Technological Innovations in Timebased Art in the Digital Age
Preserving Digital Art: Museums Capitalising on the Innovation Adoption Lifecycle
Frances Lloyd-Baynes, Head of Collections Data Management, Minneapolis Constitute of Art, United States
When it comes to their relationship with digital technology, museums — just like individuals — are not all on the same tech trajectory. They be at every stage of the Innovation Adoption Lifecycle. Frances Lloyd-Baynes argues that where a museum sits on this curve significantly affects its approach to exhibitions, audience engagement, communication, enterprise, content management, and, increasingly, to its collections
Museums come in all flavours and sizes. Their collections range from the sublime to the quixotic, filling from one pocket-sized cabinet to multiple buildings. The museums that I know best, where I accept worked for the past thirty years, are fine and decorative arts museums, both large and small-scale. Today I am based at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), a large encyclopedic museum located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, deep in the American Midwest.
Mia's collection of 90,000+ objects is drawn from cultures around the earth and spans 6000 years of human history. The museum has been inspiring audiences through the power of art for over a century. Mia's objects are primarily what could be considered "traditional" types of fine art: oil paintings, ceramics, prints, photographs, sculpture, furniture, metalwork, etc., though increasingly its collections are digital in nature, either all or in office.(1)
The museum world is no stranger to digital technology. It has infiltrated museums via gallery interactives (which Mia began creating xx+ years ago), databases for managing collections and customer relationships, marketing via website and email, social media, and more; today, digital technology supports nearly every activity of museums similar Mia. And that digital technology is appearing in our collections more than and more, in the form of videos, animations, multimedia installations, digital audio, virtual and augmented reality, and fifty-fifty code and social media. (Arran Rees recently made the argument for collecting social media content as art.(2)) In 2013, the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum caused its first piece of lawmaking: Planetary, "an iPad application written in C++ using the Cinder framework".(3) These kinds of artworks — likewise termed "time-based media art" for their defining characteristics of a reliance on temporality and applied science — are what I mean when referring to "digital fine art" in this article.
The trend for collecting digital art (or art with digital components) began in the 1950s and '60s. Since then, it has flourished in contemporary art collections (Tate, MoMA, the Guggenheim, etc.) as artists experiment with new technology and museums introduce it into exhibition spaces and then their permanent collections. Far from existence purely a "first-world" phenomenon, artists across cultures and around the world are creating digital art. As digital fine art gains in prevalence and this "new media" is no longer new, but part of our everyday lives globally, it has spread into the collections of smaller and/or more "traditional" museums similar Mia. This adoption creates significant challenges for such organisations, which uphold collections preservation and stewardship in their missions.
Over the by several years, I accept witnessed Mia's recognition of the challenges of digital art stewardship and participated in its efforts to see them head on. I'd like to share some thoughts on our progress and the country of digital fine art stewardship efforts in the United states of america. First, allow's consider our relationship with technology.
Embracing Innovation
Most of you likely will take heard of Moore's Law, either by name or reputation. The simplified version predicts that "processor speeds, or overall processing ability for computers volition double every two years."(iv) Gordon Moore's original thought (dating from 1965) referred specifically to transistors and integrated circuits.(5) Today it'southward been popularly generalised to utilize to all information technology (IT).
History shows that actual technological development has not stuck to Moore'due south proposed timetable, yet we (members of the public) retain a general sense that the footstep of technological change is accelerating.(6) The ways we face and embrace this change progression depend on our openness to innovation, as described by the Innovation Adoption Lifecycle.
The Innovation Adoption Lifecycle (of which you lot have also likely heard) categorizes individuals into one of v groups based on their speed in adopting a new technology from the time it becomes available.
