Digital technology is so ephemeral that an artwork created using a G4 Mac, Flash 4.0 software and C++ coding today may no longer be viewable 10, 20 or even 200 years from now.
Film canisters are collecting dust after 75 years of nonuse, video formats from the 1980s are becoming unreadable and Web projects created just minutes ago are already becoming stale.
As the half-life of these media becomes shorter and shorter, variable media art is in a race against technological obsolescence.
That's why it's critical that these artworks are documented and preserved now, before they are lost indefinitely, observers say.
"With digital art, there's no room for things to fall between the cracks," said Richard Rinehart, director of digital media for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. "If you don't do something to preserve it within a span of five years, it's not going to survive.
"Some works of digital art are already gone. Our time frame is not decades, it's years, at most."
A consortium of art institutions is launching a new project, Archiving the Avant Garde: Documenting and Preserving Variable Media Art, which will propose a set of rules to document and preserve variable media art.
The collaboration includes the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org, the Franklin Furnace Archive and the Cleveland Performance Art Festival and Archive.
Arts organizations have sponsored and exhibited variable-media art for decades. But recently, Internet and "born-digital" multimedia art have entered the mainstream with watershed exhibitions such as the 2000 Whitney Biennial and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's 0101010: Art in Technological Times.
"Digital art is increasingly on the radar, because it is a time when the challenges it provoked to Jurassic collecting philosophies are starting to be overcome," said the Guggenheim's associate curator Jon Ippolito.
"It is clear that digital art will be of long-term historical significance," said Mark Tribe, executive director of Rhizome.org. "Now, more than before, there's a broad-based consensus about the cultural significance of digital art."
While there are standards for preserving more traditional forms of art, such as photography and printmaking, those standards don't yet exist for digital art. Instead, individual institutions have developed their own digital art preservation programs.
The Guggenheim launched its Variable Media Initiative to preserve performance, installation, conceptual and digital art.
In 1988, Rhizome.org formed ArtBase as a community-driven archive for Net art. The collection has since evolved into a collection of digital and other variable-media works.
"The new-media field is exploding right now," Tribe said. "Few organizations are trying to archive this movement in a more comprehensive way."
Archiving the Avant Garde will unite these efforts by developing a model that will be scalable to other institutions, from small nonprofits to large museums.
"Nobody knows the final, definitive answer for how to preserve this digital cultural heritage (over the next few centuries)," Rinehart said. "This project is really just a subset of the larger problem."
The project proposes four strategies for preserving digital art: documentation, migration, emulation and re-creation.
While documentation is a traditional preservation strategy, other methods are unique to art created in variable media, each posing its own challenges.
"These works of digital art and Internet art are actually more like performance and music than they are like paintings and sculptures," Rinehart said. "They can be re-performed throughout history with various instruments.
"When digital artists create a work of art, they are not creating an object anymore. There is no one original form. There is no original authentic object."
The Guggenheim uses a variable media questionnaire to ask artists to describe their work in a way that is independent of any platform or medium so it can be resurrected once its current medium becomes obsolete.
Artists designate whether original versions of their work could be installed, performed, interactive, reproduced, duplicated, encoded or networked. They also indicate whether future versions could be stored, migrated, emulated or re-created.
"This is a completely different way of thinking about art," Ippolito said. "It's no longer about storage. It's about preserving intent, rather than bits or bricks.
"It's about collecting the authority and experience to recognize an artwork in a medium that hasn't existed yet. That's a pretty radical step."
This sort of information will be useful if, for instance, a website created in the year 2000 with Flash 4 becomes unviewable in 2010, when that version is no longer supported.
"Our goal is to create the most comprehensive archive we can," Tribe said. "We need to be gathering information now (in a methodical way) ... so we know what software we need to emulate 20 years from now."
"We need to get artists thinking from the get-go about how to make those choices," Ippolito agreed.
But art in variable media can't always be stored, migrated or emulated.
"A lot of times storage equals death for digital mediums," Ippolito said.
Works that are dependent on data mining, such as Mark Napier's piece, "Shredder" (an alternative browser that dices Web pages into digital art), only work in networked environments, so storage isn't a viable solution.
When artworks are emulated or migrated to new technologies, there is often some loss and degradation from the original.
Emulation can be expensive and inconsistent with the artist's intent. Modification often occurs when obsolete hardware is executed on different equipment, like a game of Pong running on Windows 95.
Re-creation can also be problematic. Artists must decide whether they want their works to be translated into media that don't even exist yet. In 20 years, websites written in HTML may no longer be available.
"We don't presume to know what's going to be important 50 years from now," Tribe said. The challenge lies in "staying faithful to an artist's original concept."
Inventing a formal notation for a form of art that is inherently variable is no easy task, directors admit.
Capturing an artist's original intent can be difficult when trying to preserve a work created by an artist who is already deceased or who is unwilling to translate a work.
"It took centuries to evolve a system of notation for musical scores," Rinehart said. "We need to create that same kind of consistency and invent a form of standardization that is to digital art what notation is to music."
