Introduction

Relying on electronic devices and digital files, new media artworks are sensitive to technology’s constant upgrades and possible obsolescence. A single dysfunctional file may lead to the permanent loss of an artwork’s content. Aware of such vulnerabilities and urged by their duty to care for objects for future generations, museums have established various initiatives for collecting and preserving media art when other collectors and art dealers are relatively deterred by the difficulty of storing it. After years of attempts, museums have accumulated plenty of experience in developing documentation models, restoring devices and software, and better balancing conservation ethics with the replacement of media artworks’ components.

Nonetheless, as the increase of media artworks and the progression of technological obsoletion take place rapidly, organizations need more proactive preservation strategies. Thus, museum initiatives and preservationists have encouraged artists to consider how to maintain their oeuvres on their own before any artwork acquisitions happen. Though long-term preservation is not always the end goal of many new media artists, some artists have indeed attempted to document and archive the art-making process and their works to instruct future practices. Given all the different approaches, this article investigates major strategies and tactics adopted by artists who advocate for new media art preservation as part of artistic practices.

The Scope of the Study

This research focuses on analyzing existing interviews with or case studies about new media artists and their publication. Artists include Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Conor McGarrigle, Cory Arcangel, as well as new media artists interviewed by information scientist Colin Post (see Figure 1). The reason for choosing them is that they have actively shared diverse viewpoints about whether and how to safeguard media art as artists, rather than conservators.

Popular Strategies and Practices Among Artists

As shown in Figure 1, keywords including “archive,” “reuse of materials,” and “share digital objects” stood out when new media artists were discussing maintaining their works. While some of those interviewed by Post were indifferent to, skeptical about, or even against preservation practices, other interviewees did refer to more professional concepts such as open-source platforms that collaboratively record intellectual efforts. They had at least some good habits, such as documenting, controlling file formats, or adopting widely supported software to avoid encountering inaccessible data caused by antiquated platforms. However, none of them touched upon the exact models or tools they were using, nor does there seem to be a consensus about the best practices either done by individuals or suggested by institutions. Just like what Post admitted, “there is a disconnect between these artists and documentation tools generated by institutions, arts organizations, and information professionals.” Such a gap is undoubtedly concerning, especially when many new media artworks may never intersect organizations or receive institutional care before they finally disappear, worrying preservationists who see the bigger picture.

While it is too soon to assert that so-called mainstream strategies and tactics of preservation exist among artists, the practices of some artists, namely Lozano-Hemmer and Conor McGarrigle, may be potential exemplars. Below are their models.

Frameworks Proposed by Two Artists

1.    Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Four-Stage Model

Artists attempting to create systems for preservation must consider forms of documentation and storage security. Among the artists included in this article, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has put forward the most comprehensive model. In his manifesto from 2015, Lozano-Hemmer divides the framework of artists' preservation work into four phases: “before making,” “while making,” “after making,” and “dealing with collectors.” As he indicates, after giving up the idea that ephemerality is key to their creation, media artists can set off an art-making process secured by appropriate digital tools. For example, they can utilize versioning systems to store code, prototypes, or manuals, and they can list all artistic components in bills of materials (see Figure 3).

Rather than just providing supplementary documentation, Lozano-Hemmer also emphasizes the direct alteration of an art piece to make it less fragile. As far as he is concerned, moving parts and outmoded hardware should be limited or even eliminated to ensure a piece's functionality in the long run. Such an idea is not strange for some contemporary artists. Those who prefer stability rather than ephemerality sometimes even ask conservators for help when selecting materials, though they may not have a motive of catering to collectors’ needs like what Lozano-Hemmer does.  

When it comes to the art-making or “while making” stage, Lozano-Hemmer recommends his peers create video recordings and “Read Me” documents about how a media artwork runs. All such additional documentation, as well as artistic program files, should have backup copies stored in external drives to deal with unexpected data loss. While backing up sounds like a common practice, only by following solid strategies, such as the 3-2-1 rule that requires the combination of multiple media (e.g. off-site storage plus cloud-based repository), can people have safer backups. However, this still cannot fully ensure data integrity unless all the backups are tested regularly and the frequency of backing up is adequate to minimize data loss that happens between backups. After artists finish preparing these materials for either potential collectors or themselves, they can further develop packages, which include technical support available for collectors, certificates of an artwork's authenticity and provenance, or substitutes for broken components. It is from this “dealing with collectors” phase that artists' preservation work starts having a clearer overlap with institutional practices. Consequently, Lozano-Hemmer's framework helps save some work for organizations like museums, which spend much time interviewing artists to gather information about works collected.

2. Conor McGarrigle’s Emergency Response Model

Compared to Lozano-Hemmer, McGarrigle attends to how to save a media art piece in danger. In his case studies about his hands-on experience of restoring networked art, he highlights “conveying the context” as the first critical strategy before any technical issues are solved. Such a priority exists because of networked art's inherent reliance on the context, which consists of the ever-changing internet culture and the content accessed through all the external links. Once there is a severe link rot (see Figure 5), the loss of contextual information and relevant core meaning can be detrimental. As a result, artists need to deliberately consider the potential of recovering the context in order to justify their later actions of preserving media art, which may be better off when being transient. Therefore, it is still inevitable for artists to undergo the first stage suggested by Lozano-Hemmer, during which they will determine whether to accept preservation at all.