The designated groups, from primeval to latest adopters, are:
• Innovators, who have the highest take chances tolerance, are willing to adopt emerging technologies that could well fail, and are operating at the then-called "bleeding edge"
• Early Adopters, a step backside the Innovators and a bit more careful almost the applied science they adopt; they operate at the "leading border" and are the ones the rest of us watch to come across which tech flies and which flops
• Early Bulk, who await to prefer until a engineering science has proven itself (through the Early Adopters' utilize) and the take a chance (and the price!) is lowered
• Late Bulk, who come up to technology later on the boilerplate individual, once that technology is well established and may no longer fifty-fifty be considered "innovative"
• Laggards, the final to adopt a technology, adopting it later on it is so well established it is already "mainstream" and used by nigh of the population.(7)
We can all find ourselves somewhere on this bell-curve, whether nosotros were the kickoff on our block to buy a drone or accept a landline equally our only telephone. As this chart [illus 2] illustrates, nigh of united states fall into the Early Bulk and Tardily Majority categories. I believe this pattern of innovation adoption holds true in the art and museum sectors and their appointment with digital art.
In the context of digital art, I encounter the Innovators equally the practitioners — artists taking digital engineering and pushing it to its limits in the expression of new concepts and experiences through their resultant artworks. They are joined by communities of interest and back up, such equally Electronic Arts Intermix, "a non-profit resource that fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of media fine art"(viii) founded in 1971.
As innovative digital art hit the scene, the Early Adopters appeared in the form of gimmicky fine art galleries, collectors, and museums, exhibiting and and then acquiring the new digital art for their collections. Having now collected digital fine art for several decades, they accept had aplenty opportunity to empathize the unique needs of these artforms and how they differ from more traditional art media, as their collections accept grown to the thousands.
Museums similar Mia fall squarely in the camp of the Early Majority when it comes to digital art. They have substantial collections of more than traditional art, may accept come afterwards to contemporary art collecting, and to appointment have simply acquired modest collections (in the 10s to 100s) of digital art, such equally video, multimedia installations, animations, etc. They take also begun to recognise the specific needs of digital art and are looking to the Early Adopters for the benefit of their experience in addressing those needs. What does this situation look similar in practice?
Care & Tending of Digital Art
Technological obsolescence is a fact of life in the digital age: hardware fails and is discontinued by its manufacturers, software is no longer developed or supported, media types fall by the wayside equally new forms are developed. (When was the last time you played a cassette tape? Any happened to that old iPod you used before yous started relying on your Smartphone and online streaming services? Do you even own whatsoever CDs anymore?)
When an artwork is partly or completely digital, its beingness depends on engineering: software to encode an blitheness; hardware to playback digital video files or run software; the Cyberspace to provide live data or other content. As that technology fails (and it will fail eventually, it's just a question of when), we must detect new ways to enable and deliver the digital content — or the artwork will terminate to be in its original form, possibly stop to be all together.
For museums dedicated to the longer-term preservation of art and its accessibility to current and future audiences, the technological obsolescence of digital fine art presents significant logistical as well as ethical challenges.
Proactivity
First and foremost, museum staff demand to sympathize that digital art preservation presents bug that, if ignored, volition only grow. We must larn to be proactive in preserving digital art in ways that a marble sculpture, for instance, does not require.
Digital files must exist backed up and transferred to safe, distributed, digital preservation storage and files' status — their "fixity" — checked regularly for deterioration ("bit rot"). That needs to exist done before the digital files go bad. Software must be migrated to new formats or processes developed to emulate it in its original environment. Old hardware must exist stockpiled or new, equivalent hardware constitute.
Documenting Intent
In contrast to most traditional media art, our success preserving a digital artwork depends significantly on our understanding of the creative person's intent when creating the work. We tin dissect a work and understand its anatomy, simply what about its "identity"? What makes a piece of work unique and the experience the creative person intended an audition to have with it? Grasping this requires research, conversations with the artist, documentation of the piece of work's behaviour and the (multiple) iterations it may have taken in its life. (Exhibition designs can significantly alter a digital media artwork's presentation. Which exhibition installation was the truest to the artist'south vision? The almost successful in their eyes? When it was projected on a wall, for example, or shown on multiple pocket-size monitors?)
The better we understand the artwork'southward unique identity, the more successful we can exist at ensuring its ongoing being in the form its maker intended. If nosotros neglect to understand the piece of work, tin we honestly present it as "original" once the digital files, software, hardware, and playback devices have failed and been replaced by more modern versions? Herein lies a major ethical dilemma.
