Oliver, everyone,
To answer your question; yes, I do see in the U.S. (and abroad) serious efforts to collect, document, and preserve digital art. Jon and I cite more of these in our book (http://re-collection.net) than I have space to mention here, and I suspect that you are asking specifically for efforts from museums so, for example, MOMA has hired not one but two digital art conservators, SFMOMA and the Tate have initiated 'Media Matters', etc. And not every effort takes the form of a grand initiative; some museums have devoted serious research to the preservation of a single work in their collection.
Is it enough? No. Not yet. I also believe that there are certain questions that should be part of such efforts, but then that's why I co-authored a book on the topic :)
Now, as to your other question about initiatives working on the modification of the museum sector itself; making it appropriate for the needs of the digital era. Ah; that's a whole other kettle of fish! You could look at a number of examples, such as the decade-old 'Museums and the Web' conferences or dozens of NEH digital Access and Preservation grants or hundreds of essays on new media and museums, as evidence that yes the museum sector is attempting to update itself to come in line with the contemporary media (and social) landscape. But, are they as rigorously addressing the need to change in order to deal with not only the way they interface with society, but the digital culture that enters their stewardship in the form of their collections? To that, I would answer; not quickly enough.
Fire alarm going off in my building - gotta go!
Richard Rinehart
---------------------
Director
Samek Art Museum
Bucknell University
---------------------
Lewisburg, PA, 17837
570-577-3213
http://galleries.blogs.bucknell.edu
On Jul 12, 2014, at 5:42 AM, Oliver Grau wrote:
> Richard,
>
> do you see in the US (beside yours and Ion's long lasting work) serious and sustainable initiatives working on documentation of digital art, its concerted collection&preservation, helping to avoid the complete loss of this art of our time? Also Initiatives, working on a modification of the museum sector, making it appropriate for the needs of the digital cultures of our time would be interesting to hear about?
>
> Many regards,
> Oliver
>
>>>> Richard Rinehart <[log in to unmask]> 11.7.2014 21:26 >>>
> Yes, Jon; this new thread about "time based media" seems connected to the recent CRUMB thread about whether/how new media art can be seen as a distinct subject from mainstream contemporary art (and how its distinctiveness may differ in usefulness or importance at different levels; from preservation concerns to exhibition practices to research and history.)
>
> But if new media art can be said to be a ghetto, then 'time based media' would be that one block in the ghetto where Eastern European haberdashers snuffed mercury a century earlier and what remains are only the faint outlines of a store name painted on the side of a brick building.
>
> But Johannes' main point seems spot on: it is not useful to think of this new stuff primarily as an object. That simple framework has served museums well for a couple of centuries and may continue to for large tracts of their collections - but not for all; not any longer.
>
> I also agree with the suggestion that we look to other, related, fields for potential aid; in particular performing arts (Media Art Notation System, anyone? :) The performing arts are more adept at dealing with variability in a fine arts context than museums, and there is much of their mindset and related practices that museums might borrow. I also agree that we should periodically re-visit the notion of museums as being the best place for new art forms (or the best place for anything!) But I'm not sure that - at the institutional level - the performing arts are better suited to look after all this new media art. Firstly because many of these artists are self-consciously working in direct relation to the discourse and history of fine/visual art (and that's as legit a definition of the visual/art world as any other I've seen); secondly because the performing arts have not necessarily done a better job of preserving their own history (music being the strongest, dance and theatre suffering a bit more, and all of them struggling with digital versions of their own forms); and third because I've not given up on museums just yet, I think they/we deserve strong critique and have a lot of work to do, but I also have hope that they can adapt to history again and serve even this art well.
>
> Richard Rinehart
> ---------------------
> Director
> Samek Art Museum
> Bucknell University
> ---------------------
> Lewisburg, PA, 17837
> 570-577-3213
> http://galleries.blogs.bucknell.edu
>
> Re-Collection: Art, New Media, & Social Memory -- http://re-collection.net
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 8, 2014, at 5:02 PM, Jon Ippolito wrote:
>
>> I found myself nodding while reading Johannes Goebel's lifelong struggle with museums over "digital/time-based art." His account was also posted on Yasmin, where there is now a discussion prompted by the publication last month of Re-collection, my book with Rick Rinehart:
>>
>> http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
>>
>> So I'm cross-posting this response to both lists:
>> ________________
>>
>> Johannes' description of digital media as a mapping from immaterial to material is evocative:
>>
>>> The only way we can perceive and interpret that which is encoded in the "invisible, mute, intangible" mode of the digital is the mapping of the "invisible" into the realm of our senses, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting.
>>
>> Although Johannes' characterization would also apply to Conceptual art, I think its implications for new media are especially important. That said, I have a bit more trouble swallowing his corollary:
>>
>>> So it might be worthwhile to regard all art that involves digital technology as time-based art. It is not "an object", it needs at least conversion from the "intangible" into the realm of our perception.
