keywords : Events

Abstracts for the Media in Motion Symposium

Mediating Models and Modes
Somaya Langley, National Library of Australia / Australian Music Centre, Australia

Recontextualisation of contemporary technologies from objects of fascination to everyday tools has likewise been reflected in current art practices. The past decade has seen memory institutions grapple with and overcome momentous shifts towards increasingly techno-centric modes of creative and intellectual production. Library archive and academic communities have responded by predominantly focusing on web archiving and digitization practices. When faced with tackling complex born-digital objects—those assuming hybrid forms, employing multiple file formats, or containing combinations of custom-designed and constructed software, hardware, wetware and wearables—momentum rapidly decreases. Thus far, support for media art has largely been situated in the gallery and museum domain. Contributions from both library and museum archival practices are essential for a holistic approach to preservation and sustained access. Faced with developing systems for archiving media artwork collections, what models and standards are available for managing the artwork and associated metadata? With “the only constant is change” as a basic premise, how do we handle existing materials while maintaining awareness and flexibility for emerging future forms?

Conservation and Documentation of New Media Art: The Debate Between the Italian Theory and International Strategies
Laura Barreca, PAN I Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Italy

The international debate concerning the problems of long-term preservation and documentation of new media art is focused on the problem of documentation. The main question is how to preserve an artwork that depends on electronic devices that might be obsolete in a few years? Every artwork has a sort of own internal linguistic code, which could also be identified by applying the concept of “aura,” in order to quote Walter Benjamin. This computer code should be preserved because it represents the most original part of the artwork and the place where the artist conceptualized the idea. In terms of conservation, the Italian theorist Cesare Brandi, in his famous book Theory of Restoration (1963), writes about the concept of unità potenziale—the potential unity of the artwork. Brandi asserts that the final aim of any kind of restoration strategy is the preservation, and eventually the re-composition of the original information.

Assessing Risks to Digital Cultural Heritage with DRAMBORA
Andrew McHugh, Perla Innocenti, and Seamus Ross, HATII at the University of Glasgow, UK

With the goal to provide a practical, evidence-based toolkit for assessing repositories and digital libraries, the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) jointly developed the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA). The toolkit adopts a bottom-up approach that takes risk and risk management as its principle means for determining repository success and charting improvement. This paper introduces the methodology, as well as its associated online tool, DRAMBORA Interactive, and describes their broad, but flexible applicability, describing the pressing need for tangible assessment methodologies. Its coverage includes a description of experiences accumulated and lessons learned from the series of pilot assessment programs that have made possible the development, validation, and evolution of the methodology. DRAMBORA draws on experiences accumulated throughout 18 evaluative pilot assessments undertaken in an internationally diverse selection of data repositories (including the National Archives of both the Netherlands and Scotland, Gallica at the National Library of France, CERN’s Document Server, the Netarkivet, and the Google MBooks project at the University of Michigan).

Collecting a Fragment of an Ongoing Project: Mike Kelley’s Series Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction
Ariane Noël de Tilly, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Netherlands

In 2005, American artist Mike Kelley presented Day Is Done, a large-scale installation gathering the videos #2 to 32 of the series Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction, at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Kelley’s Day Is Done is a project that exists in several forms: large-scale video installation, film, photographs, single-channel videos, and video/sculpture installations. It is part of a larger project titled Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction, a series in which the artist intends to produce 365 videotapes or video installations related to the sculpture Educational Complex that he made in 1995. After the 2005 exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, the 25 individual video/sculpture installations, forming the large-scale installation Day Is Done, were sold to different museums and private collectors. This paper delves into the exhibition, distribution, and preservation history of Day Is Done in order to highlight key elements to consider for future exhibitions of the different video/sculpture installations.

