Background

Media art, which frequently involves data, software, or electronic devices, continues to face the challenge of technological obsolescence. In a previous article, this research project reviewed example models and strategies that media artists have personally developed to prevent artworks’ technical failures and to restore artworks on the edge of obsolescence. The preliminary study also touched on why artists may or may not devote themselves to preservation proactively. For example, an artist may have essential assumptions about their artworks’ life span. Or, an artist may recognize personal preservation efforts as a kind of assistance offered to potential collectors, including institutional conservation initiatives. However, given the diversity of media art, my preliminary research on three artists does not sufficiently reveal variations in or similarities between media artists’ understandings of preservation. Since preservation and conservation are fields often dominated by museums and similar organizations, a contrast also exists between personal and institutional practices.

Introduction

In order to provide more representative data about how media artists view preservation, this research relies on two larger samples. One consists of seven media artists who contribute to this research as interview participants. The firsthand interview data reveals artists’ genuine perceptions of institution-based preservation work. The other sample is a dataset of media artworks donated by artists to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Ultimately, this research aims to answer the following questions: when do artists and institutions interact with each other for media art preservation? Is there potential for museums to develop more artist-oriented policies and services?

Sampling and Data Collection

For this research, I selected interview participants randomly from the THESAURUS database of the Archive of Digital Art (ADA) to include media artists with diverse backgrounds and practices. With the scientific selection of hundreds of international artists from about 5,000 evaluated artists, the ADA represents a larger population of media artists. Moreover, it has documented digital art since 1999 and covered various aesthetics, genres, subjects, and technologies involved in media art. Therefore, sampling from the ADA’s database allowed this research to reflect a comprehensive range of media art-making and preservation practices.  

Among the 21 artists contacted, seven artists (see Figure 1)—Ellen Sandor, Jeffrey Shaw, Marcello Mercado, Mark Reaney, Paolo Cirio, Susan Collins, and Yiannis Melanitis—participated in the semi-structured interviews and answered questions listed in Appendix A. Although the non-response rate (see Figure 2a) is admittedly high, the participants were able to provide information that may apply to other cases given the variety of their artistic practices (see Figure 1). Nonetheless, one limitation is that the distribution of participants’ gender is imbalanced (see Figure 2b) even though the numbers of female and male artists (10 vs. 11) among the 21 potential interviewees were very close. Future studies may need to address potential self-selection biases, although this is not the focus of this article.

Apart from the interviewee sample, the research project also includes a sample of artist-donated artworks under the Media and Performance department of the MoMA. The reason for using the MoMA’s dataset is that the MoMA is one of the three members of the Matters in Media Art initiative, whose acquisition policies explicitly show museums’ concern about long-term preservation costs related to the technologies and materials used by media artists. Additionally, the dataset of MoMA’s collection is also the most up-to-date compared to that of Tate, another member of the media art initiative. Thus, it reflects, to some extent, how media artists have handed over artworks to institutions in recent years. 

Dealing With Media Art’s Ephemerality

As mentioned in the preliminary study, artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer says in his digital preservation manifesto that only after evaluating the significance of ephemerality for a piece of art can one decide whether to preserve the work or specific elements. Such a principle is indeed critical because not every work can keep making sense when it loses the original context. For example, both Susan Collins’ street-based interactive intervention works and Mark Reaney’s theatrical designs at the University of Kansas (seen on the left) heavily depended on people onsite, regardless of whether they were pedestrians or actors on stages. When it is impossible to reproduce significant contextual factors, original or complete meanings, or the “moment in time” that several interviewees mentioned, physically maintaining or replicating something is no longer reasonable.

However, this does not mean that the preservation concept completely conflicts with such works. Facing the weakened artistic significance, artists such as Susan Collins switched to a documentation mode. This finding aligns with what the preliminary study found about how Conor McGarrigle dealt with his net art that suffered link rot.

As said by Jeffrey Shaw, who pursued the transience of works at the beginning of his career in the ‘60s, ephemeral works can at the same time “have a continuity over time, which is given to them by various forms of documentation.” Even if one did not expect a piece of art to be meaningful over time at the time of creation, the documentation might later show that it can stand the test of time and remain relevant. Not only artists themselves may appreciate the evidence when looking back, but such records will also benefit future generations, including emerging artists and future art audiences. Irrespective of the assumptions about artworks’ longevity, most interviewees recognized the significance of documenting and archiving contexts or processes. Nevertheless, some still admitted that their plans for reviewing these records were often on the shelf and that documentation can be fragile due to the turbulent environment and human-made hazards.

