NEW YORK -- With major museum shows featuring new media art on display in New York and San Francisco, it's a good time to confront the problem of how to preserve digital art for centuries.
After all, today's software, operating systems, and PC screens will soon become obsolete. And videotape, that ancient relic from the 1980s, has an estimated shelf life of 15 years.
So while New York's Whitney Museum of American Art and San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art are showcasing what's hot today, New York's Guggenheim Museum is looking forward.
The Guggenheim's Variable Media Initiative is an unusual proactive program that asks new media artists to devise guidelines for translating their artworks via alternate media, once their current formats expire or disappear from the market.
The museum will present the program's progress at the "Preserving the Immaterial" conference March 30-31.
"When I started working at the Guggenheim 10 years ago, preservation of media art was done on an ad-hoc, reactive basis," said Guggenheim assistant curator Jon Ippolito, who is spearheading the Variable Media Initiative. "But now beta video tapes from the 1980s are unwatchable. Web projects are becoming difficult to read because they were created for earlier versions of browsers. Why should museums wait for a crisis?"
The questions Ippolito and his colleagues ask artists are very specific and technical. Beyond basic inquiries such as what plug-ins or server platforms are required for a work of Net art, for example, the questionnaire asks what authoring environment -- Dreamweaver? -- and what screen resolution -- 640 x 480? -- is used.
Theoretical questions such as "should original software be rendered in an algorithmic meta-language for future emulation" appear as well. The artist is asked whether such an option is preferred, discouraged, or unacceptable, among other choices. Curators, technicians and the artists themselves will then adapt the work to newer media when necessary.
Of course, the Guggenheim's suggested solution isn't a panacea.
"Collectors will ask what will happen when their hardware breaks. And there are always differences when a work is migrated (to a new format), so dilemmas will continue to exist," said John F. Simon Jr., a digital artist whose work appears in "DataDynamics," an exhibition of Web-based art that opened at the Whitney on March 22 in conjunction with the blockbuster "BitStreams" show.
The Guggenheim's paradigm for preservation beats earlier attempts, according to Net artist Mark Napier, who has Net artworks in both the "010101" show at SFMOMA and the "Data Dynamics" show at the Whitney.
"SFMOMA was interested in copying one of my websites, and by copying they meant capturing the entire site at one moment in time, like a snapshot, and presenting it on their own website," Napier said. "That was unacceptable. The piece was an evolving work of art. To freeze it in time would confuse viewers and be untrue to the original concept."
Napier thinks the ideal solution is to implement emulation software. But he also believes this is a pipe dream.
"Put it this way -- Netscape and Microsoft can't figure out how to create such software, and they've got the monetary resources and profit motive to do so," said Napier, who projects that he will simply allow for the rebuilding of the software used to adapt his work to new computer platforms when the time comes. "What's most important is that the piece seems the same to the viewer."
Ippolito hopes other institutions will contribute to the development of the initiative in an "open source" spirit. He states that the electronic questionnaire he's sent out will not be sold commercially.
Curators at other museums seem willing to accept such creative curatorial solutions.
"It certainly is a very interesting time," said Christiane Paul, new media curator at the Whitney. "Presenting Net art in a museum context entails its own kind of challenges, and the curator's work often becomes as experimental as the art itself."
