CHArt Twenty-Second Annual Conference

Preserving and Recovering Computer Art: Reconstructing Data or the Artwork
Nick Lambert, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

The development of computer art took place in a burgeoning ecology of software and hardware formats, many short-lived and almost all incompatible. Their evolution and subsequent development, convergence or extinction is broadly comparable to the ‘Pre-Cambrian Explosion’ in palaeontology. The sheer diversity of obsolete formats poses many questions for the historian of computer art when researching this area's archives with a view to digitising or recovering their contents. To what extent can historic digital artworks be preserved, re-displayed or even recreated for modern audiences with contemporary technology? And how far can the work be separated from its underlying context of data, and the associated hardware, without destroying its most distinctive aspects? The paper considers examples from the CACHe Project, ZKM and other initiatives.

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