The Novelty and Efficiency of Artist-led Preservation Practices

While creating supplementary documentation is a widely accepted best practice, some artists integrate preservation as part of their artworks. Two approaches that stand out are the DNA transfer method used by Marcello Mercado and Yiannis Melanitis and the PHSCologram medium developed by Ellen Sandor with (art)n.

Though the two artists’ creations are completely different, both Mercado and Melanitis treated DNA as an information storage medium. As people can decode the DNA, there is a chance for them to retrieve, access, and interpret any information deliberately hidden by an artist, such as a signature that Melanitis mentioned. In this way, leaving and storing data within an artwork, rather than in separate files, also becomes part of one’s preservation practices. As Mercado has beautifully said, “There is a moment when the question is established: should I preserve something, what and how? In a moment, the question is erased as such, and the preservation investigation becomes the work itself.”

PHSCologram, on the other hand, is an art object and a term representing photography, holography, sculpture, and computer graphics, and it digitally produces images on archival film. Namely, it creates 3D hard copy virtual photographs that are more durable. Although there were times that the films exhibited for a long time became fading, Ellen Sandor and (art)n were able to recreate PHSCologram using available archived files. While PHSCologram was invented in 1983, its preservation logic of carefully selecting complex materials and building an archive still works for reducing technical failures and preparing for acceptable reproduction.

On the other hand, another advantage of media artists’ preservation practices is efficiency. Unlike artists, conservators tend to be more hesitant about each step they take because, firstly, they are unlikely to understand work better than the work’s creator. Secondly, as suggested by Yiannis Melanitis, they always face the invisible pressure from the public that cares about whether institutions are taking good care of cultural legacies. Therefore, artists are more efficient in terms of deciding what and how to preserve. Furthermore, artists may choose time-saving preservation methods to satisfy artistic needs in their day-to-day processes. When talking about how he digitized his works, Jeffrey Shaw pointed out that the sophisticated machinery adopted by museums and official archives can be very slow. Not only do tens of thousands of items wait to be processed,  but the occasional change in conservation personnel is also likely to hinder the whole process of preserving something. Sometimes, an institutional preservation project may just stall, according to Susan Collins, who is waiting to collaborate on her university’s video digitization project.

The Lack of Institution-based Support

Despite the pros of letting artists themselves act as “conservators,” the cons are also unignorable. Complicated technical issues and the associated cost of finding solutions can be out of artists’ control. Sometimes, an artist may want to hand a piece of work over to a museum or similar collector. For example, the article “Four Artists on the Future of Video Art” introduces the story about how Lynn Hershman Leeson gave her commissioned algorithm artwork, “Agent Ruby,” back to SFMOMA after she couldn’t afford its upkeep on the internet. Several interviewees also mentioned that they, occasionally, did collaborate with museums and let them preserve certain artworks, copies, or archives. Both Marcello Mercado and Jeffrey Shaw have works collected by the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), which is, however, still struggling to maintain some artworks with outmoded components despite its specialization in media art conservation, according to the interviews.

Apart from the interviewees, a number of media artists have entrusted their artworks to museums with the capability of preserving media art. Based on the MoMA dataset, as of August 9, 2020, 502 pieces—or 17% of the 2,952 pieces—under the Media and Performance department were gifts from artists themselves. Some artists even donated more than 100 artworks to the museum, while most artists in this dataset only have one or two works collected by MoMA. Given the drastic difference in the number of artworks donated by each artist, the critical question is, how do museums determine which artworks they should accept and which artists not to support?

Unlike Tate, MoMA does not explicitly consider artists’ achievements as a factor. Nonetheless, MoMA’s acquisition policies emphasize that accepting a gift from an artist depends on the curatorial staff’s recommendation and the director’s final decisions. It is unclear how implicit standards and customs will limit one’s chance of entering museum collections. In fact, even of the works in this dataset, many did not become part of MoMA’s collections until they had been around for more than 25 years (see Figure 6). To some extent, this chart proves that some media artists, like the interviewees in this research project, were capable of maintaining artwork for a relatively long time due to years of self-learning. However, another interpretation is that museums are turning away younger, upcoming artists. It is also possible that there is a time lag between the emergence of certain media art practices or genres and museums’ recognition of it. Genres like net art, which is vulnerable to decayed online content, may not have such a life span of 20 or 30 years if few people actively safeguard them.

Paolo Cirio, an artist who creates intervention-based media art and participated in the research, has apparently noticed such politics regarding media art preservation and acquisitions. When answering questions about museums as potential collectors of media art, he said:

I tried to approach some institutions claiming to archive art of my sort [net art], but they didn’t reply or follow up…Museums acquire only artists that are represented by powerful galleries or collectors, so before asking about preservation by institutions, there should be some questions about the metrics that decide what is going to be preserved or ignored.

