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Abstract
The need to preserve digital art is already an emergency. Digital art heritage is endorsed by UNESCO. Museums, foundations, collectors, etc. increase their collections and at the same time increase the associated problems with the unstable media conservation, rapid technological obsolescence, and the lack of development methodologies, documentation, conservation and restoration. The tools and protocols available for the proper conservation of such assets are still scarce and the process becomes virtually a forensic experience. The first part of the article is a categorisation of digital art, which is a starting point for the understanding of its complexity and scope. The second part describes various approaches to preservation on a discussion that combines both categories and attempts to clarify the challenges that are imposed by this relatively new expression of contemporary art.
Introduction
The necessity of preservation of the digital heritage is, at the moment, a desperate claim. Its own unstable nature requires an urgent intervention. International institutions such as UNESCO are aware of it. However, except for the case of editorial, bibliographical and documental heritage, the current initiatives and efforts are insufficient; the techniques and applicable methodologies are even scarcer, not just for conservation and restoration, but also for documentation and cataloguing. This complex, multidisciplinary and urgent issue poses a major challenge to museums, galleries and institutions. In this article, the authors carry out a study of the state of the art in the conservation and restoration of digital heritage and, in particular, of digital art. A categorisation scheme of digital art is proposed herein as a starting point of the analysis of its complexity. Next, the strategies of conservation and restoration are also covered. Finally, the application complexity of these approaches is discussed according to the previous categorisation and the increasing challenge that the new multidisciplinary approach represents, as well as the technological obsolescence and the absence of methodologies, standards, etc. Defining the unstable: the categorisation challenge The preservation of contemporary art, and of digital art in particular, is sort of a forensic science1. The concept conversion in art turned into case-by-case strategies of preservation, instead of general ones. The conservation and restoration of each work, usually with a strong temporal, unstable and ephemeral character, requires an analysis and a particular approach as diverse as the contemporary art itself. Figure 1 is a map of the categorisation of digital art. The left side shows a Venn2 diagram of a possible constellation, while on the right side there is the correspondent hierarchically ordered caption. The widest category (universe) in this representation of groups (unstable media) contains all the ephemeral artistic manifestations, or those of unstable nature, being a subset of a bigger universe: the contemporary art. The new media art is a term frequently but inappropriately used to refer to artistic contemporary practices in the intersection of art and technology. The art and technology discipline gathers those activities that benefit of new technologies, not necessarily applied to communication, while the new media art comprises those artistic expressions based on technologies of the communication media [1]. Laura Barreca [2] shows a constructivist approach based on the combination of the three C: computing, communication, content. This way, a work is considered new media when it uses the outcome of some of the possible combinations. For example, communication + computing = mobile telephony; communication + content = cable TV and interactive TV; content + computing = CD-ROM, DVD; etc.
Digital art has multiple meanings. In this context digital arts are those artistic practices that consume, process and/or produce digital information, usually audiovisual, that always demands the use of a computer, or at least of those technologies with digital processing capacity such as microcontrollers, microprocessors, digital signal processors, etc. From this point of view, the traditional videoart, for example, should not be considered digital art even when the most reasonable conservation strategy is the digitisation of the media, with the highest quality possible and should not be exclusively restricted to the use of analogical videotapes. Figure 1 shows a small intersection between the two categories which take into consideration these cases. Very different is the intersection between videoart and interactive art, where those interactive works that use, somehow, digital video to generate new realities coexist. Videoart is static by nature since it documents a process and/or artistic result, while the interactive videoart is dynamic, ephemeral and time-based. The uncertainty of this universe is conditioned by the decadence of the environment we live in. Everything is condemned to die. Only the continuous human intervention makes possible to prolong the existence of inanimate objects. Any media, no matter how robust, is exposed to an erosion process by its interaction with the environment, whether biological, chemical or physical, or even any possible combination of these. The power of the digital media is related with the form in which it appeals to the senses3 [3]. However, it contains an additional ingredient that accelerates its expiration date: the uncertainty that produces its own development. This continuous process of technological versioning makes that