AIC's 41st Annual Meeting

The Legible City (1989-1991) is one of the major works of the Australian media artist Jeffrey Shaw and a milestone of 1990s interactive, computer-based new media art. In this installation, the spectator rides a stationary bicycle in a dark room, experiencing a virtual journey through projected views of the cities of Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe. The real physical exertion on the bicycle is converted into the virtual distance covered.

Since the beginning of his career, one of Jeffrey Shaw’s main preoccupations has been the overcoming of the traditional, institutionally laid-down distance between the artwork and the viewer. From the mid-1970s on, Shaw moved from sculptural to computer-based work, seeing the computer as a particularly efficient medium for his work since programmed software configurations could function as modules, which could be adapted to create new artworks.

Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City illuminates numerous problems specific to the emerging field of digital art preservation. On the one hand, the interactive installation is based on proprietary, i.e. work-specific and licensed software. On the other hand, it uses obsolete hardware and custom-made components. Both factors contribute to the high cost of maintaining this work. By tracing the complex evolution of this artwork since its first presentation in 1989, this paper aims to illuminate the various strategies employed by the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe for the maintenance and preservation of this installation over the course of the past twenty years.

In his double capacity as artist and director of the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media from 1991 till 2003, Jeffrey Shaw carried out several changes to The Legible City. Since the creation of a prototype (1988) of the artwork – which could interactively be operated by a joystick – the interactive installation has undergone several technological modifications, partly owed to the artist’s desire to take advantage of enhanced software possibilities, and partly caused by the obsolescence of components. Since the artwork was acquired by the the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the institution has adopted the strategy of “hardware preservation” for the conservation of the artwork.

The Legible City is one of the ten case studies of the EU-funded research project “digital art conservation” (January 2010 – December 2012; digitalartconservation.org) and part of the traveling exhibition “Digital Art Works. The Challenges of Conservation” (held at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media from 29 October 2011 – 12 February 2012). As part of the case study, an in-depth retrospective documentation of the different stages of alteration of the work was carried out for the first time, with the aim to formulate recommendations for the long-term preservation of this artwork with regard to its authenticity and integrity. In addition, in dialogue with the artist, a porting of the software was carried out. This paper will reflect the measures undertaken over the course of the installation’s twenty-year history as well as this most recent undertaking.

The presentation will introduce into the problems after the collapse of the Historical Archive building in Cologne in 2009, where about 90% of the holdings were either lying beneath the mountain of rubble or among the debris in the underground railway shaft outside the building. Withmore than 500.000 photographic and 5000 audiovisual objects among the salvaged holdings. And each item needs a thorough cleaning and adequate repackaging and at least in many cases, further restorative measures will need to be taken. It is estimated that all in all, more than 6000 man years will have to be put in for conservation alone. So processes for mass treatment in the restoration of these materials and an exchange of experiences in the realisation will be needed and set up in the speech. The general workflow distinguishes between a first phase of basic conservation and restoration measures which can be taken with all items, regardless of their state of identification. Later on, more sophisticated (and costly) restoration processes will be priorised with respect to collections, individual value of the object in question and availability of sponsorship.

The presentation will take a look at the perspectives for the work in a new organized studio for conservation and restoration of photographic and audiovisual materials at the branche Office in Wermsdorf (Germany).
Apart from normal processes of conservation and restoration, the possibilities of the reconciliation of negatives and damaged photographs will be presented and different ways of re-using these negatives will be shown. The presentation will point out the possibilities and problems of cooperations with other institutions to make use of available records - in case of live recordings - from other archives, too.

Deena Engel, Department of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University and Glenn Wharton, Time-based Media Conservator, Museum of Modern Art & Museum Studies, New York University

As part of its program to conserve software-based artworks, the Museum of Modern Art undertook a risk analysis of thirteen works that use a variety of software programs, programming languages, and libraries. Eleven artists and two programmers were interviewed as part of this project. They were asked about the software, the hardware dependencies, and their concerns for future presentation of the artworks.

Risks assessed in this study include the potential impact from changes and upgrades to hardware, operating systems, programming languages and/or software applications used to create the artwork that would render the software or any associated multi-media files obsolete, thus jeopardizing future exhibition.