Barriers to Collaboration

Not surprisingly, museums and similar institutions have their own agenda and priorities for both digitization projects and acquisition decisions. One example that can illustrate such an agenda is the policy of the Matters in Media Art initiative since it looks at preservation difficulty and cost when deciding whether to collect a piece of media art. In response to this tendency in museums, Susan Collins said:

I do see the works being acquired by collections being the most easily “packageable”… So it is a concern that museums are able to properly represent the art of our time and not only those that package themselves in the most easily acquired way—but having sat on acquisition panels I know how hard that it is from the point of view of a collection.

As a result, if the art world simply relies on institutional initiatives to preserve media art, there will only be a vicious circle in which:

• Museums are only responsible for artworks that bring moderate preservation challenges.

• Artists can easily fail to seek help from museums for hard-to-preserve objects.

• Practices involving complicated technology and devices become endangered, even if artists do not intend to make them transient.  

Then what about recommending institutions’ preservation practices to artists and making artists maintain things like a conservator? What about artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s suggestion of altering an art piece for the sake of robustness and preservation? These may not be as practical as they sound, since many interviewees held a relatively pessimistic view about such ideas (see Figure 7). In addition, as indicated by Mark Reaney, who practiced in the field of theatre art, a genre documented less sufficiently, there will be an impetus for artists to continually experience new things even without applying what they have learned previously. Consequently, it is not surprising that documentation and archiving methods, which need a process of standardization, can often fall behind.

Conclusions

Figure 7 shows that, although artists rely heavily on their own preservation knowledge and habits, some of them have actually learned about, contemplated, or been interested in professional or institution-based preservation practices. The problem here is not that artists lack awareness of preservation models or tools; instead, it is that the traditions, techniques, or procedures formalized by museum institutions are not applicable enough.

Therefore, merely having education activities about institution-oriented practices may never make a difference. Robust user research within the artist community is necessary for preservationists to pinpoint practical constraints that prevent artists from referring to professional preservation models. On the other hand, preservationists ought not to have the illusion that there will be a one-size-fits-all solution for media artists. Since strict conservation ethics and standardized procedures are embedded in institution-based methods, those methods may never meet artists’ need for flexibility and efficiency.

One way for museum practitioners to bridge the gap is to keep observing the dynamics between the artist community and the technology field. Several artists mentioned their direct collaboration with technicians, coders, scientists, and device suppliers. Marcello Mercado even completed his artistic project Variations Van Gogh via NASA’s program. Learning such interactions will help museums and preservationists figure out what unexpected technical assistance they can seek from the technology world to allocate the financial burden before taking bolder actions to support cutting-edge media art.

Additionally, the pandemic has resulted in an even tighter budget for preservation inside museums. Before they recover and decide to serve artists’ needs, artists and creative specialists’ collective intelligence seems to be the only viable solution for individuals concerned about media art preservation. Future studies using the data on hand need to dig into how artists are collaborating with each other and people from outside the art world.

Appendix A

Resources

Archive of Digital Art. “Media Art Research Thesaurus.” Accessed December 16, 2020. http://mediaartresearch.org/databases.html.

Ellen Sandor & (art) n. “What Is A PHSCologram (SKOL-O-GRAM)?” Accessed December 16, 2020. https://www.artn.com/phscolograms

Kaggle. “Museum of Modern Art Collection.” Accessed December 7, 2020. https://www.kaggle.com/mfrancis23/museum-of-modern-art-collection.

Lozano-Hemmer, Raphael. “Best Practices for Conservation of Media Art from an Artist’s Perspective.” Media/rep/ (2019): 105-116. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/13346.

Matters in Media Art. “Acquiring Media Art.” Accessed October 18, 2020. http://mattersinmediaart.org/acquiring-time-based-media-art.html.

McGarrigle, Conor. “Preserving Born Digital Art: Lessons From Artists' Practice.” New Review of Information Networking (2015): 170-178. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=aaschadpart.

Museum of Modern Art. “Collections Management Policy.” Accessed December 16, 2020. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/about/Collections-Management-Policy-2020-04-20.pdf. 

Post, Colin. “Preservation Practices of New Media Artists Challenges, Strategies, and Attitudes in the Personal Management of Artworks.” Journal of Documentation 73, no.4 (2017): 716-732. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JD-09-2016-0116/full/html.

Russeth, Andrew. "Four Artists on the Future of Video Art." The New York Times Style Magazine, July 22, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/t-magazine/video-art.html.

Tate. “Tate Acquisition and Disposal Policy.” Accessed December 7, 2020. https://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/116821#:~:text=Tate%20will%20only%20acquire%20works,of%20art%20from%20degree%20exhibitions.