Focusing on introducing and analyzing new currents in media art in all its rapidly evolving facets has been for the last two decades the central mission of NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] in Tokyo. Since its spectacular opening in April 1997, this innovative center has most successfully encouraged artistic and scientific exchange and has linked the most advanced media art institutions worldwide. The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Germany) has been one of ICC’s renowned cooperation partners.
In 2014, the Open Space program of ICC offered the opportunity to present, to test and to discuss with scientists and in public the successful conservation of one of the most cited interactive digital artworks, “The Legible City,” created by pioneering media-artist and researcher Jeffrey SHAW. Since its early creation in 1989, this work had been shown in its original form and in successive versions and has inspired attracted an enthralled audience in numerous exhibitions, biennales and art centers all around the world. But for more than one decade, it had been at risk of disappearance, when in 1997 the production of its original computer platform, the SGI Indigo series, had been suspended by its manufacturer Silicon Graphics International Inc. (SGI).*
From 2010 to 2013, as a most significant major example of an early interactive immersive art installation, “The Legible City” has been subject of a larger case study—in consultation with the artist—in the context of the European research project “Digital Art Conservation” (www.digitalartconservation.org), directed by the author himself at ZKM | Karlsruhe. The preservation solution finally realized in 2013 was the porting of the installations software to a current operating system.
Collecting, preserving, research, and communication as the primary tasks of museums, are strategies for transmitting cultural heritage. Today, a brief glance at private and public collections reveals that practices of preserving digital art have lagged far behind expectations that are oriented on measures applied to traditional art media.
Since the 1950s, we have been participating in the rapidly evolving far-reaching system change from analog to digital culture which not only marks the commencement of a new era, of a new time in history, but also the concept of time itself has changed and is changing still. With the ubiquitous availability and, at the same time, transience of all information,the perception of the present is distinct from that of the past. The utilization of new materials, which began in the early twentieth century, brought with it the development of artistic techniques and the use of new media. However, it was especially the advent of electronic and digital art that since the 1960s has resulted in new concepts of artistic authorship and expanded forms of communication between artworks and viewers. Via the media channels of radio and television the public sphere now has extended to the global electronic data universe, in which today, according to the sages and promoters of the Internet, all information—at least potentially—is available at all times and everywhere. And the expectations connected with these developments in tandem with a society increasingly oriented on the cult of the event, today confront museums, collections, curators, and conservators with hitherto undreamed creative possibilities, but also with unanticipated and yet unsolved curatorial and conservation issues.
Rapid technological and social transformations have made it necessary to undertake a thoroughgoing revision of previous theories and practices of art, and thus in essence to a reevaluation that interrogates all traditional standards and criteria. The familiar and common concepts used before to describe art, as well as those used to describe and critique emergent social and economic upheavals, have run up against problems of detailed definition, classification, and meaningfulness. This reevaluation also derives from the fact that the question “Were you born-digital?” is now answered in the affirmative for an entire generation of digital natives. Today, art is fascinating a new generation of users who are approaching it with new expectations directed explicitly towards interaction and participation.
Only very recently have we come to understand what this system change of cultural memory signifies for media art realized in digital code: the more rapid the technological development, the shorter the “half-life” of works of art. Going by our experience of the past twenty years, we must assume that in view of their rapid cycles of innovation, digital hardware and software have a maximum usability period of less than ten years. The resulting functional obsolescence or failure of digital art works calls for a general rethink about their preservation, conservation, and presentation.
Although the basic substance of the work of art lies incontestably in the idea, such an idea can only be expressed, communicated, and comprehended through being experienced by the human sensual perception. To this end material media are required, whether these be the walls of Stone Age caves, stone sculptures, paintings on canvas, photographs on paper, or even hardware and software whose functioning are intrinsic to the preservation and any new presentation of a digital artwork; namely, computers, hard drives, interfaces, sensors, monitors, projectors, and all other devices, which although they function and operate together in the digital process, they are in themselves anything but immaterial. Over the course of thousands of years it has been shown that information saved in analog media is retrievable for as long as they exist in their material form. In the space of a mere thirty years, with each new cycle of development and “advance” relating to digital art, the extremely short history of digital media has demonstrated the opposite. The technological and cultural paradigm triggered by the systemic shift from analog to digital culture may be shaped to a large extent by art as a catalyst of new technologies, but this has yet to be accepted by the majority of museums and collections.
Thus, the question is how can and will museums and collections meet their responsibilities to preserve and pass on cultural heritage. This is quite independent of whether we understand the substance of digital art as consisting in its ideas and its codification in immaterial binary code, or whether we wish to hold fast to the historical materiality of its equipment for production, storage, and presentation. With respect to their existing forms of organization, and due to increasingly diminishing funds, museums and collections have thus far not been in a position to meet the requirements imposed by this acceleration in technological development.
Most evidently, a paradigm shift has occurred in the practice and theory of art collection and conservation which continues to present unsolved problems to curators, collectors, art historians, and conservators. Whereas the traditional tools were still the responsibility and in the hands of the artists, and subsequently the conservator, the digital tools for production and presentation are subject to an ever more rapid succession of technical changes in the hardware and licensing of new software versions that are frequently incompatible with the original version.
New conditions of production have always led to new approaches and, necessarily, also to a review of traditional conceptions of a work. In the case of digital artworks, one continues to erroneously assume that the immateriality inherent in the programming which is anchored in the source code guarantees their eternal survival. What is more, one has evidently completely accepted the notion of works with a performative character and multiple identities, which result from the respective staging.
The general problem touched upon here, namely, the preservation and handing down of the genuine digital culture of our time to future generations, is destined to become a decisive question for all culture institutions in the twenty-first century, irrespective of whether they uphold the standards of traditional values, operationing structures, and objectives, or themselves seek to be part of the avant-garde of technological progress.
* The porting of “The Legible City” was realized by artist and scientist Bernd LINTERMANN. It was possible to access the partly incomplete installation source code originally programmed by Gideon MAY. The parts of the source code, which were not available, could be replaced by a source code available on the Internet. In that the original version of the work was implemented on SGI computers, a platform that likewise had a decisive influence on the development of graphic software standards, and which is comprehensively available on the Internet as a freely available source code, software concepts could be transferred to current standards without having to substantially change the structure of the original software. As had been originally sought, the ported version of the work is running on different platforms, such as Linux or Mac OS X, and used software including glut is completely available in source code. The porting was carried out in small steps, which facilitated a comparison of the software modifications with the original in each step of the work, thus minimizing differences. Given the concurrence of the processes, the dynamic behavior cannot be identically illustrated, but was approximated to the original behavior. The complete case study is described in: Bernhard SEREXHE (Ed.), Preservation of Digital Art: Theory and Practice, Vienna 2013.．
