journal [active]

this inquiry will focus on the conservation of digital art, or works at the intersection of art and technology. i will be look at two specific perspectives: the conservator and the artist. to collect information, i will be executing two tracks. the first will be a series of in person and email interviews with professionals in both fields. the second will be the act of creating 3 original artworks that build on a series of works started last spring. during both of these tracks, i will be keep an active loose journal to track thoughts, questions and observations that i have through the process. the inquiry will end with a new work of art and an initial dialogue about the subject. the end materials will be organized with an eye towards a presentation / lecture format. paper in progress here

THOUGHTS -------------------------- the other issue that spurred out of the posting below is: how involved are digital artists when it comes to preservation? and would a conservator need to be a computer scientist or engineer in order to have a dialogue with them? documentation, recreation and emulation all make logical sense. however the bigger issue that i can't find anyone addressing is: what background should digital art conservators have? do they need to be computer scientists or engineers? so that they can better work with artist.

CURRENT READING LIST Art That Puts You In The Picture, Like It Or Not - Sarah Boxer - NYTimes 4/27/2005 Critics Notebook Museums Seek Methods For Preserving Digital Art - Scott Carleson - Chronicle Of Higher Education Information Technology Screen Savers - Carly Berwick - http://artnewsonline.com/pastarticle.cfm?art_id=1170 How To Preserve Digital Art - Kendra Mayfield - http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53712,00.html Preserving The Rhizome Artbase - Richard Rinehart Sept 2002 http://rhizome.org/artbase/report.htm Digital Preservation: Recording The Recoding - The Documentary Strategy - Alain Depocas http://www.aec.at/festival2001/texte/depocas_e.html Information Arts - Stephen Wilson Digital Art - Christiane Paul Variable Media Initiative - http://www.guggenheim.org/variablemedia/variable_media_initiative.html International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art - http://www.incca.org/ ** Archiving the Avant-Garde - Documenting and Preserving Digital / Variable Media Art -- http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about_bampfa/avantgarde.html A System of Formal Notation for Scoring Works of Digital and Variable Media Art (PDF) Appendices to A System of Formal Notation for Scoring Works of Digital and Variable Media Art (PDF) The Straw that Broke the Museum's Back: Documenting and Preserving Digital Art for the Next Century (http://switch.sjsu.edu/nextswitch/switch_engine/front/front.php?artc=233) UC Berkeley Symposium on Preserving Digital/Media Art Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation - (http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/rothenberg/contents.html) Internet Archive - http://www.archive.org/ The Long Now Foundation - http://www.longnow.org/ DSpace - http://www.dspace.org/ PADI - Variable Media Art --- http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/topics/132.html V2 : Capturing Unstable Media - http://capturing.projects.v2.nl/ CRUMB : upstart media bliss -- http://www.crumbweb.org/crumb/phase3/index.html RECENT ADDITIONS: An Experiment in Using Emulation to Preserve Digital Publications - Jeff Rothenberg (RAND-Europe) (PDF) Permanence Through Change: The Variable media Approach - he Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum - http://variablemedia.net/e/preserving/html/var_pub_index.html Physical Computing: A Design Studio that Bridges Art, Science, and Engineering (PDF) Exploring relationships between learning, artifacts, physical space, and computing (PDF) CoolPaint: Direct Interaction Painting (PDF) Art of the Network - the first decade of net.art : notes for Web Archiving Conference presentation. Developing Strategies for the conservation of installations incorporating time-based media with reference to Gary Hills Between Cinema and a Hard Place