>>
>> I absolutely agree that you can't have the work we're discussing without some form of conversion (what Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media calls "transcoding"). The necessity of that translation--from hard-drive voltages to screen pixels now, from MPEG4 to MPEG21 or whatever in the future--prompts Rick and me to look for a new term, such as "variable media."
>>
>> Nevertheless, at the risk of beating the terminology drum to tatters, I'm drawing the line at calling all new media "time-based art." Johannes rightly points out the ways digital forms unfold in time. And I appreciate Johannes' conclusion that organizations dedicated to time-based arts such as dance and theater might be better prepared to conserve the crucial performative aspect of digital media:
>>
>>> The declaration or viewing of all "digital" art as time-based arts changes the perspective on such art radically. It is now part of "performing arts", it needs to be "performed" or in the digital realm "executed"....with machines, operating systems, programs and I/O devices and maybe by the audience in "interactive" and "participatory" art.
>>
>> My problem is not with dance archivists and theater techies per se, although they have a long ways to go in figuring out how to preserve their own art forms. Re-collection even argues that digital emulation can be thought of as a re-enactment of an old performance (Super Mario) on a new body (a PC instead of Nintendo).
>>
>> My problem is with how the term "time-based arts" is used by organizations accustomed to collecting static media like paintings, documents, and books. For the past four decades, art museums have been timidly inching along the bending limb of video art, thinking that it will help them accommodate all manner of new media because at the end of that limb is something a lot like video art but just a bit more "out there." So they call that whole branch of their taxonomic tree Time-Based Media. And they think if they know how to preserve a spool of celluloid or a Betamax cassette they know how to preserve Arduinos and Augmented Reality.
>>
>> The reality is that adopting a medium-dependent approach to preservation doesn't even make sense for movies anymore. Re-collection cites a case study of Ken Jacobs' Bitemporal Vision performance, whereby the filmmaker trains two 16-mm film projectors on the same point on the wall, adding a stroboscopic propeller that reveals the two image sources in alternation. By manipulating identical film snippets in each projector, Jacobs superimposes similar frames to tease out a three-dimensional image from these two-dimensional pieces of film stock. The stunning result--almost impossible to explain unless you've seen it--makes the Hollywood version of 3D in movies like Avatar look trivial.
>>
>> Now suppose I say the Bitemporal Vision piece is "time-based media." What does that do? It prompts conservators to copy it onto safety film and put it into cold storage. But that does nothing to save the work's essential performative behavior.
>>
>> Of course, you could say Bitemporal Vision is a special case compared to a theatrical release like Toy Story, which does not have a performative dimension. Surely in a conventional film the narrative's time-based qualities eclipse any other properties. Well, my co-author Rick Rinehart relates a great story about Toy Story in our book. When Rick was at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives, the Pixar folks showed up from across the bay and said they wanted help preserving this new, all-CGI movie called Toy Story. His colleague said, "This is a well known problem: nitrate film was flammable, and cellulose acetate turned to vinegar, so now we use polyester...." But the Pixar people said "Whoa, whoa! We don't want to preserve the film. We want to preserve the *movie*."
>>
>> By "the movie," the Pixar reps didn't mean "digital video." They meant the original computer data that would allow them to re-create the movie in 3D or 4k, or with different lighting, or from Buzz's perspective rather than Woody's, or as a video game. Toy Story was a completely different genre than Gone with the Wind, even if we call them both "film." Its behaviors are not just about being a reproducible, time-based medium; they are also about being encoded in a rich data set that can give birth to the versions you see in theaters, on your Playstation, and online.
>>
>> Toy Story was 1995. In 2014, the hottest trend in moving images is probably Vine--those six-second videos you can take with your cell phone and then upload and share. It's fairly simple to preserve Vines themselves, because they are a variant of MPEG4. They are short, so they don't take up much storage space. But that ignores their networked nature--sharing Vines via Twitter, discovering and promoting them with hashtags--which is pretty much the point of Vine. These clips are tied to commerce, with Vine micro-trailers promoting a movie years before it comes out. They're part of a social network. All of that is invisible and lost if all you do is save a bunch of MP4s on a hard drive.
>>
>> So I'm concerned that the Time-Based Media label lets archivists off the hook for capturing the relationships that underpin performative installations or social networks. In my work, I'm particularly interested in understanding those relationships on a functional level, so we can plan to migrate, emulate, or reinterpret them in the future when the 16-mm projectors or CAD files or Twitter URLs break down.
>>
>> Some observers claim it's impossible even to try to re-create such relationships, especially for performance. Johannes says:
>>
>>> "Digital" 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 "digital" art that its life cycle is indeed very brief. It almost approaches the time-scale of oral tradition.
>>
>>
>> One of the most exciting discoveries for me in researching Re-collection was finding out how extraordinarily long the time-scale of oral traditions can be, thanks to what Rick and I call "proliferative preservation." I'm curious if anyone else sees parallels between oral culture and new media.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> jon
>> _________________
>>
>> "Read it if you want to prevail"--Bruce Sterling
>> Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory
>> http://re-collection.net
>
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