A Walk in the Dark: Preserving Video Now
Melitte Buchman and Alice Moscoso, New York University, US

NYU Libraries Digital Library Technology Services and Preservation Department have worked with the Hemispheric Institute and the Fales Library and Special Collections to preserve unique performance-based works. The collections span the early 1960s to the present. The projects included preservation and the creation of access copies for significant recordings originally in U-matic as well as Beta SP, mini DV, S-VHS and VHS. We have used both a calibrated standard definition environment and the semi-automatic SAMMA solo system to create DigiBeta tapes and experiment with jpeg2000 as preservation formats. We will discuss our specific findings as well as overarching issues including the search for ideal container formats for long-term safekeeping. These projects aim to encourage a cooperative approach to developing standards for guaranteed long-term preservation and access.

Of Optics and Aesthetics: Perceptual Considerations in the Preservation of Video Art
Marilyn Terzic, McGill University, Canada

This paper presents a threefold analysis of the human-display interface as it relates to the aesthetic qualities of cathode-ray tube-based video art. First, a technical overview of the medium is provided. The perceptual processes and physiological mechanisms involved in watching a work of video art are described thereafter. Finally, the spatial and temporal variations of color cathode-ray displays and their effects on viewers’ perceptions of electronic images are discussed.

The Grammar of New Media: Notation Systems for Digital Media Art
Nina Wenhart, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, (SAIC)
Although digital media art includes the term media, hardly any media art archive sufficiently deals with this core aspect of the art form. If a crucial factor like this is almost completely forgotten or excluded, then what else is lost? And furthermore, we should ask ourselves, what is remembered and included? In the Grammar of New Media, I critically analyze existing media art archives while investigating alternative strategies of capturing the unstable and ephemeral; that is, time- and process-based works of art. Through my research into these archives, I identify the “closure” of existing archival database systems as a main problem. This closure results in a premature aging of the archives that damages their reliability and decreases their value significantly. I suggest that models of openness, such as Wittgenstein’s Sprachspiel (language-game), wherein we make up the rules as we go along, more functionally fit the task of describing evolving systems. The archive itself must become an evolving system in order to keep up with the changes in Digital Media Art.

New Media, New Knowledge: A Knowledge Management Perspective on the Preservation of New Media Art
Corina MacDonald, Canadian Heritage Information Network, Canada

New media by its very nature defies many of our assumptions about the identity and fixity of works, making it a challenging domain in which to develop strategies of preservation. For many new media artworks, documentation has become a crucial practice in managing continuity. This paper will explore an event-driven, lifecycle-based approach to new media art documentation, using as an investigative framework Nonaka and Takeuchi’s Knowledge Spiral, a mainstay of knowledge management (KM) theory and practice. This approach highlights the role of documentation in knowledge creation and continuity, and emphasizes the contexts of meaning and use in preservation. The need for a KM perspective in the preservation of new media artworks will be discussed, as well as the implications of the Knowledge Spiral for current documentary models.

La propriété intellectuelle et les arts médiatiques
Stéphanie Corriveau, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada

Les arts médiatiques suscitent des questionnements quant à la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle par les musées, notamment en raison de la durée de vie limitée des technologies. Cette présentation vise à démontrer de quelle manière les musées peuvent appliquer des stratégies de conservation tout en respectant les droits moraux de l’artiste. À cette fin, l’auteur propose des modèles de contrats qui doivent être soumis aux artistes lors de l’acquisition des œuvres d’art médiatique.

Approaches to Defining the Significant Properties of Digital Objects
Kathleen Fear, University of Michigan, US

Understanding and identifying significant properties is recognized as an important part of preserving digital objects; however, a methodology for doing so has yet to be fully developed. Much work in significant properties has been researcher-centered; in other words, researchers examining objects and building lists of properties. Significant properties, however, are subjective. Lists created by researchers are essentially lists of those properties that are significant to the researchers; they may overlap with those significant to users, but perhaps not. In this paper, I present a review of work done in the field to date and a critical comparison of existing methodologies; additionally, I explore alternative approaches, focusing on the role of the user’s experience and perception of value as a primary factor in evaluating an object’s properties for their significance.

