Anne Laforet, University of Avignon, France

Preservation of Net Art in Museums

Keywords: net art, variable media, preservation, museum.

Artists appropriated the Internet as soon as it became public, developing new artistic, social and technical practices that are now referred to collectively as net art. Museums and cultural institutions that are interested in such works have had to reconsider the way that they commission, exhibit, collect and preserve artworks, just as they have done for other forms of ephemeral or process-based art.

Within the museum, the balance between documentation and preservation is shifting in favour of documentation, as many contemporary artworks do not have a fixed or stable form but exist in multiple states. A rich, diverse and precise documentation is crucial in order to support preservation strategies that envisage artworks as being variable, mutable and not static.

New or updated preservation models need to be explored. Beginning with an overview of current models being researched and implemented (especially those within museums or national libraries), this paper will develop the idea of the archaeological museum as a potential solution to the problems inherent in net art preservation.

Net art preservation may be seen as a paradox: How should the conservation of a living artistic practice in flux be approached?

Preservation involves the care of objects and the transmission of values and concepts from yesterday or today to the future. It means that choices must be made and possible losses accepted. It entails future access to and exhibition of the objects and artworks.

Current data storage capacities may give the illusion that the preservation of all human creations is possible, at least in the short term. Automatic data processing, without any human intervention, is being pursued by many, from archival institutions to commercial companies, as a means of preservation. However, effective preservation involves selection according to a set of defined criteria.

Developing a specific long-term preservation strategy is not an easy task for museums even though most now have experience of preserving other ephemeral forms of artwork such as land art, performance or conceptual art. There are new questions to be addressed: on one hand, there are accepted preservation methods and practices, and on the other hand, specialised knowledge in the maintenance and preservation of digital content. The alliance of the two creates an exciting, and perilous, area for experimentation.

As Julian Stallabrass pointed out in his book Internet Art. The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce:

‘..there is a strong contrast between the unchanging character of digital artworks for those who hold to fixity as an ideal, and the reality of the process-led and temporary character of Internet art. The former is a dream of the immutability of the art object; the latter a visible manifestation and dramatisation of the condition of art even in the offline world, its original meanings changing, growing and eroding as its social, political and institutional framing shifts’. ¹

The impossibility of maintaining an Internet-based artwork in an ‘original’ state (which may not even have existed) compels the institution to clarify what it desires to preserve and why, and what may be possible for it to preserve.

The practical and conceptual question of how to delimit an online artwork is raised A net art piece may be in continual evolution, incorporating contributions by one or many persons to content derived from other websites (links, access to databases, webcams, audio, video streams, etc.). The perception of the boundaries between the works and their environment is far from easy to understand, even for the artists creating the work. This issue is also significant within the framework of intellectual property.

An online artwork may be delimited only through a deep understanding of the original context of its creation, a context that should be preserved as far as possible for further research but also for presentation (through access to the work and its exhibition). For instance, if an institution acquires works that have a ‘parasitic’ relationship with other websites, such as pieces using data from search engines, or which create alternative visualisations of websites, for instance by using alternative browsers, should such works be exhibited with the websites and technologies available at the moment of creation or with the tools and content at the moment of actualisation? Both are valid but are of different significance.

Which elements of net art works should be emphasised, described, documented and kept? What makes up the artwork? Its source code? The experience of the piece for the visitor? Preservation strategies and subsequent collections will vary, depending on how institutions answer this question.

The balance within the museum seems to be shifting from preservation to documentation, owing to the make-up of these artworks, that is, the many software and hardware layers that are continually on the brink of obsolescence. These artworks do not have a fixed or stable form but progress through multiple states. These states need to be captured (using the term chosen by the Rotterdam-based centre for unstable media V2_).

Alongside the context of the works, it is also important to document the process of their creation rather than simply focusing on one or many states or moments of the work. Documentation may also include contextual information, information about visitor interaction and how its interfaces are inhabited and explored.

In this paper I focus on three approaches to preservation for museums and cultural institutions: first, when the museum model of preservation is promoted from inside the museum institution (the Variable Media ² paradigm); second, how institutions that embrace new media art from its inception to its presentation deal with traces of artistic practice (e.g. the V2_ archive ³); and third, some initiatives from archival institutions and libraries in web archiving.