today’s fashionable tools will lose their support tomorrow. When any element of the complex digital skeleton of a work fails, and there is no technical support, it inevitably dies. Digital art is intimately connected to science and technology and this relationship has, in fact, the biggest influence on its categorisation. Terms such as digital art, electronic art, multimedia art and interactive art are often used indistinctly as synonyms of the new media art [4]. The ambiguity in the description and use of these terms, as shown in figure 1, is due to the multiple and complex interrelations between them. Digital art is a subset of the new media. New media basically consider other artistic practices such as videoart and video installations “not necessarily” related with digital art. This last one closely resembles videoart [5]. According to established perspectives, digital art categorisation could help understand its techniques and purposes, and it is usually related to the final media that the artwork adopts, no matter its process. There is a certain consensus which considers that digital art often takes the form of data. As Bruce Wands stated, “Whether or not this data is transformed into something more concrete depends on artist. As computers grow more powerful and software more sophisticated, the variety of forms (often referred to as ‘polyforms’ or ‘meta-forms’) that the data can assume is increasing. For example, a virtual object created with three-dimensional modelling and animation software can end up as a single image, as animation, or it can be output as sculpture. The animation or image can also be incorporated into a website and thus exist on the internet as net art” [3]. Software art and computer art are two categories used indistinctly to define, imprecisely, the same thing. Computer art is any practice in which computers play the role of production or visualization of the work. Software art, however, is related to the creation by means of algorithms [6] and it is centred in the code itself4. An algorithm is a well defined, ordered and finite list of operations that allows to find the solution to a problem through consecutive and well defined steps. Roman Verotsko says that the “whole art uses algorithms in an implicit way, what happens is that we make it explicit focusing our art in the algorithm” [6, p. 66]. The database art is a variation that uses data as the work substance. The art of digital imaging, includes works that were created or manipulated digitally to be printed in a traditional way [7]. The image can also be combined with traditional media, such as drawing and painting, or incorporated in installations, sculptures or videotape projections [3]. The art of digital sculpture comprises those projects of creation of three-dimensional objects that use digital technology. The virtual sculpture emerged as an evolution of the digital sculpture5. In the virtual world the sculpture rules have no limits: there is no gravity, and the nature, location and size of the materials are infinite. The artist does not only have absolute freedom in the creation of their piece but they can also examine it from any point of view and can create a virtual and interactive world to place it in. The sound art and that of digital music are commonly related with the plastic action or performance art, the sound, the listening and the hearing. Like many of the contemporary art genres, sound art is interdisciplinary by nature, or it adopts hybrid forms. It is related with acoustics, psychoacoustics, electronics, noise, audio like media and technology (even analogical), environmental sound, exploration of the human body, sculpture, film or video and an entire group of aspects in expansion that are part of the current speech of contemporary art [8]. The animation art and digital video art is the digital counterpart of the traditional animation, cinematography and video. The 3D computer animation belongs exclusively to the digital domain. The production of audio, video, and even high quality digital cinema, thanks to the spectacular development of the techniques, instruments and devices of audio and digital video, have broaden their use by even questioning the own essence of the audiovisual market. The interactive art comprises all those practices that usually require the interaction or the spectator's participation without the artist's control. The possibility that interactivity offers of getting the spectator-participant involved has been frequently used in artworks of social character. Digital installations constitute interactive environments built with digital technology such as processors, microcontrollers or computers, sensors, communication devices, etc. that can be as complex as any robotic system6. This is one of the most complexes and fascinating areas in digital art, with more expansion in contemporary art, and the one that presents greater conservation and restoration challenges. Virtual reality allows the creation of experiences of immersion. In general a computer interface that generates artificial environments in real time or representations of a perceptive reality is considered without an objective support. The virtuality establishes a new form of relationship between the use of space and time coordinates, overcomes the temporal-space barriers and configures an environment in which the information and communication are accessible from perspectives that were ignored up to now, at least regarding their volume and possibilities. Life art and artificial intelligence (a-life) were born from the old aspiration of reproducing the characteristics of life by means of the intersection