Like Lozano-Hemmer, who combines offline and cloud storage, McGarrigle adopted an “online version - offline copy - documentation mode” approach to saving his net art, "Spook...". When dead links appeared more frequently, McGarrigle first made "complete copies of the file structures of not only the core site but all the externally linked sites and the sites linked from them to three levels of depth." Namely, all the available relevant media files were downloaded to create an offline version of the work, which was essentially an archive. However, due to the fast, irreversible link rot, the work ultimately lost most webpages it originally contained. Thus, McGarrigle transitioned to the documentation mode as a compromise. He began to continually replace or delete links to keep the artwork “alive.” In this case, he no longer worried about the variability in the artwork’s meaning, as there was no way to recreate the context apart from maintaining the proof of the artwork's existence. While McGarrigle’s concerns are more conceptual, they help to reveal the difference between the ethics of artists’ preservation efforts and those of conservators. Unlike conservators, who are bounded by the ethics of ensuring the authenticity of digital art against an acceptable level of variance, artists have the flexibility to redefine their work or overhaul core components during the process of preservation.

3. Model Comparison

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Conor McGarrigle share in common that both of them recognize the significance of separate storage, various versions, and necessary documentation, no matter whether their goal is proactive preservation or the rescue of artworks. The difference is that Lozano-Hemmer directly takes collectors' long-term needs into account due to artists' pursuit of being memorialized, while McGarrigle perceives artists' efforts as a basis for institutional success in preservation. Though they both foresee the erosion of an artwork, Lozano-Hemmer is apparently more active in preventing that from happening. For example, he suggests that artists should program idle modes or automatic shutdowns for their piece in case of collectors' negligence. The reason for such a tactic may be the difficulty of repairing overloaded or unfunctional items. According to him, "providing technical support can be a nightmare in media art," even though the artist is attentive enough to collectors' consideration compared to those interviewed by Post. In comparison with Lozano-Hemmer, McGarrigle is more open to artworks' ultimate exit and their transition to historical materials without explicitly showing an intent to get favored by collectors. Nevertheless, he admits that "for institutional digital art conservation initiatives to be successful, they must originate from a pre-existing culture of preservation within digital art communities," and artists' efforts at early stages need to be "supported by institutional initiatives." Such statements indicate that he still considers artists' preservation actions as something under the umbrella of institutions.

A Prototype System for Artists

While preservation can be an independent topic, artists often include the preservation process in their digital infrastructure. Lozano-Hemmer is not the only artist who incorporates documentation, archives, and digital preservation as part of their business. A case study by Ben Fino-Radin about the database in artist Cory Arcangel’s studio clearly shows how strategies like version control and various storage spaces, which Lozano-Hemmer has suggested, can be enabled in one system.

According to Fino-Radin, Arcangel’s studio adopted an intellectual and administrative system to manage transactional data and collector information in addition to the metadata of each art piece. While the system, FileMaker Pro, often serves enterprise-level needs for data management, artists also need to accommodate software and hardware for storing the increasing size of data. To simplify the setup, Fino-Radin, as a preservationist working with the studio, designed a system shown below.

Despite being proposed in 2015, it is not outdated due to its flexibility resulting from the changeable storage methods and applications used. As shown by Figure 7, the system not only separates local servers to three locations but also utilizes a cloud-based storage backup, which allows the artists to access their files at multiple places or remotely. According to Ben Fino-Radin, artists can also use alternative cloud-based solutions other than Dropbox on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, the system leaves enough room for users to add plug-ins to secure data fixity, the bit-level integrity of digital files, and to assign memory units to save and recover older versions of files. For artists about to embark on digital preservation, this system is relatively understandable and affordable regardless of artists' purposes since it does not include obscure concepts or overly high-end equipment.

Conclusion

Compared to those interviewed by Post, it seems less difficult for organizations to collaborate with artists like Lozano-Hemmer and McGarrigle, which to some extent ensure the consistency between personal and institutional preservation efforts. As for artists like Archagel, though their data management actions mainly benefit the daily business operation, they are open to and familiar with digital preservation. Organizations can help identify and recommend, for instance, data storage policies that fit studio-level data systems in future workshops and lecture series. In this way, there will be a greater chance to close the gap between artists’ habits and institutional standards in terms of media art preservation. However, to what extent artists should adjust their practices, including the art-making process, to accommodate preservation-related requirements is unclear. As indicated by the acquisition policies of the initiative Matters in Media Art, museums have explicitly shown their concern about long-term costs caused by certain materials or technology before acquisitions. How artists will react to organizations' changing standards is worth exploring in the future due to the potential for the creation of technology bias in the process to increase the potential future value of a work. Thus, the next part of this research project will focus more on artists' perceptions of institutional preservation requirements.

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