Within the museum context, Jon Ippolito, an artist, and a curator at the Guggenheim Museum, originated the approach known as Variable Media. This perceives the artwork outside its medium, so that it can evolve and be recreated, for instance when its original medium becomes obsolete. Every art work is considered individually, more as a score than a finite, unchanging object.

The variable media approach does not only focus on net art, but also deals with every contemporary art form that puts an emphasis on process rather than on the object, such as, for example, conceptual art, land art, minimal art, installations and performance.

When an artwork is acquired by the museum, its ‘behaviours’ are defined to describe it beyond its physicality. The artwork may be installed, performed, reproduced, duplicated, interactive, encoded, networked or contained. These terms go beyond a mere separation per medium or a simple opposition between analogue and digital.

The acquisition is also the opportunity for a deep dialogue between the museum and the artist. Four preservation strategies have been highlighted: storage, migration, emulation, and reinterpretation. The artist is invited to choose one or more of these. This process demonstrates a significant change in the rôle of the artist within the museum.

Storage, the default solution, consists of holding the artwork on digital media. There is of course the risk of losing the artwork if the storage media becomes obsolete.

Migration implies an upgrade from one storage medium to another; that is converting a file to a new format or transferring it to a more recent version of the underlying software. One consequence of migration may be a change in the appearance of an artwork, for instance if some software functions are not continued from one version to another.

Emulation recreates the appearance of a work. Preserving the hardware and software on which artworks have been created is not conceivable in the long term, but it is possible to emulate the original works. By installing the various software layers that have been preserved on a new system, it is possible to execute the artwork (original or modified) files to recreate it. It seems simpler and less expensive than migration because the level of intervention is not at file level but at operating system or hardware level (depending on the kind of emulation chosen). Such solutions may be developed by a network of institutions. Emulation works best for autonomous software, and for net art. One significant issue is the possibility of network emulation. This goes beyond emulating connection speed, to Internet protocols, server- and client-side softwares, and perhaps even the content of the Internet for some net art projects. Despite the many developments in the emulation field, it is probable than not all elements of an online artwork may be preserved. Nevertheless, all preserved fragments are still very precious to museums.

One of the main contributions to the variable media paradigm is the identification of the fourth strategy, reinterpretation. This means recreating the work each time it is actualised, faithful to the artist’s intentions although the artwork may be very different materially from its original form. The museum then has a more active role. ‘As outlandish as the idea may seem to traditional collecting practices, the Variable Media Initiative offers an alternative for those whose conception of their work goes beyond its manifestation in a particular form. And it helps us imagine the museum as an incubator for living, changing artworks, rather than a mausoleum for dead ones’. ⁴

Variable Media is not the only institutional framework for net art preservation. Archiving the Avant-Garde ⁵, subtitled Documenting and Preserving Digital/Variable Media Art, is an initiative of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Associated with Variable Media and other structures, Archiving the Avant-Garde develops and tests models for notation, cataloguing, accession, and emulation within the museum environment.

To deal with the challenge of preservation, some institutions choose to focus on documentation strategies. Such an institution is V2_, not a museum per se, but a centre devoted to unstable media art based in Rotterdam. The goal of the V2_ archive is to document the artworks and projects presented or produced at V2_, not to acquire and preserve them. However, it is not always possible to distinguish an online project from its documentation (a website and its archive could be similar or different depending on their code, their content and the way they are copied). Similarly, it is harder to distinguish data and metadata in an online environment (as they both may be embedded in the same code).

Instead of preservation, V2_ has chosen to use the term ‘capture’: ‘capturing means assembling all necessary information on a project and its subordinate aspects, structuring this information in such a way that it gives a good impression of the different manifestations of the project and keeping the resulting metadata blueprints of the electronic art activities accessible for future research.’ ⁶ In this way the V2_ initiative reflects the current shift from preservation towards documentation that is taking place within a number of cultural institutions, owing to the materiality of the artworks.

Although the objectives and methods of museums and archives do differ, it is pertinent to look closer at archival initiatives to preserve online materials. Many archives and libraries are currently pursuing web archiving, many through the framework of legal deposit, or in collecting websites from national domains. Owing to the high volumes of data to be captured (for instance a snapshot of the French domain contains around 120 billion files ⁷), they usually focus on automatic archiving with the aid of webcrawler robots, while integrating metadata.

