Digital Preservation Coalition

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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