It became evident from this analysis that acquisition and technical documentation of source code is key to preserving these works. MoMA partnered with the Computer Science Department at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematics to perform a pilot study to document the source code of four artworks. The project used standard software engineering methods to analyze the code and create textual documentation for future programmers who may need to recompile or re-write it for new operating environments. The documentation will also aid future researchers in better understanding the principles behind the work. Technical documentation of code is standard in the software and business industries, but it is new for museums. Due to artist concerns for public experience of their work, standard methods in the software industry must be adapted for museum collections.

In this presentation, the authors describe their collaboration to document the source code of these artworks. The focus is on documenting how aesthetic properties such as color, movement, and sound are determined in the source code.

This paper aims to provide an overview of two European funded projects which will begin in early 2013 and which include the conservation of digital arts within their purview. The four year project, Pericles, considers the preservation life cycle for digital arts and Presto4U, focuses on video preservation and includes art museums and collections as one of its communities of practice. Both of these projects ask why previous research has had such small take up within the museum sector, specifically among those dealing with the conservation of digital arts. These also aim to develop tools and methods which will help to support the conservation of these works of art in our care.

The author will describe the aims of these research projects, the importance of building partnerships and developing a common understanding and vocabulary with those working within digital humanities and the archive community and how participation in this research is impacting approaches to the conservation of digital arts. The paper aims to develop alliances and dialogue between these research projects and those working in this area within the US.

In the past 5 years contemporary art museums, and other institutions actively collecting artists’ video, have witnessed a significant technological shift from video tape to digital file as the primary form of video material coming into our care. This shift has been caused by artists producing new work as digital files and also by a change in institutional migration programs as we move from tape to file in response to the ongoing needs of preservation and display.

As a consequence of this shift, institutions rapidly need to become familiar with a new set of technologies for the preservation, storage, and display of video. To effectively respond to these changes, new alliances are needed with the broadcast industry and the archive sector and also, crucially, with the IT domain.

In 2012 project members for Matters in Media Art decided to conduct a small survey in order to create a snap shot of this area of emerging practice. Staff from 12 institutions in the USA and Europe who are recognised as amongst the leaders within our sector in addressing the challenges associated with caring and managing video as digital files were interviewed. In addition to gathering information about practice with regard to both artist supplied digital files and files created during the migration from tape formats, the survey also captured information about the type and size of the video collections and the resources available. The survey has resulted in a greater understanding of the strategies, solutions and challenges these institutions are currently facing.

This paper will discuss the results of the survey and identify common practices that may be generalised for other institutions, as well as identify needs for training and tools.

In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art began a process of making its extensive video art collection of over 1500 works available to the public through an installation of interactive monitors in the galleries. With a collection that spans the history of independent video production, the project was especially urgent because of video degradation in some of the early works, technology obsolescence, and the availability of some of the original artists. To facilitate the project, an in-house transfer and monitoring station was established at the museum. Numerous systems were developed for transport, in-house migration, metadata capture, working with artists, and outsourcing some of the migration. Now with over half the material migrated and the launch of MoMA’s media lounge in February 2012, a large body of information has been collected that helps inform best practices in migrating and managing video art. This presentation will detail the project workflow that was formulated in collaboration with MoMA’s media conservators, curators, registrars, audiovisual staff, and IT department. Special attention will be paid to the question of in-house migration vs. vending out to specialized transfer houses. Examples will be drawn from the project to illustrate challenges in migrating analog and digital material and the impact of performing migration and other media conservation work within the museum. Whether you are dealing with 1 analog source or 100,000, this presentation will hopefully further the discussion on the conservation of analog and digital moving image material.

Net artist Igor Stromajer started to delete all of his net artworks in 2010. Over a period of 37 days he deleted one of his artworks each day, from the conviction that “if one can create art, one can also delete it. Memory is there to deceive”. Other artists like Constant Dullaart and Robert Sakrowski are giving people guidelines on how best to document their, or other people’s, net artworks. Their approach of subjective documenting, and straightforward collecting of meta data is aimed at the participation and exchange of the collected documentation by all parties interested in preservation of Internet based artworks. At the same time more and more net artists are translating their online artwork into objects, sculptures and installations, experimenting with ways to present and document their work for future generations.

In the last decade a discussion on how to preserve net art for the future is also starting to emerge in museums for contemporary art. This growing attention is wonderful and more than justified, but most methods still depart from the ‘final’ project, albeit static, variable or networked. What has been given little attention is the ways these works are made (produced) or documented by artists. In this paper I will argue that the way artists make, use and present their documentation, from the work in progress to the final presentation, can give a lot of information about the work, which is of vital importance for the preservation or recreation of a work. By analyzing artists’ documentation methods and comparing these to the information that is asked for in traditional museum documentation models showed that specific and inherent qualities of the artworks are not taken into account in the models up till now. For example, closer analysis of Blast Theory’s creative processes indicated that integral information might get lost when using standard questionnaires or applying emulation methods that transfer the game-play to new platforms.