of robotics engineering, computer science, and biology7. The term was used for the first time at the end of 1980 in the first International "Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of the Alive Systems'' in the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Some of the recurrent topics are artificial evolution, simulation of ecosystems, cellular robots, behaviour in robotics, etc. The net art [9] defines the artistic activity based on the Internet. The use of Internet like mean of expression8 limits the technologies and specific services that can be used, such as websurfing, email and file transfer, and, in turn, affects the specificity of its conservation, restoration and interaction. The game art is a special type of the software art: it works with code written by the artist where the game is considered an artwork. Most of the times the game is played by means of a browser, keyboard and mouse. “What makes them art and not only games? For some, the fact that they are made as art, for others the fact that they are exhibited as art” [10]. A common manifestation of this is the manipulation of classic games, either as their reinterpretation on the same support, or on a virtual platform or any other medium like the Internet. The frontier between all these artistic practices is usually very blurred, independently of categorisation and uses. A computer code can generate data (information) of multiple dimensions9, in a centralised or distributed system, with generic or specific tools. The different combinations will place the work in a certain category that, in the case of intersections, will probably be labelled to the smallest category that includes all the subsets. A video, or even a video channel10, would probably be considered videoart or video installation if it is part of a sculptural complex, or interactive art if it requires some sort of interaction. It will be an animation in case it is generated by a computer, virtual if it does not correspond to some reality or net art if it is based on the Internet11. In this context, categorisation can be very useful to find the best way to document, to preserve, and even to restore an artwork. These practices should be methodical, meticulous, exhaustive and well documented, as they constitute, in fact, the art of conserving the digital heritage. Conserving the unstable: the challenge of getting it right The multiplicity of perspectives that are interrelated in the preservation of digital art requires a deep theoretical reflection on the aspects involved in the conservation and preservation of digital art. After forty years a narrow transdisciplinary collaboration becomes absolutely necessary between all the agents involved: stakeholders, artists, curators, conservator-restorers and collectors. Organizations, museums and organisms that collaborate in research projects in search of solutions are increasingly collaborating with each other. In general, work policies and methodologies are related with three different problems: exhibition, collection and conservation. Although this paper only discusses the challenge of conserving digital art, they are all closely related12. The preventive conservation in the context of digital art is directly related to the availability of the work. Strategies Although there are many people involved in the preservation of contemporary art, there are very few strategies for the survival of digital art and in fact, they are not exclusive for this category, as they are often applied to the new media. Most of the documentation and conservation proposals of contemporary art only pay attention to those works that don’t make use of digital technology, such as sculpture installations, or non-complex type, such as a video installation. The most common strategies used in the conservation of digital art are: Storage It is only possible to substitute a damaged element if it is available in stock. This is the most basic strategy and it lies in accumulating the largest quantity of devices of a certain technology in order to guarantee its readiness in the event of damage or replacement due to wear. The strategy is effective in the short term but is inappropriate as the speed of obsolescence of a certain technology increases, and notoriously bad to capture contextual aspects of the works, which makes it useless for net art. This strategy has some variants such as: the refreshing, which consists in the periodic transference of the digital information of a media in danger of obsolescence to a better adapted media; the restoration, which cleans or repairs a file or device when a new version replaces the original one; and the networked storage that uses computers connected13 by a persistent loop of data that maintains critical files in circulation or as multiple copies cloned on several hard disks. Migration Migration consists in upgrading the format of a work from an old media to an up-to-date one14, for example, from the VHS video format to DVD. The DVD, for example, uses MPEG2 codec which is a codification format with loss of information. In order to guarantee the minimum degradation of a video, lossless conservation formats should be used rather than the ones used for distribution. The degeneration or loss of quality increases exponentially with the migration generation. A migration of third or fourth generation doesn't probably satisfy the minimum quality required by the artist. This problem is accentuated when a comparison assessment is not possible, and involves the loss of quality in order to keep the integrity of the original. This strategy assumes that the preservation of the content or information