THE PRESERVATION OF BORN-DIGITAL ART
8th October 2004
CCA, Glasgow
- Papers
- Programme
- Briefing Paper
- Travel Information
- Further Reading
- Digital Art Preservation Inititatives: VMN, PANIC, Archiving the Avant Garde
Digital technologies are a ubiquitous presence in contemporary art practice, from production through to presentation and preservation. Born digital art employs technologies as its very own medium, exploring their inherent properties, conventions, contents, contexts, and potentials for interaction and participation. They may take the form of an installation or digital environment; a website or web intervention; custom software; or an attachment to an email. New media galleries and organizations have engaged in commissioning, facilitating, presenting, and, vitally, archiving digital artworks and projects. Indeed, several have formed on-line databases or assembled physical collections, which have in turn prompted international debate and research into issues of documentation, longer-term preservation and access. The challenges of the medium are many: hardware, software, operating systems, and browsers are threatened by obsolescence and supercession. There are also the difficulties of documenting such works, of reasserting their interactivity, and of recreating a specific context or environment. The Internet itself is an unstable medium subject to constant change and its own potential vulnerabilities. More recently, some museum and private collections have begun to acquire born digital artworks and face the task of developing plans or strategies for their long-term care. For the majority, however, acquisitions remain highly selective: what they can commit to is dictated by the long-term functionality, resource and maintenance implications that such artworks, particularly those with a ‘network-dependency’ or interactive element, can bear. The question of what is possible – across a range of collecting contexts - is only just being determined.