In this paper I will trace and map out the consequences for conservation by analysing the multiplayer game Naked on Pluto, a work that is based on process and relies on a commercial and restricted online platform; Facebook. Although this is a rather extreme case study, because there is still little analytical reflection on artworks that proliferate on commercial social media platforms let alone interest of museums for presentation or acquisition of these works, I will show that this practice is gaining attention with artists and thus can be regarded as paradigmatic for contemporary artworks. When it comes to born-digital artworks, conservation has missed the ability to understand the specific and large-scale changes that computational culture has brought about. Most practices still depart from the traditional object oriented way of dealing with the artwork and fail to understand computing as inherently cultural, social, networked and process based. I argue for a conservation practice that departs from the digitally native and adopts similar strategies. Instead of working towards an object-oriented approach of fixation I propose to focus on documenting the process and experience of a work, i.e. keeping knowledge and memory alive but accepting a loss in history.

Brad Dilger, Multimedia Specialist, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Richard McCoy, Conservator of objects and Variable Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art

With the continued and increasing use of electronic media components in contemporary art projects, a need has arisen to efficiently and accurately control the active cycle of these components while on display. The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) has created a novel approach to effectively manage its contemporary art projects that have electronic media components using a “hands-off” approach.

There are several methods controlling electronic media components in galleries, such as simple timers, manufacturer-based, internal controls, the occasionally unreliable human controller, and computerized control systems. For the past 7 years the IMA has tested, installed, and maintained an innovative and effective approach to controlling its electronic media components in the gallery with a completely computerized control system. The IMA’s solution, which was created through an inter-departmental working group from the Installation Department, Conservation Department, and Information Technology (IT) Department, does not require daily human interaction to maintain a gallery schedule. This relatively low-cost solution allows electronic media components to be controlled both autonomously and via web-based graphical user interface (GUI). This GUI can easily function from smart phones.

Autonomous control of electronic art is based on a system of linking together different software and hardware components from various manufacturers. This technology has had widespread use in commercial, educational, and residential applications to control all aspects of a building functions: Lighting, HVAC, security, entertainment, irrigation, are just a few systems that can be covered by computerized control systems. It is believed that the IMA is the first museum to apply this system to electronic media components in contemporary art projects and has been using the solution for nearly a decade with great success.

This approach achieves an important goal of relieving staff from having to physically manipulate electronic media components in the gallery on a day-to-day basis, and has dramatically increased the efficiency and proper functionality of contemporary art projects by reducing their gallery “downtime” caused by errors.

This paper will discuss three case studies based on IMA art installations. These case studies will demonstrate the success and limitations of the system, and provide clear guidance for other institutions for installing this system.

Teamwork and communication between curators, technicians, registrars, and conservators prove to be invaluable in the preservation of media art installations. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) has a long history of fruitful, interdepartmental collaborations and with the upcoming expansion of the museum, scheduled to open in 2016, working spaces have been conceived and designed to reflect and advance this tradition. This talk explains this series of adjacent and shared spaces — a black box workshop, a time-based media conservation studio and an exhibitions technical workroom — where time-based media conservators and the exhibitions technical team will prepare, stage, document, repair and thus preserve the museum's rapidly growing media arts collection.

In 2009 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art initiated a project to develop a sustainable, long-term preservation strategy for software-based artworks. For this research two artworks in its collection were examined.

The first work, Julia Scher's Predictive Engineering 2 (1998), a web-based artwork that accompanies a large media installation and mirrors the formative years of HTML programming in the 1990s.

The second work, Agent Ruby, was created by San Francisco-based artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, a pioneer of media-based and conceptual art Hershman’s work features a custom code for artificial intelligence that is embodied by an avatar that can talk back to viewers.
The technical complexity and different media components of these works created a need for new forms of documentation and the concept of a technical narrative was developed. It is a standardized system for documenting digital artworks. The purpose of the technical narrative is to describe:

A high level functional description of the work. This is a general description of how the work functions and operates as a whole. This part of the narrative is a platform-neutral description of the work in a general and functional way.

A modular examination of the individual components of the work and their specific functions. The intent of this section is to look at every individual component of the work in detail. Additionally a high level examination is given to how all of the parts work as a complete system. This section attempts to map out a general technical schematic of the work.

