DIGITAL ART PRESERVATION
Restoring Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes was easy compared with the efforts needed to preserve new media - conservators merely stripped off layers of grime to revive his work. But what fate might digital art suffer centuries from now, when the Java apps, monitors, and keyboards used to create and display it no longer exist? The Guggenheim hopes to answer this question through its Variable Media Initiative, a program that encourages digital artists to help establish preservation guidelines long before their equipment, code, and lives become history. The goal: to gather adequate detail and know-how to sustain digital artwork.
In October, the museum will join forces with Montreal's Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, collecting information via an electronic survey. The survey will initially target artists commissioned by the Guggenheim, followed by those associated with Conceptual and Intermedia Arts Online, which represents organizations such as the Tate Gallery and the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. Ultimately, the Guggenheim hopes the survey will take on a life of its own, allowing other galleries and museums to use its open source code and contents to build similar databases.
Jon Ippolito, assistant media arts curator at the Guggenheim and head of the Variable Media Initiative, says the mostly essay-question format contains both meticulous technical queries and philosophical what-ifs. For instance, should the original software be replaced by something that creates a comparable viewer experience but alters the artwork's appearance? Their artists' answers - not just the original code or the Betacam videotapes and other traditional records - become the basis for emulation of their artwork.
"Preserving media is like preserving ice cream. Storage is a lousy strategy," explains Ippolito, who hates the museum habit of hoarding outdated software and hardware for posterity. "You're better off getting ahold of the recipe."
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