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. A Race Against Time
While there have always been special cases that challenge conservators, such as how to immortalize performance-based artworks, preservation was once relatively straightforward. Particular techniques may have been complex, but the process was mostly object-centered and the concept relatively easy to wrap one’s mind around. The Mona Lisa will always be the Mona Lisa—the canvas upon which Leonardo da Vinci rendered it may need upkeep, but it will not become obsolete or morph into another form. A good chunk of tomorrow’s masterpieces, however, are a different story, with digital platforms such as the Internet shape-shifting before our eyes. Many of these works also are interactive, growing almost as living organisms in time, such as Mark Napier’s net.flag at the Guggenheim, which allows visitors to the project’s Web site to add their own touches to the work.

“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.

Conservators of new media also face another daunting challenge—the race against time. “The digital world is moving so quickly, and obsolescence is a regular occurrence,” said Carol Stringari, senior conservator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim. “That means we need to find solutions at a rapid pace—decisions have to be made for emulating hardware or migrating software; we have to find out what parameters for change the artists are willing to accept, what equipment should be preserved and archived. We are not accustomed to moving at such a fast pace in the world of conservation. Research takes time and funding, and solutions can’t be found at the rate one might like.”

Still, it’s the search for solutions that makes conservation a gratifying field, said Jim Coddington, MoMA’s chief conservator. “[New media] is challenging our definitions of what art is, and that challenges our definitions of what conservation is,” he said.

Collaborative Responses
Art institutions have developed an array of approaches to preserving digital media. One of the highest-profile is the Variable Media Network, a collaborative effort among the Berkeley Art Museum, Franklin Furnace Archive (New York), the Guggenheim, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology (Montreal), Performance Art Festival + Archives (Cleveland), the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s Rhizome.org (New York), and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis).

“Variable media” refers not just to digital works but to all types of artworks with ephemeral formats, including performance art. The Variable Media Network, developed in 2001, organizes conferences, exhibitions, case studies, and tools in an effort to encourage artists to “define their work independently from medium so that the work can be translated once its current medium is obsolete,” according to the group’s Web site. “This requires artists to envision acceptable forms their work might take in new mediums, and to pass on guidelines for recasting work in a new form once the original has expired.”

Tools include an interactive questionnaire that prompts artists to state their ideal preferences for installation and exhibition, as well as brainstorm philosophies and methods for emulating or reinterpreting works later on. Linked to a database, the answers are shared among members of the Variable Media Network.

MoMA also has worked on a multi-institutional basis, Wharton said, as part of a consortium called Media Matters, aimed at establishing “best practice guidelines for care of time-based media works of art,” which includes SFMOMA, the Tate Galleries, and the San Francisco–based New Art Trust, established in 1997 by collectors Pamela and Richard Kramlich to support research on conserving new media.

“The most significant development is certainly the collaborative response the field is taking,” Wharton added. “Conservators are no longer working alone. The net is much wider now, and we work with people from many technical backgrounds, including the artists themselves.”

MoMA, which in 2006 opened a department of media that focuses on works involving sound and moving images, is also conducting an ongoing survey and in-depth research of all the media works in its collection, a process that includes interviewing artists. “The result is a report that attempts to answer questions that may not be asked for another 20 to 30 years,” Wharton said. “We try to imagine problems that will come up in the future, and provide answers today, given our access to the artist and today’s technologies.”

In addition, a handful of museums, including the Berkeley Art Museum, are testing the Media Art Notation System, a new technique using computer programming languages to document digital works.

Thinking Ahead
What does all this mean for the future of conservation? Back in 2001, the landmark “010101” exhibition at SFMOMA proclaimed that, with the arrival of the digital age, “Neither art, nor those who make it, show it, and look at it, can ever be the same again.”

But when asked whether new media is changing the face of conservation, Rinehart and his colleagues were more reserved. While the drive for new solutions is important, older methods of preservation have not fallen by the wayside, according to Rinehart, who says most museums are still filled with “regular, old-fashioned ‘analog’ works”—sculptures, paintings, photographs—which require more traditional conservation techniques.

And, Wharton added, it’s not the first time conservators have found themselves facing the unknown. “We aren’t inventing a new field,” he said, “but building on a thoughtful practice that has tackled equally troubling problems in the past, such as whether to keep musical instruments playing and clocks running, while risking using them up for present generations. Equally vexing are questions of treating sacred objects, and, more recently, preserving ephemeral media of conceptual artists. “New media offers a new set of questions, but our field is resilient and accustomed to lively debate.”