QUESTIONS BEING POSED: the artist: Can you talk a bit about how you arrive at where you are skills and creative wise? Can you talk a bit about how you approach the materials of your medium of choice? How do you address the support issue when creating your work? Are you concerned with the longevity of your pieces? Please elaborate. Does you feel an artist has any responsibility towards the preservation of their own work? the conservator: Can you talk about the current role of conservators with regards to digital / electronic art? How are conservators adapting? What processes / methods are being employed to adapt to the unique qualities of digital art? How effective are these processes / methods in your opinion? Can you outline and expound upon the specific strategies your working with to address the issues that arise with digital art conservation? Can you discuss any shortcomings you might see with the strategites of migration, emulation and recreation? RESPONSES NON_EDITED [pending phone conversation today] Dear Tim, It would be my pleasure. You've touched on a topic most central to what I/we do here at SFMOMA in the care of contemporary art. What's your timeframe? Best, Jill Sterrett //////////////////////// Hi Timothy, please send my best to Tom. I would love to help but am comletely snowed under and leaving for the holidays tomorrow. I am concerned about archival and like the model proposed by Rick Rinehart where artists fill out a detailed survey about what is important to preserve in their work when the medium evolves... Ken Ken Goldberg Professor of IEOR and EECS, UC Berkeley 4189 Etcheverry Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720 http://goldberg.berkeley.edu goldberg@berkeley.edu (510) 643-9565 ////////////////// Answers below. Good luck with the research. I'm curious to hear more about what you find. mark Can you talk a bit about how you approach the materials of your medium of choice? I work in software. I consider Java and OpenGL to be my medium. The final presentation of the work (whether as a projection, or on a flat panel, or on the web) are different framings of the work. The artwork itself is actually the algorithm, the logical structure that generates the aesthetic experience. That's what I make, that's the "intellectual property" of the artwork. How do you address the support issue when creating your work? I haven't addressed this formally. I choose to support my work and keep it running but I don't have a written agreement with collectors. My work is deliberately simple, with minimal hardware that is easily replaced (ie. a standard laptop, a flat panel, no custom hardware), because I don't want to get into repairing customized hardware. Can you touch on an experience where technical difficulties arose with the installation or exhibition of your work? If so, how did you overcome thesis hurdles? All technology has technological difficulties. It's just part of the process. There's no such thing as a "simple" program. Programming. software, computers are by their nature intensely complex systems. I did work with a video motion detection system in one piece and discovered that the ceiling of the room was too low for the camera to get a full field of view, and that daylight would reflect off the floor and change the cameras view of the area. I used a wider lens to (partially) correct the low ceiling, and adjusted the software settings to account for the daylight glare, but in the end I realized that this type of artwork requires very controlled environment. I decided to pursue interactive software instead, where I have more control and the hardware/software is much more tested and stable. With the work I make now I find the interface is the biggest challenge. The artwork has to communicate clearly and simply. The viewer has to be able to intuitively understand how to engage in the work (at least to how to begin engaging). I worked with motion detection briefly and considered other forms of sensors and detectors before I decided that the mouse was the best interface element because everybody already knows what a mouse is and how it works. It is a ubiquitous device that has become a recognizable standard. When people see a mouse they know that they are expected to interact with a piece and they already have some idea of how they might do that (ie. click, click and drag, double-click). And since a mouse is so common, the viewer does not focus on the mouse. They focus on what they can do within the artwork. Can you talk a bit about how you arrive at where you are skills and creative wise? I went to art school for a BFA in painting. I worked as a programmer when I got out of school (self taught). I make money by developing web-based database systems, mostly for the financial industry. I started making artwork for the web in 1995. Are you concerned with the longevity of your pieces? Please elaborate. Concerned may not be the right word. I'm intrigued by the desire for permanence. Art is supposed to be permanent. Many people believe software is by nature not permanent. Both beliefs are flawed. Many of my artworks explore this idea of permanence, and I look at the preservation of software as one aesthetic element of the work. Also, as an artist and a craftsman I want to be able to choose how long an artwork will last. Some are meant to be ephemeral while others are meant to last, and I look for ways to control that aspect of the work. Software is tricky, but with effort can potentially live far longer than material work (as a musical score can be faithfully performed centuries after the composer dies). I am concerned that ignorant people make broad and incorrect assumptions about the durability of software. And I'm frustrated by the scale of the task. I have a LOT of code that I'd like to archive, just as part of my own house-cleaning. Does you feel an artist has any responsibility towards the preservation of their own work? Ideally someone else does this. The artist should be making art. In reality though it's up to the artist. I have not yet found (or heard of) an arts organization that has an even a rudimentary ability to archive digital artwork. It's a huge topic, and very daunting for arts institutions to even consider at this point. Please feel free to add anything below that you feel relevant or particularly interesting about the subject of digital art conservation: One reason paintings have propagated so widely in our culture is that painting is such a simple and standard technology. Anybody can install and understand a painting, at least on the physical level. At this time in history, digital art is growing rapidly and is in a very experimental stage. There are few standards. As much as artists dislike standards, art flourishes when the ground rules are very simple and accessible (ie. oil on canvas, brush and pigment, the plain white surface of the canvas -- all these are very simple forms). It's easy to begin painting, but it may take a lifetime to master. Eventually standards will arise in software and hardware, and that will change the landscape of digital art, both in terms of how it is made, and how it is preserved. ///////////////////////// Hi Timothy, Thanks for the inquiry. I'll certainly do my best. I also recommend that you contact artists and curators who are directly working in the area of conservation of digital work, such as Alexei Shulgin, Jon Ippolito, and Lauren Cornell from Rhizome. More soon. Yours golan //////////////////// Timothy, OK IÕm game. Here are some quick replies but feel free to contact me if you have any further Qs. Please give my best to Tom. Cheers from LA, Michael Naimark http://www.naimark.net Visiting Associate Professor, Interactive Media Division USC School of Cinema and Television http://interactive.usc.edu =============================== Can you talk a bit about how you approach the materials of your Ê medium of choice? ItÕs always concept first. But with that said, the concepts I find most compelling usually deal with possibilities and implications of new technologies. How do you address the support issue when creating your work? Kick me, but I almost always need additional technical help Êfor my projects. So the way I address it is by making sure I have a good and honest relationship with my technical collaborators. Can you touch on an experience where technical difficulties arose Ê with the installation or exhibition of your work? If so, how did you Ê overcome thesis hurdles? I work very hard to make sure my work is as bullet proof as possible. IÕd rather be conservative but working rather than risky and broken. (Not everyone agrees with this.) To me, itÕs about Òcalculated risk.Ó See [ http://tinyurl.com/9yq72 ] Can you talk a bit about how you arrive at where you are skills and Ê creative wise? Always researching and often making things. Are you concerned with the longevity of your pieces? Please elaborate. IÕve had the good fortune to have worked with Exploratorium people on some of my installations, where they helped make them exhibit-worthy. It was clear that experience counts here. I learned a lot but also learned to respect them. Does you feel an artist has any responsibility towards the Ê preservation of their own work? Good question. I hadnÕt thought much about it until this past spring, when i had my first retrospective show, including works from the late 1970s. [ http://www.williamsongallery.net/naimark/ ] . I donÕt think an artist has the responsibility but it certainly helps if the artist gives it some thought. Please feel free to add anything below that you feel relevant or Ê particularly interesting about the subject of digital art conservation: