William Kilbride: Introduction

Notes by Kristy Davis ... The day was to focus on digital art and preservation in which cutting-edge issues would be discussed. He noted that the day would be broken into four areas: an overview of the topic of the digital preservation of digital art; case studies of preservation issues in digital art; emerging trends and things to consider in the future; and a discussion at the end. The conference was tweeted at: #preservedigitalart

David Duce (Oxford Brooks University): The Nature of the Problem

Notes by Kristy Davis ... Background – digital objects are just ‘bits’; hardware and operating systems are subject to change that presents a challenge for continuous access.  There is a longevity issue with digital art ‘bits’ lasting only around 50+ years compared to the longer lasting cave and oil paintings.  Example of how a logo changed for a conference website with the first version in 2001 and over time there have been over 20 logo sequences. Not straightforward to preserve and the experience of viewing digital animation changes over time. Various approaches such as migration to new media and/or file formats, emulation that replicates original look and feel on modern hardware, and the Universal Virtual Computer. However, there are risks in preserving with hardware. Presented several models and case studies: national Archives Australia, JISC, etc. Issues raised were lack of fixity, dynamic of a work, formal elements and authenticity that leads to the question ‘what really is the work?’ Mentioned the need to document why an object is being preserved and precisely why it’s being preserved in a particular way. Part of the problem is uncertainty and speculation on what it might be in the future. Mentions that cultural heritage is particularly challenging since what is the original, how is it recorded, used and its significance. Mentioned meta knowledge such as CIDOC-CRM standards and to encode metadata about historical artefacts by recording events. For the future, ideas of digital forensics and ideas of pieces of evidence and historical process applications to capture digital artefacts. The pitfalls are: knowledge as interpretation of evidence that can be ambiguous.

See presentation here (link to follow)

Kate Jennings and Pip Laurenson (Tate): Collecting, conserving and managing digital art-an institutional perspective

Notes by Kristy Davis ...The Tate has approximately 400 time-based artworks in its collection that are primarily installation-based and the video works have been archived. Standards of practice have been established as times changed. At the time of acquisition of any time-based artworks they ask why an artist chose that medium, what are acceptable and unacceptable risks and possible changes in the work. Questions on media (how it’s made, production path, what is the master and exhibition format) and display (ask artist how they want their work to be shown) were discussed. Referred to the Internal and External Collaborative Workshop: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/mediamatters In the Internal, there is a departmental working group established to work on web-based art, and in the external, it deals with matters in media arts and what does a digital repository need to look like and what software is needed. A video was shown of an interview, part of an AHRC project, with David Rokeby on how software is the core of his work and discussed issues on documented specifications, philosophy, aesthetics, etc. Noted that the Tate has a close working relationship with artists and their programmers to work on the preservation of time-based media; however, they need more strategies to deal with this. Discussion on the benefits of working with digital work programmers early to explore the process of the future of the work and to learn from the process and how documenting code and interviews with artists are necessary to better understand work. The Tate is active in research and is responsible for developing standards for software-based work.

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Leo Konstantelos (Glasgow University): Digital Art Online - perspectives on user needs, access, documentation and retrieval

Notes by Kristy Davis ... Discussed his project to explore digital arts need for documentation and retrieval with a user-orientated approach. Looked at digital art as learning and research material and investigated practices of digital art resources.  Some issues found in this research are that digital art records modern culture for future scholars, dissemination methods often bypass traditional channels of memory institutions, there are huge collections of digital art in dedicated online resources, are museum and art galleries the sole arbiters of value and who are the scholarly users of this material and what are their needs? Conducted a case study of online digital art resources to examine variables and found that mission statements generally promoted community interaction, occasionally engaged a community of digital art users and rarely emphasized the educational research value of digital art. Found that there were inconsistencies in documentation, especially with description and technical metadata which was left to the artists; discretionary use of elements with no mandatory fields with mostly system generated, resource – specific data and that only two of the resources used formal metadata standards (RHIZOM/DAMS) and the rest relied on ad hoc methods and social tagging. In the digital art market network sale and profit is valued over scholarly value and it is difficult to keep track of artefacts without contacting the artist/creator, who sometimes goes by a nickname, since there is no reference or contact details attached. In search and discovery of digital art resources, four out of sixteen resources were optimized for search engine exposure of the collections and the sorting of the collections items was mostly based on community related criteria. Other issues to address with online digital art resources are access rights, information on creator, requirements to view the work, genre, software and hardware specifications and a history of changes to the original work. Notes that conservation starts at creation. Mentioned the role of cultural heritage institutions crating good practice guidelines that extend to digital art and highlighted the Planets Report on Emerging Digital Art Characterization, the POCOS Project and the KEEP Project. The educational value of digital art online resources can be established through synchronizing art and museum efforts and that preservation signifies long-term access.

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Sarah Cook (CRUMB) and Jon Thomson (UCL): Curating, Commissioning, and Conserving - Digital Art in Practice

Notes by Kristy Davis ... Sarah Cook discussed how digital and media art fits into art history and how it exists in a larger context. She described two online art projects she had curated that raise issues of preservation. The first one, Add-Art, is an online exhibition ‘curated’ by a different person every two weeks of digital images which replace commercial advertising on the web; it is predominantly documented by screen grabs, but this method won’t provide much context. The second, MobileScout, was a time-based, user-contributed artwork, commissioned for a touring exhibition; the work is no longer online but wasn't intended to exist 'live' indefinitely, raising questions about the responsibilities of commissioners and curators. She raised the question of how much does complete metadata matter for art history research, and that documentation - writing and publishing about digital and media art - is one preservation strategy.

