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From my experience, the only certainty about definitions and terminologies (like technology itself) is that they perpetually get updated and change. For some people, the catch-all term "media art" is used in lieu of time based-arts. They both are all encompassing umbrellas, as is the term variable media.  

 

So much innovation happens around inter-disciplinary activity, and there is as much going on today as thirty years ago. The main difference is that electronic tools are less expensive, more versatile, and ubiquitous. Most museums are quite wired up, with short commissioned videos or audio tours, artist interviews, and relevant music offered in downloadable formats to mobile phones and PDAs. Hip to Twitter and the Internet, museum-goers will stop and readily engage with whatever media is offered in the gallery (art and educational.) Sure there are museum and gallery visitors who only pause for a nanosecond, but there are plenty of others who become involved and even return. 

 

The public is perpetually hungry for content, for ideas, and count on artists to make sense of the crazy world we live in. Visitors will remain in front of that old fashioned painting by a recent Yale Art School grad; they will interact with Roman Ondak's Measuring the Universe (2007) by including their name and height to the gallery wall; and they'll surely hog the keyboard of Xu Bing's Book from the Ground (2007). 

 

I agree that delivering (and mediating) the artwork to the viewer is the reason the institution is there. Some art takes ages to work through a museum bureaucracy. But some makes it in very fast. 

 

Data clouds are a recent approach to "preservation." Three institutions have pondered some of the same issues. You can check out the Tate/MoMA/SFMOMA web site http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/mediamatters/ <http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/mediamatters/> >. Matters in Media Art includes thoughtful acquisition guidelines for the documentation (i.e. indicating what the artist says are the aesthetics) of time-based media works of art (e.g., video, film, audio and computer based installations). The project was created in 2003 by a consortium of curators, conservators, registrars and media technical managers from the three institutions. 

 

That's it for now.

Barbara London