of an artwork with respect to the fidelity of its aspect and perception is more important than the change of its media. Emulation Emulation is a process of simulation of an obsolete platform (technological support that constitutes the media of the artwork15) in a new one. The aim of this strategy is to maintain alive an artwork even though its original media is obsolete. The emulation is usually considered, instead of migration, only in those cases where the original code of the artwork is preserved. The emulation program, from this point of view, is a kind of virtual machine that emulates the behaviour of an old one and is able to execute the same code in a new support. Migration implies repetition as new formats are developed while in emulation, this continuity is only the responsibility of a virtual machine. The use of a virtual machinery16 instead of just a virtual machine expands the capabilities of the emulation. In both cases, it is essential that the upgrade and migration speed of the virtual support is as slow as possible, this being one of the highest impact characteristics in the struggle with time. It is also important to have the guarantee of support and long term maintenance. Another important characteristic is the implementation of an architecture with high absorption capacity of any technology. Although it still does not exist, a technological architectural standard that meets the needs of digital art preservation is a demand. This is why it is so important to work with open17 and standard environments and with free tools. The proposal of a standard, or group of standards, for the documentation, preservation and restoration of digital art is also a priority. Reinterpretation It is the most powerful preservation strategy, but at the same time, one with greater risks. It consists in reinterpreting the work each time it is re-created. The reinterpretation can require the writing of a code for a totally different platform following a group of specific instructions in situ with respect to the installation, or to renovate a work in a contemporary media with the metaphoric value of an outdated media. This technique is very dangerous without the assurance or approval of the artist, but it may be the only way to guarantee the re-creation, installation, or re-design of the artwork. Duplication This strategy is applied to the media that can be perfectly cloned. There is no difference between the original and the copy. Case Studies Each artwork should be treated as unique, and can be considered a case study. All the previous strategies can be applied to almost any category. However, it is necessary to consider the particularities of each case and to value the suitability of each tool, cost, etc. TV-Garden, for example, created in 1974 by Nam June Paik, is a work considered by some as New Media Art, and by others as Video Installation and even Electronic Art18. It is an installation that celebrates the diffusion of television like a garden that extends, composed of natural plants and monitors with intermittent images. The application of the storage strategy to this work would require to stock a large quantity of monitors identical to the originals. The migration, however, would allow to replace these monitors with others from a different manufacturer. The emulation would be even more permissive, and it would allow the digitization of the installation so that modern digital monitors such as LCD, Plasma or OLED, could be used. This last strategy would facilitate the preservation of the work in a totally digital world. Finally, the reinterpretation of the work would have no qualms about using monitors of different size. In each case, the most important is the preservation of the artist’s intention and of the perceptual quality, which diminishes as permissibility increases. Most of these variables can be clarified with a good documentation, and with the artist opinion and supervision. A good documentation, in fact, should clearly quantify the perceptual quality of the images, a process for which the artist is not prepared and probably neither the institution that acquires the artwork. Otherwise, how can one know when the monitor fatigue degrades the image? How to prepare the illumination to obtain the same visual effect? How do the conditions and storage time affect the operation of the work? There are categories with well defined technological features such as net art. The pieces, data and code that share hard disk space in a server can satisfy in a greater or lesser degree either official or de facto standard, or can be more or less related to certain technologies. The use of standards can be a good strategy because they usually keep a certain level of compatibility with the previous technological versions and have a higher endurance to change. The protocol of data communication TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is a good example. In 1969 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) created ARPANET, a R&D project to develop an experimental net of package exchange. This net evolved until 1975 when it became totally operational. The TCP/IP protocols were developed during that period. In 1983 the protocols were adopted as a military standard and all the machines connected to ARPANET had to migrate to those protocols19. At the end of 1983 the original ARPANET was divided in two subnets, MILNET, the unclassified part of the DDN (Defense Network Dates) and a new and more reduced ARPANET. The group of those nets was named the Internet. Finally, in 1990 ARPANET disappeared but the Internet remains as the net of nets. TCP/IP are open and free standard