A detailed description of the artwork as it exists upon acquisition. This section is specific about the hardware, software, operating systems, languages, algorithms, video codecs, etc. These platforms, components and technologies are examined closely to inform an understanding of how they serve operational requirements of the work. This section is closely tied to the technical documentation provided by the artist and their engineers, describing the pragmatic requirements for operation and display.

An analysis of the current technology platform and an evaluation of its longevity against the current state of technology. Here we consider the long-term stability of the piece upon acquisition. It calls out strategies and concerns in preserving the work over the long term and informs ongoing conservation and maintenance protocols including possible strategies for migration or emulation.

The technical narrative is now a standard piece of documentation for all digital based artworks that are acquired by SFMOMA including video, audio and software-based art. This presentation and paper will describe the technical narrative in detail and the processes involved in its creation. Some real world examples from the documentation of software-based artworks and multi-channel video installations will be covered.

$25 Electronic Media Group members, $30 Non-Electronic Media Group members

Alex Cooper, Lighting Designer, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Isabel Meyer DAMS Branch Manager, Office of the Chief Information Officer, Smithsonian Institution

Born digital Time Based Media Art (TBMA) works are an emerging and rapidly growing art form which pose significant technology challenges to art museums and other collecting institutions across the globe. Within the Smithsonian Institution (SI), the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) are working together to address the unique challenges inherent in preserving works of this kind. Born-digital works are generated in real time using digital information stored in the form of binary data. As such, they are vulnerable to the same integrity (data corruption) and obsolescence concerns of any digital file format or software. The preservation of born-digital works requires both IT-based infrastructure to safely store and organize this data, as well as an organizational method to document, describe, and categorize information related to the artist’s intent and the work’s provenance.

To meet these needs OCIO has developed the Digital Asset Management System (DAMS), and the NPG has created the TBMA Archival Package. The DAMS is an enterprise-level Digital Asset Management System used to store, manage, preserve, and share the Smithsonian’s rapidly growing collection of digital assets and related information.

An enterprise digital asset management system is essential to meeting SI’s objectives for:

• Preservation and stewardship of objects and specimens.
• Organizing, classifying, and locating digital assets.
• Delivery of digital assets in multiple formats.
• Public outreach and education and electronic commerce.
• Participation in external cultural heritage, library, and science initiatives.

The Time Based Media Archival Package is a method used to organize TBMA assets including the digital essence of the work, as well as related curatorial, exhibition, and collections management related documents. This presentation will include discussions of the DAMS system architecture (hardware, database, application software, storage, staffing resources, and operational procedures) as well as functional aspects of the DAMS (user roles, asset security policies, ingest methods, metadata models, and transcoding) as well as the structure of the TBMA Archival Package, and its various components.

As cultural heritage institutions have recognized the urgency of migrating rare and unique analog video content off of unstable carriers, many have begun to establish facilities for in-house reformatting. In determining which materials could be responsibly digitized in-house, open reel video formats are frequently written off as too problematic to tackle and remain in the purview of specialized vendors. In many cases this assumption is absolutely correct—scarcity of functioning playback equipment and the technical skills to operate it are logical deterrents.

This brief presentation will address an alternate tack, focused on collecting local technical expertise (as well as equipment) and documenting period production practices, with an eye towards in-house reformatting. The proposed case study is a collection of 1” IVC video, salvaged by a former employee of Charlottesville’s early local origination cable station. Through contact with former station staff, we have sought to document the technical and production expertise needed to understand how equipment was operated and how tapes were produced. This outreach work has helped us to acquire rare playback equipment, as well as putting us in contact with a local video engineer conversant with this obsolete 1” format.

This talk will provide an overview of this project, with wider recommendations for how documentation can be collected with the explicit goal of overcoming format-specific technical hurdles.

Electronic video instruments are custom devices developed during the 1970s and 1980s that were used to make video art and other time-based media works. The devices include synthesizers, colorizers, keyers, sequencers, video capture devices, computer interfaces, and oscillators, to name a few. They may be modified commercial devices or machines built from scratch. The presentation will consider theories, guidelines, and practices within instrument conservation, industrial conservation, and time-based media conservation that are relevant to the conservation of machines. A central question is whether the machines can and should continue to be 'worked' after they are collected. Also, the presentation will look at user and institutional efforts to save the video instruments and at new instruments being developed for artists' use.