledgeable in this area since he has a large number of different installations set-up in Hong Kong and has diligently maintained his works.) I could not imagine any museum (but the Media Museum at ZKM) maintaining such a work and updating it. The hardware and software expertise to update all the integrated systems and to make such a work portable is quite difficult to find in one place (Bernd Linterman at ZKM certainly being an expert in many aspects of this.) The accumulation of this knowledge in a new team like here at EMPAC which would need to be the case if Oliver¹s proposal to have museums take on such work is especially complicated. I wonder if such pragmatic examples are taken into consideration in the conferences and discussions, Roger Malina mentioned in his recent contribution to this list. And what the conclusions and resulting strategies might be. As I proposed above, the only way might be to have a video/audio documentation of such work instead of keeping the work itself functioning. The video formats will certainly be kept supported for an extended period of time, especially if they are used by commercial studios. Which brings me to the final consideration: How do we store the resulting documentation without having to constantly monitor the state of corruption of the data stored on some medium. Again, we in the art world cannot afford complex systems of automated error checks and automated replication processes. And museum certainly will never be able to create and support such automated systems. It is always good to go with standards, which some important business is relying on like Hollywood. So we went with LTO-5 tapes to back up our productions. Having been through many generations of back-up considerations, I still felt uneasy about tapes or in a generalized way about media, which have moving parts integral to their functioning - which can crash (heads on hard disks), stretch or tear (tape) or have a magnetic storage life, which will run out at some point in time (hard disks, SSD). For all these reasons, I have been ³fond² of writable optical media like CDs, DVDs and maybe Blu-ray discs. The only shortcoming of these media was (maybe so far) that they used organic material, which will deteriorate and eventually make it impossible to read the disc. The reflective layer will peel off if exposed to UV-light and they don¹t like high temperature and humidity. I used at ZKM high quality archival CDs, which have been available now for almost 25 years. The seem to stand up to their advertised 100 year life-span Š Recently I came across the Millennium Disc (DVD and Blu-ray), which is supposed to not have any organic materials as part of its make-up and which withstood reportedly tests by the US-army in excellent shape (nowhere comparable to standard discs). I would like to hear feedback on my current strategy (for video, audio, images and documents in a format that will most likely be kept around to convert to then newer formats) : Put everything on these Millennium discs; buy a few computers and a few disc reading devices and put them on a shelf, maybe restart them once a year and replace batteries on the mother board Š) and otherwise just let them sit there. The investment might be $5,000. But I can be certain that this is the cheapest way to keep the documentation and documents available for say the next 30 years, maybe 50 or until someone decides to throw them out - without the constant need for ³checking the state of the bits². ============================= Ending on this pragmatic note, Johannes