Legal deposit in France has been expanded in order to include the Internet in its mission. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) intends to create snapshots of the French Web at regular intervals, and plans also to gather net art sites. The latter project is still at the conceptual stage but many issues have already arisen. For example, artworks captured through automatic tools may behave differently to the ‘original’ works, and may be captured without the knowledge of the artist(s), without remuneration, etc. Such matters are at the core of the differences between the museum and the library. The way the BNF resolves or does not resolve these issues will be an interesting focus for future research.

To conclude, I would like to propose a hybrid model for the preservation of net art using the metaphor of the archaeological museum. Archaeology is often concerned with gathering fragments and reassembling objects, taking account of voids, gaps and missing parts. Through analysis, a plausible argument for the original object/s may be put forward, while maintaining open alternative hypotheses. Viewers are made aware that what they are seeing and experiencing may be a reconstruction or interpretation of an original state.

As Annick Bureaud, Nathalie Lafforgue and Joël Boutteville suggested in a study on new media for the French Ministry of Culture in 1996: ‘the art museum which receives unique items is certainly not the model for the conservation of electronic art, even if it can still fulfil this function on the fringe or open its premises to other forms of conservation. The archaeological museum however seems to be a more apposite example: it combines scholarly culture and everyday items ; it keeps "broken pieces" (equivalent to works which don’t work as they should any more) that it can decipher; it deals with the repetition and accumulation of identical objects in different states which help towards the projected reconstitution of the original condition. Such ‘archaeology’ is necessary in electronic art. Indeed, the works created by many pioneers in this field simply do not work any more or do not work properly, while some have simply vanished’. ⁸

This model seems an appropriate means to comprehend and deal with net art works and their contexts. Indeed, the net art environment (online critical writing, annotated links, mailing lists, etc.) is not currently preserved by art museums as they concentrate on the artworks themselves, taking part, in spite of themselves, in the disappearance of the original context of the works. In contrast, automatic net archiving takes into account the inter-relational aspect of net art; that is, its continuing evolution within a dynamic environment. Regular and automated indexing (which doesn’t necessitate the active intervention of a person in charge of preservation) makes it possible to follow very closely the way art works evolve. However, automatic recording doesn’t necessarily mean that the works are functioning as they did at the time of their capture when they were on their original servers, especially as a large part of the web, nicknamed the ‘invisible’ or ‘deep’ web, may be accessed only through requests in databases or via passwords, making it difficult for robots to view and record data (even if partial captures may be performed). A presentation by the BNF team working on legal deposit and on the prefiguration of its net art collection at a BNF Symposium was a good example of the latter; the examples chosen for the demonstration of the capture of net art were ‘broken’ owing to the inability of webcrawler bots to cope with their technological make-up. It seems relevant to pursue a combination of museum and archive methods in order to maintain the richest experience of net artworks.

By emphasising the dialogue between net art works and their environment, an institution could become a living archive; a research space, with fragments of artworks that could be updated and re-activated in multiple ways. Ideally, it could take the form of a partnership of organisations involved in giving access to and preserving Internet art. Ad-hoc projects or long-term collaborations may easily be imagined: a cross-pollination of fragments, histories and stories. Current groupings of institutions in both the archive and museum communities as well as an increasing interest in inter-operability and complementarity might adumbrate such meta-institutions, and of course the involvement of artists, art historians, art critics and net art lovers would be intrinsic to the development of such projects.

November 2006

Notes

1. Stallabrass, J. (2003), Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, London: Tate Publishing, p. 44.

2. Variable Media, http://www.variablemedia.net/ (active 15 April 2008).

3. V2_Archive, http://framework.v2.nl/archive/general/default.xslt (active 15 April 2008).

4. Ippolito, J. (1998), The Museum of the Future: A Contradiction in Terms?, http://three.org/ippolito/writing/wri_cross_museum.html (active 15 April 2008).

5. Archiving the Avant-Garde, http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about/avantgarde (active 15 April 2008).

6. V2_ (2004), Capturing Unstable Media: Deliverable 1.2 – Documentation and capturing methods for unstable media arts. http://archive.v2.nl/v2_archive/projects/capturing/1_2_capturing.pdf (active 15 April 2008).

7. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Legal deposit: five questions about Web Archiving at BnF, http://www.bnf.fr/pages/version_anglaise/depotleg/dl-internet_quest_eng.htm (active 15 April 2008).

8. Boutteville, J., Bureaud, A., Lafforgue, N. (1996), Art et Technologie: la Monstration, http://www.olats.org/livresetudes/etudes/monstration/ (active 15 April 2008).

 

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