Jon Thomson of the artist duo Thomson & Craighead, gave examples of how some of their digital art and installations was made and how it has been acquired by museums or national collections or commissioned for (semi)permanent display in public space. Each of the artworks discussed raised various issues in how they were to be preserved since all are at some level software-based work, many using live data drawn from the internet.

Sarah Cook's Presentation / Jon Thomson's Presentation (link to follow)

Perla Innocenti (Glasgow University): Preserving digital art - Art Theory, Methods and Experimental Applications

Notes by Kristy Davis ... Discussed digital art as a process of components and as performance and how to prevent digital casualties. Digital preservation is an ongoing activity to ensure the reoccurring value of a digital art object and to ensure that future users are able to use the digital information in the face of constantly changing technology. It involves conservation, renewal, restoration, selection, destruction, enhancing, updating and emulation. Digital art is art that is produced and mediated by a computer. Previous initiatives in digital art preservation comprise: EAI (1971); IMAO (1999), INCOCA (1999), UMN (2000), Matters in Media Art (2003), Inside Installation Project (2004), and DOCAM (2005-2009). The research methodology used included onsite visit and in-depth interviews with artists, experimentation (EU/FP7 Planets/SHAMAN), and anticipated outcomes-foundations of a preservation assessment framework of digital art that included policies and notation systems. Preservation of digital artwork by conservators and curators is ad hoc and experimentation with the curation of digital art is essential and to preserve digital art one needs tools and a plan. Mentioned SHAMAN, which is a preservation framework project (www.shaman-ip.eu). The importance in art history the context, authenticity and surrogates of digital art are important in preserving ideas and the medium; with digital preservation, the digital lifecycle in the past and present, curation and evaluation, and in organization of the mission expectations, models, and legal and ethical constraints.

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Brian Matthews (STFC): Preserving the software in software based art

Notes by Kristy Davis ... BM Works for the Science and Technology Facilities Council that provides large-scale scientific facilities, within the E-Science centre providing advanced IT support. Involved in JISC projects between 2007-2009 that reported on the significant properties of software and provided tools and guidelines for preservation of software as a research output. The role of software in digital art needs to preserve output both physically and digitally and to preserve the source-code. Discussed how one needed to preserve the whole environment of a digital art installation, the algorithm and seeds of an algorithmic artwork and the complex preservation needs of an interactive application / intelligence machine. Issues with preserving software-based artworks are varied and complex since there are lots of dependencies, licensing issues, the work is subject to decay, one size doesn’t fit all, depends where the key part of the artistic intentions lie, and needs some vocabulary to discuss it’s management. There are several ways or strategies to deal with theses issues: encapsulation, emulation, migration, cultivation, hibernation, depreciation and procrastination. Software preservation steps are: preservation, retrieval, reconstruction and replaying. When one needs to preserve software, one needs to identify all of the related digital artefacts to preserve and in order to use it again one must thing about functionality, environment, dependencies, software as a composite, architecture and user interaction. One important question is 'what is enough?' in tracking significant properties and assessing value of a performance; the notion of adequacy allows significant properties of software to be tested.The meaning for digital art is preserving software artefacts, one may not need to preserve it all, does it keep satisfying the artists intentions, does is keep satisfying the audiences experience and that digital art is hard to sustain and one should prepare for reinterpretation.  Mentioned the Variable Media Network (www.variablemedia.net/eindex.html), which has information on storage, emulation, migration and reinterpretation.

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Patricia Falcao (Tate): Software-based art from delivery to display - Case Studies from the Tate Collection

Notes by Kristy Davis ... Research based on developing a tool found in use studies and examined the lifecycle of software-based art from acquisition to installation to display to long-term storage. Looked at risks involved such as possible and expected loss of value in physical form, inherent decay, custodial neglect and information disassociation. Software-based risk is similar to time-basked risk – both systems are bespoke, both systems are easily changed and both technical environments rapidly decay. Magnifying factors influence consequence of risk, which includes anything that can be described as a lack of something, a lack of technical expertise, lack of information on emerging procedures and a lack of trained staff. The significance refers to values and meanings that items have for people and the community. A statement of significance should be a reasoned, clear summary of values, meaning and importance of an object or collection. The recovery and significance for traditional art objects that are damages equals a loss of value and for time-based medial there is recovery. Recoverability means is an element replaceable and can one find or produce an appropriate replacement and can one afford to acquire a replacement. Obsolescence and cost of recovery is expensive so it is best to act before the work starts to decline. Noted the importance of interviewing the artists and programmers of software and time-based works in order to define display specifications and parameters and to identify what can and cannot be changed and to discover how an artist wants their work preserved. Some ways to secure the work are to make clones immediately, create exhibition copies, gather operation manuals and specifications for software and hardware and test the system throughout the installation. Other issues with the display of software and time-based work is the maintenance of the device throughout the exhibition since long-term display is a magnifying factor with obsolescence and recoverability, but one can, over the life of a work, document any change to the system. Suggests that we should develop procedures for acquiring software-based work and to identify tools and test recovery strategies.

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Discussion - notes and comments

(Notes by Kristy Davis)

• Need to evaluate tools for digital art preservation.
• Capacity is a looming issue: we currently preserve only a tiny amount.  This may be the right way round because the costs of intervention seem to high.
• Is there scope for small, cheap, high volume interventions that can secure a significant proportion of digital art
• How do we define value and who should be entitled to make these decisions.  What might be the terms of reference for establishing value. If we can achieve this then we can establish priorities more effectively
• Discussion on information management issues, particularly regarding metadata
• It’s possible that preserving digital art will get cheaper through time.  In the analogue world the costs of preservation go up through time.  Need to establish a more thorough understanding of costs.
• Repository issue – different languages used which makes things difficult.  ‘Repository’ is not always a useful concept in the context of digital art
• Discussed the need to define content specifications.
• It was noted that a national archive of material from the Internet is in progress.