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Questions on Technical Standards in the Care of Time-Based and Digital Art

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Questions on Technical Standards in the Care of Time-Based and Digital Art The Smithsonian Interview Project: Questions on Technical Standards in the Care of Time-Based and Digital Art Ten Insights from Artists and Experts in the Field Produced by the Smithsonian’s Time Based Media and Digital Art Working Group and the Smithsonian Office of Policy and Analysis July 2014 1 Introduction A hundred years from now, how can museums plug in and turn on today’s time-based media and digital artworks? Time-based media artworks1 are characteristically unstable, unique, and complex. They often depend on operating systems, materials, and hardware that rapidly obsolesce. They may rely on audiences interacting with them in specific environments that will not exist in the future. Future installers may not be sure exactly what they can and cannot do with these works if they wish to respect an artist’s original intent. In light of these considerations, what are the prospects for effective stewardship of time-based media artworks over the long haul? In 2013, interviewers from the Smithsonian’s Time-Based Media Art Working Group and the Smithsonian Office of Policy and Analysis posed this question to over two dozen experts2 in the creation, curation, installation, conservation, and preservation of time- based media art and related materials. The interviews focused on two themes: The role of standards, guidelines, and professional best practices in the long-term preservation of time-based media art. Appropriate education and training for time-based media-art preservation professionals. Despite the enormous challenges of long-term preservation of media art, the interviewees were optimistic about the prospects for continuous improvement of practices in this area. The following document presents a brief, thematic summary of some of the key messages to emerge from these interviews. For those who want to delve into the details of one or more interviews, full transcripts of most of the interviews are available for reading on the Smithsonian’s Time-Based Media Art website.3 1 Time-Based Media and Digital Art is artwork with a specific duration including film, video, digital, audio, computer-based, web-based, performance, and installation art. Time-Based Media and Digital Art includes art works with technology-based components that present specific challenges for conservation, documentation, installation, and acquisition. 2 The list of the interviewees is available at the end of the report. 3 Some quotations here have been edited for brevity and flow from the corresponding passages in the full transcripts. 2 Ten Insights 1. Preservation Is Possible The experts interviewed for this study agreed that the current situation is cause for concern, and that caring for media artworks is an immense challenge.4 However, they insisted that preservation is possible—and noted many ways in which museums, galleries, art centers, and universities throughout the United States and abroad are already developing and implementing solutions. Caitlin Jones, Executive Director of the Western Front Society in Vancouver, was clear: “We don’t have to despair. This is not an impossible task. We just have to figure out how we can scale it so we can do it.” Contemporary art conservator Christine Frohnert described the progress that has been made in these terms: As a field, we might be about 15 years old. So we’re really, really young and evolving. But … there has been a lot of research, a lot of publications, and a huge body of knowledge developed. Of course, not everything has been covered yet, but we are certainly not where we started 15 years ago. Curator and scholar Sarah Cook believes that successful preservation is largely a matter of getting collectors to value the works enough to dedicate the necessary resources to their care: There is an amazing misconception that media art and time-based art cannot be preserved, and that it is immaterial. I think we have to smash that one on the head, because anything can be preserved if the money and time are put into it. The problem with this is that they don’t want to put the money into it—the collectors, or the investors, or whoever. There is no sense of the value of it, or [if there is,] it is not being articulated. … It can be preserved; it just needs investment. The University of Sunderland’s Beryl Graham placed the issue in a wider philosophical context: Organizations often cite preservation problems as a reason for not collecting new media art, but I think it is more complicated than that. It reflects a more general unfamiliarity with [media] art, and a humanist distrust of technology. Obviously, there are issues there, but nothing that a skilled preservationist can’t deal with. 4 Artworks under the umbrella TBMA are not equally vulnerable. For example, video, film, and digital photography are well understood by conservators and are stable for acquisition and display. Technologically multifaceted works, e.g., net-art, software-based art, and interactive art, are less so. 3 2. Be Prepared to Meet Each Work on Its Own Terms Interviewees were asked if there are general approaches to similar types, classes, or components of time-based media works, or if each work needs individual attention. Most answered with some variant of “it depends.” Mark Heller, a media technology consultant at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) offered these thoughts on how that organization deals with software-based art: For software-based works, there are a lot of commonalities, but there is a lot of variability too. I was [once] asked, “What will you do when you have to deal with 1,000 works?” My answer was, “Well, we have about eight right now. So I don’t think we’re going to have to deal with 1,000 any time soon.” We’re giving individual attention to all of these works because things are just emerging. … Hopefully when 1,000 works in a collection is the norm, we will have some kind of structure. We’re exploring, discovering, and defining that [structure] now. Although most interviewees shared Heller’s hopes for greater systematization in the future, many also stressed that organizations need to be prepared to meet media artworks on their own terms. While there may be established preservation practices for certain components of a work, works often consist of multiple components that interact in unique and often unexpected ways. Christiane Paul of The New School’s School of Media Studies put it this way: The components to be assessed consist of materials (hardware, media displays, natural or manufactured materials, sensors, mechanisms); sources (video sources, generic software, custom software, key concepts); and environments (including the gallery space). … You have to develop approaches for each and every component. … What film or video requires is so different from what a piece of net art or a virtual reality installation requires. We have to basically assess each project on a case-by-case basis. For works that have an interactive dimension, audience contributions might be considered yet another component to factor into the mix. Faced with this complexity, Paul Messier, founder of the American Institute for Conservation’s (AIC’s) Electronic Media Group, suggests thinking in terms of “preservation systems” that consist in the flexible application of general guidelines. Such systems can be seen as a middle way between applying rigid rules and reinventing the wheel with each new media work that comes through the door: We are trying to come up with preservation systems—portfolios of practices—to do the most good for the most objects. … If you signed up to take a bunch of rules and live by those rules all the time, this is probably the wrong profession for you. [Instead, you need to] take some broad guidelines and approaches that will do the most good for the most objects, and then be intelligent and flexible enough to know when those guidelines are irrelevant and need to be reworked. … You need to know that if they are 4 applied to this particular work of art, it will simply die. You need to know when to put the rules aside and meet the artwork on its own terms. New York University media archivist Mona Jimenez raised a similar point when she noted, “It’s not that you don’t need to [individually] evaluate every time-based media work; but the actions you take will be the same in some cases.” 3. Formal Standards Per Se Are Not the Answer Interviewees agreed that formal standards coming out of related fields can be helpful for addressing parts of the preservation puzzle. However, most had doubts about the idea of formal standards for time-based media art preservation per se. These doubts arise from factors such as the wide variability within the category of media art, the rapid evolution of the underlying technologies, and the tendency of artists to stretch or break the “rules” that govern non-artistic uses of the relevant technologies. New York digital archivist Kara van Malssen summed it up in these words: Standards with a capital “S” … are more concerned with market factors and questions about the underlying technical infrastructure of things. ... Those standards don’t really tell you how to preserve the works. The Whitney Museum’s Christiane Paul offered this view: I definitely see the need for standards, but … there simply is no silver bullet. That is what every conservator would presumably agree on when it comes to preservation in general, and it has not changed in the case of digital art. Jeff Rothenberg, an independent Information Science consultant, put it in these terms: To the extent that we can find universal or generic solutions, I think that’s a good thing.
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