Archiving digital media

"We are just beginning to grapple with the question of what it means to collect and archive work that is based in such a fluid substrate. In theory, digital files can be easily and perfectly copied. In practice, technological obsolescence, mutability due to dynamic interactivity, and the unbounded qualities of networked space all conspire to complicate both the ability and possibly even the desirability of collecting and archiving 'new media.'"

Jon Ippolito, the curator at the Guggenheim of the CyberAtlas, presented his ideas on "variable media." Drawing on his experiences with conceptual art in the Guggenheim's Panzi collection, Ippolito has proposed that artists pre-identify to what extent an artwork is allowed to vary from its original instantiation. For instance, is it kosher for a museum to update a net art project so that it still runs the same way in the new version of a browser or must the museum also archive different configurations of hardware and software along with the artworks, so that they run "correctly?"

Ippolito is also part of a collaboration with Janet Cohen and Keith Frank, and they invited curators to suggest different variations of an existing project as a concrete working through of the variable media proposal.

Vuk Cosic, a net.artist and archaeologist presented his guerilla archiving of the Documenta X Web site, which otherwise would have vanished, although there was some debate with the curator of that site, about the accuracy of Cosic's archiving, raising again the question of whether something imperfect is better than nothing.

In contradistinction to Cosic's efforts, the CIAO project--Conceptual and Intermedia Art Online--is a consortium of museums that is attempting to adapt a formal archiving standard, the EAD or Encoded Archival Description format, as a way to ensure that archiving of online, conceptual, and intermedia art is rigorous.

In comparing the two projects, I can't help thinking about Luciano Canfora's (1998) book on the fabled library of Alexandria, in which he states:

"The great concentrations of books usually found in the centers of power, were the main victims of these destructive outbreaks, ruinous attacks, sackings and fires. The libraries of Byzantium proved no exception to the rule. In consequence, what has come down to us is derived not from the great centres but from 'marginal' locations, such as convents, and from scattered private copies."

At another earlier symposium, "Virtual Museums on the Internet," organized by the ARCH Foundation, Salzburg, Austria, Peter Weibel went so far as to suggest that the "true" function of the museum in the digital age is as an archive.

"How will the virtual museum change our concept of the museum? It will support an underlying tendency to show the difference between an exhibition space and an archive. Any space can be an exhibition space. The main function of the museum is not just to show something. The main function is to be an archive. . . . So the question of conservation, of preservation, of reproduction, reconstruction and simulation, etc. is the biggest problem of the museum, which is now reformatted by the virtual museum."

"Radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete changes but rather the restructuration of a certain number of elements already given: features that in an earlier period of system were subordinate beame dominant, and features that had been dominant again become secondary."