protocols. Their development and update are carried out consensually and not according to manufacturer strategies. Anyone can develop products that are consistent with the specifications. They are software and hardware independent. Their wide use makes them especially suitable for interconnecting different manufacturer devices, not only for the Internet but also for local networks. They provide a common address scheme that allows a TCP/IP device to find another in any point of the net. Moreover, they are high level standardized protocols that support services to the user and they are broadly available and consistent. To change the programming of all the TCP/IP devices that constitute the Internet, some of them using protocols dating from 1975 that work, means a cost, an effort and a collaboration almost impossible to imagine. However, the use of less common technologies of a certain manufacturer with multiple versions represents a risk. Companies follow expansion policies, merge and even go to bankruptcy according to the market more than they offer guarantees required by their customers. A proprietary technology has a shorter expiration date than a standard one, which is empowered by a community of internet users, scientific and/or academic institutions, etc. To migrate a net artwork means to modify code over and over again which requires a continuous and considerable effort. The emulation means to upgrade a virtual machine, probably the server and the client, and to preserve any and every of the involved obsolete technologies. To reinterpret means to re-create the work with completely different technologies. It should be mentioned that the diskette, which was the normal support for the distribution of any technology in the 80’s and 90’s, belongs now in a museum, and it is not supported by most of 2009 computers. However the migration, emulation, and even the reinterpretation can be the best options when the adopted technology is prepared to resist obsolescence. Anyway, the core strategy is to remake the work in a robust and well-documented technology that makes its display, conservation and restoration easier for the museum. Conclusions It is clear that the mobilization and cooperation of entities such as museums, collectors, foundations, and other institutions in favour of the preservation and restoration of digital art is not enough. The answer to the concern of UNESCO with this kind of heritage has been focused on documentation. There is still much effort to do regarding the technology, its stability, methodologies and their most dangerous natural characteristic: the obsolescence. A remarkable special feature is the need of involving the artist in the documentation, preservation and restoration processes. The preservation of the digital heritage is a multidisciplinary technological forensic activity that requires appropriate training, not only for the new conservators but also for the artists themselves. The control of the appropriate technology is as important as the development of methodologies that raise good practices and pass them on to all the agents involved: technicians, conservators and artists. Digital heritage did not survive the passing of time. This is both a problem and a reality: challenges are there and action is urgent. Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge the positive willingness and collaboration of the preservation and restoration department of the National Museum Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and to thank Laura Barreca, who facilitated the access to their important research on the detection of the needs and problems that the preservation of digital art poses.
Notes
1 As for the application of scientific practices to the conservation process. 2 Venn diagrams are representations of the set theory that shows graphically the mathematical or logical relationship between different groups of things (sets). Each set is normally represented by an oval or circle but we allowed ourselves to represent them as rectangles. The diagram is an approach towards a graphic and organized representation of the multiple terms used in this environment and their interrelations; the volumes of the sets do not carry information and the intersections are not very accurate. 3 Bruce Wands draws attention to the participation of the spectator in interactive art. Wands says “The traditional museum and gallery etiquette of ‘Look, don’t touch’ cannot be applied to interactive art, which requires the participation of the viewer and can be more accurately described as ‘Look, please touch’”. 4 According to Alsina [6 ] "today software art is based on the consideration that software is not only a functional instrument, but rather an artistic creation itself: the resulting aesthetic material is the generated code and the expressive form is the programming." (free translation). 5 “[…] the sculptural work never assumes the form of an actual physical object but resides as a file within cyberspace or within the virtual world of the computer” [1]. 6 They manipulate data in real time, responding to the behaviour of certain information either from the environment, from the audience or algorithmically generated. 7 Christopher G. Langton, American biologist founder of the study of artificial life, defines it as "the study of systems built by human beings (artificial) that exhibit characteristic behaviors of natural alive systems (biological)” [6, p.75]. 