Thesis Research

Source: New Media Art

pg. 24: “The inherently ephemeral nature of much New Media art, we well as its often unfamiliar aesthetics and technologies, posed a challenge to gallerists and collectors. Some artists provide a CD-ROM of other storage device containing a copy of the work (e.g. the sale of a floppy disk containing Douglas Davis’ The World’s First Collaborative Sentence to collectors in 1995). Others produce works that take the form of physical objects, such as John F. Simon Jr.‘s wall-mounted “art appliances,” which recall framed paintings. Feng Mengbo’s Iris prints from his interactive CD-ROMs and Cory Arcangel’s silk-screens of images from his Game art works, have had commercial success, partly because such forms are familiar and relatively easy to exhibit.”

“Because of its often immaterial nature and its reliance on software and equipment that rapidly becomes obsolete and unavailable, New Media art is particularly difficult to preserve. Just as most of Eva Hesse’s latex sculptures from the 1960s and ‘70s have deteriorated, many works of New Media art will soon be beyond repair. In 2001, a consortium of museums and arts organizations founded the Variable Media Network. These included the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, Franklin Furnace, the Guggenheim Museum and Rhizome.org in New York, the Foundation Daniel Langlois pour l’art, la science et la technologie in Montreal, the Performance Art Festival + Archives in Cleveland and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Dedicated to finding ways to preserve works made with non-traditional, ephemeral materials, such as Nam June Paik’s video installations, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ piles of give-away candies and Mark Napier’s Net art works, the Network has developed a number of case studies and publications, and a questionnaire that organizations can use to gather preservation-related information from artists. Notable strategies for preserving works of New Media art include documentation (e.g. taking screen shots of Web pages), migration (e.g. replacing outdated HTMl tags with current ones), emulation (software that simulates obsolete hardware) and recreation (reproducing old work using new technology).”