Conserving Pixels, Bits, and Bytes

Conserving Pixels, Bits, and Bytes

Photo © 2007 Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, courtesy Museum of Modern Art

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, "Our Second Date" (2004)

Photo courtesy University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Shirley Shor, "Landslide" (2004)

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“Digital art had been collected by a few museums, such as the Walker Art Center, but it was really at the turn of the century when long-term preservation became widely recognized as a big problem,” said Rinehart, digital media director and adjunct curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and associate director for public programs at the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Two landmark exhibitions—the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “010101: Art in Technological Times” and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “BitStreams”—spotlighted technology’s growing influence in the art world and garnered media attention in 2000 and 2001. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York also hosted a much talked-about symposium, “Preserving the Immaterial: A Conference on Variable Media,” in 2001, and around the same time the Berkeley museum received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts for “Archiving the Avant-Garde: Documenting and Preserving Variable Media Art,” the first national consortium project aimed at finding new ways to preserve ephemeral and technical mediums—seminal events signaling a “sea change” for conservators, according to Rinehart.

“Before that, there were, of course, many digital artists and exhibitions, but they were largely ignored by the mainstream museums and press,” he said.

But insiders watching the market saw the shift coming even earlier, said Glenn Wharton, special projects conservator at the Museum of Modern Art and research scholar at New York University’s Conservation Center for the Institute of Fine Arts. “Artists and galleries started selling editioned video works and media installations in the 1990s,” he said. “By defining their scarcity, their economic value increased and they became ‘collectible.’ Museums could no longer purchase rights to show uneditioned copies of video works, so they began collecting them—parallel to more traditional works. As electronic works began accumulating in collections, problems of equipment obsolescence began to come up, requiring new formats and new display technologies.”

Wharton was quick to point out that new media conservation is still in its nascent stages. “I’m not sure that most museums really do recognize that conserving new media is an expensive, complex undertaking,” he said.

“The key issues are twofold,” Rinehart said. “First, a technical problem: how to preserve for the long term—centuries—work in media that become obsolete every 18 months. Second, an artistic problem: how to preserve the right aspects of the artwork and not focus too much on the aforementioned media. This is new for museums; museums tend to think about preserving form.”

Balancing these technical (writing new code, reformatting and backing up files, updating equipment) and conceptual (staying true to the artist’s original intent) concerns is where conserving new media can get dicey. “As technological changes are made over time to keep the work alive, there can be subtle and not-so-subtle variations that dramatically alter a work—in its pacing or interactivity, for instance,” Wharton said.