What are the Barriers to the Preservation of Digital Game Heritage?
Joanna Barwick, Loughborough University, UK

It is now 50 years since the development of the first computer game and an average of 9 computer games was sold every second of every day in 2007 (Entertainment Software Association, 2008). However, despite the apparent proliferation of these games in our society, it seems that they are not valued as a cultural industry in the same way as the film or music industry and are a largely ignored part of our cultural heritage. This paper presents an overview of current preservation initiatives that highlights how digital media presents traditional institutions with difficult selection decisions as well as introducing some of the issues that are hindering the development of national preservation strategies; including consideration of the cultural barriers to their preservation. It will show how online preservation activities are limited by legal issues, due to the lack of involvement of the digital games industry; and emphasize the importance of collaboration to the long-term preservation of these cultural products.

Virtualization for Preservation of Executable Art
Kam Woods, Indiana University, US

In this work, I present performance data on the use of emulated environments to ensure continued access to “demoscene” audio-visual presentations originally intended for execution on a variety of computing platforms. These presentations represent a multi-decade span of artistic endeavor that have, over time, gained increased recognition for their impact on new media art. Open-source tools including Wine, UAE, and Hatari are used to evaluate the efficacy of this preservation technique with respect to audio, video, and timing performance. As demoscene software frequently exploits low-level programming routines such as custom interrupt processing to maximize performance, failure modes are recorded and addressed. The use of open-source software for the emulation environment, along with scripted installation, execution, and migration of existing metadata, mitigates a number of issues associated with the production and future maintenance of well-defined preservation objects.

An Evaluation Chart for Born Digital Artworks
Tabea Lurk and Jürgen Enge, AktiveArchive – BUA | Bern University of the Arts, Switzerland

This paper describes the conservation of computer- and network-based art and introduces the concept of an evaluation chart for sustaining this kind of born digital artifacts. Presenting interim results of AktiveArchive, the evaluation chart ties our scope of research. The interest in preservation strategies, which are appropriate to the museum and exhibition contexts, justifies an art technological approach. Our methodology therefore combines conservatory documentation practices and the experience in recording artworks with computer scientific descriptions of the functionality as well as internal and external communication processes. In addition, art-historical understanding is consulted for localizing the logic of operations within the examined artwork and in the process of identifying the artistic concept. Core elements, which shall be sustained for a long-term, have to be defined. The evaluation chart deals with conservation and restoration procedures and provides important information for future operations.

AktiveArchive is a Swiss preservation initiative that focuses on strategies for documenting and preserving electronic media art. It is funded by the Swiss Department of Cultural Affairs within the framework of sitemapping.ch. AktiveArchive is located at Berne University of the Arts and at the Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zurich.

A Moving Target: Archiving Net Art
Tracy Popp, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, US

This paper explores broad topics related to Internet art (net art). The history of net art in relation to other conceptual and electronic art will be briefly explored. In consideration of net art preservation, artistic working modes will be explored such as the use of commercial software and other volatile technological tools. Primarily, this paper focuses on issues related to net art as a volatile medium and the preservation of net art works. Preservation will be considered in relation to methods of preservation applied in saving historical conceptual and electronic art works. Presentation and legal issues related to artworks and how artists can facilitate preservation of their works will also be discussed. Issues relating to why an artist may not be willing to participate in the preservation of their work or wish to work within the museological system will be considered.

Copying-it-right: Archiving the Media Art of Phil Morton
jonCates, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, US

The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive contains Phil Morton’s “personal video databank” of individual and collaborative Media Art projects. Morton developed the “COPY-IT-RIGHT” ethic, an anticopyright approach to making and distributing Media Art. The Archive seeks to coordinate and share Morton’s work and associated research online under the COPY-IT-RIGHT license. Morton’s COPY-IT-RIGHT ethic presents an important predecessor to current Free and Open Source approaches to Media Art. I will discuss these alternative Media Art Histories in relation to the preservation and conservation of Media Art that resists current copyright and intellectual property regimes.

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