8 "Appropriation is something so normal that it is almost taken for granted" [4, p. 13]. Although it is a property that is normally associated to new media, it is practically natural to the Internet-based art. "Internet and the file-sharing networks give artists an easy access to images, sounds, texts and other resources. This hyper-abundance of materials, combined with the ubiquitous function cut/paste of computer software, has contributed to clarify the idea that is better to create something from nothing than to borrow it". 9 The sound is a one-dimension signal; the image is bi-dimensional; the video, the cinema and the sculpture are three-dimensional and the interactive installations are tetra-dimensional. 10 The difference is totally functional. The video is a closed work and stored in digital format while a video channel is a video source in real time that captures certain reality, such as surveillance, which uses security cameras. 11 The artwork Telegarden by Ken Golberg and Joseph Santarromana is a good example of it, http://queue.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/garden/telegarden. "The TeleGarden is an art installation that allows web users to view and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. Members can plant, water, and monitor the progress of seedlings via the tender movements of an industrial robot arm". This work, developed at the University of Southern California and available (online) since June of 1995, and whose keywords could be installation, telepresence and participation, is considered, however, interactive art. 12 Media Art Resource, Electronic arts intermix, http://resourceguide.eai.org/ (last accessed on June 2, 2009). The project EIA Online Resource Guide to Exhibiting, Collecting & Preservation Media Art establishes a series of common guidelines: introduction, good practices, basic questions, processes, contract/condition reports (according to which cases), costs, teams and technologies, interviews and articles. It contains three categories or typology of works: monochannel video, computer-generated works and installations. 13 Cloud computing offers a special opportunity to distribute information copies or clones throughout the world. This type of architecture provides storage services that ensure data protection to natural disasters. 14 In this sense, refreshing is closer to migration than to storage. 15 It could be an operating system, a program, the appearance of a video game console, or an electronic device. 16 System of systems where several digital devices have the responsibility of running code from an obsolete platform. 17 In terms of interconnection of the systems. 18 The video installation is a subset of new media for which it seems to be a more specific category. However, the correspondence with electronic art is given more for its nature than for the means of the expression itself. 19 In order to facilitate this migration, DARPA BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman) was founded to implement the protocols TCP/IP in the Berkeley Unix system (BSD Unix). This was the beginning of the long union between TCP/IP and UNIX. References [1] M. Tribe, J. Reena, Arte y Nuevas Tecnologías, Taschen, Germany, 2006 [2] L. Barreca, Il dibattito internazionale intorno al la conservazione e alla documentazione della New Media Art. 1995-2007, PhD thesis, Università degli Studi della Tuscia di Viterbo, Viterbo, 2008 [3] B. Wands, Art of the Digital Age, Thames & Hudson, London, 2006 [4] M. Rush, Nuevas Expresiones Artísticas a Finales del Siglo XX, Ediciones Destino, Thames & Hudson, Barcelona, 2002 [5] S. Martin, Videoarte, Taschen, Germany, 2006 [6] P. Alsina, Arte, Ciencia y Tecnología, Editorial UOC, Barcelona, 2007 [7] C. Paul, Digital Art, Thames & Hudson, London, 2008 [8] D. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001 [9] R. Greene, Internet Art, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004 [10] K. Ploug, Art games: An introduction, http://www.artificial.dk/articles/artgamesintro.htm, 2005 (accessed May 3, 2010)
About the authors
Lino García
ScientistContact: lino.garcia@uem.es
Lino García has an engineering degree by the Instituto Superior Politécnico “José A. Echevarría” (ISPJAE), a Master in Communication Systems and Networks by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and a PhD by the same university. He has been teaching at different universities since 1992. He is now Professor at the Universidad Europea de Madrid (UEM), at Escuela Superior Politécnica (ESP) and Escuela Superior de Arte y Arquitectura (ESAYA). Currently, he is the leader of a transdisciplinar research group on the intersection be-tween art, technology and society. He is also a published author, musician and composer. Since 2007 he is the director of the Master in Arquitec-tonical and Environmemtal Acoustics. In 2008 he published his first novel ISLAS, published by @becedario and received a prize in the Jornadas Internacionales de Innovación Universitaria for his work Metodología para proyectos transdisciplinares.
Pilar Montero Vilar
ResearcherPilar Montero Vilar graduated in Fine Arts, Paintings and Conservation specialty, at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) after which she pursued a Master in Aesthetic and Arts’ Theory at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), and a PhD in Fine Arts from UCM. She was teaching Theory and Practice for the Master in Contemporary Fine Arts from UCM (2002-2007) and she is currently a Professor at the Department of Artistic Creation and Theory of Art of ESAYA, UEM, and an Associated Professor of the Paintings Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts, UCM. At the moment she leads a research project entitled Dibujando el Madrid del siglo XXI (Drawing the XXI-century Madrid) at UEM.
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