Processes & Procedures
Digital preservation and stewardship require changes to museums' approach to artwork and the processes and procedures we follow. Nosotros must inquire more (and more detailed) questions about digital artworks and document the answers. (Obviously, our best chance to develop an agreement of a work's identity is while the artist is still living and is usually at the fourth dimension of conquering.) We must identify — and budget for — the ongoing costs of maintaining and exhibiting digital artworks in a higher place and beyond their acquisition cost. We demand to recall through the implications of acquiring objects that may accept no concrete grade, just bits and bytes (How will we rails the location of a digital file? How would we loan it to another museum?), or works that require engineering that will get obsolete within a few short years (Can we stockpile equipment? Dedicate it to a single artwork?). Nosotros need technical skills (ideally in-business firm or readily bachelor) to assess a digital artwork at the bespeak of acquisition (Did the museum become what it paid for? Does all the equipment work?) and throughout its life.
Legacy of the Early Adopters
Those of us in the Early Majority category of museums are currently recognising and coming to grips with the preservation and stewardship issues of our digital art collections. (I predict the Late Bulk will be following behind u.s. in a few more years.) Nosotros are fortunate to have a significant body of thought and material generated past the Early Adopters to which we tin can refer. For instance:
• The Guggenheim museum(9) (particularly conservator Joanna Phillips) taught us important ways of thinking about digital art (e.k. distinguishing its "identity" from its "iterations").
• The Matters In Media Fine art project(10) (including the New Art Trust, Tate, MoMA, and SFMoMA), Tate's Head of Conservation Pip Laurenson, and the Smithsonian's Fourth dimension-based Media Art Working Group(xi) take given u.s. articulate guidelines and detailed standards to follow and a wide range of tools (forms, reports, etc.) to apply.
• Software preservation projects have been developing open-source tools available to the public to support specific areas of digital preservation. These include Yale University Library's "Emulation as a Service"(12) and Rhizome'southward Webrecorder, enabling users to capture "loftier-fidelity, fully interactive copies of almost whatsoever website,"(13) and its ArtBase net art digital archive.
• Special interest groups like VoCA (Voices in Gimmicky Art)(14), INCCA (International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art)(xv), and the Electronic Media Group (EMG) of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC)(16) provide platforms for dialogue and sharing new developments in digital art stewardship.
Even with these rich resources at our disposal, changing practice to accommodate the preservation requirements of digital art remains complex for the average museum: tailoring template forms and reports to private museums' needs, examining and re-structuring workflows, ownership-in or constructing preservation systems, and enhancing technical skills. Fortunately, the Early Adopters and their funders have stepped in to offering training and back up.
Digital Stewardship Residencies
In 2013, America's Library of Congress, in conjunction with the U.S. government agency Found for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), created the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) program. The NDSR aims "to build a dedicated community of professionals who volition advance our nation'southward capabilities in managing, preserving, and making attainable the digital record of human achievement."(17) NDSR "bridge[s] the gap between existing, well developed classroom teaching and the demand for more direct professional person experience in the field" of digital archiving.(18) The programme achieves this past funding the placement of trained digital archivists in projects across the United States for between nine months and i yr.
NDSR residencies have been hosted at a wide range of organisations, including several museums, merely they have not been focused on digital fine art. In 2016, the latest iteration of the program — NDSR Art — was created to accost specifically "issues of digital preservation and stewardship in relation to the arts, with a particular focus on new media and arts information."(19) Mia was selected as a host organisation for the first cohort of NDSR Fine art residents, allowing the museum to focus on improving the stewardship and preservation of our digital art collection, something staff had lacked the resources to achieve, despite recognising the need.(twenty)
NDSR Art's direct affect is express to viii organisations over the project'southward three-twelvemonth lifespan, but they, similar the Early on Adopters already mentioned, are dedicated to disseminating the learning from each residency project through papers, symposia and outreach. NDSR and NDSR Fine art have built bridges betwixt the library, archive, digital preservation and museum sectors that volition continue to support collaboration around digital art preservation for years to come.
Conservation Training
Digital art stewardship in museums requires collaboration internally beyond multiple departments: Registration, Curatorial, Interactive Media, Exhibition Design, Collections documentation, and more. And, as we discovered during Mia'south NDSR Art project, nearly museums are relying on conservators (in-business firm or contracted) to accept the lead in digital art care. Equally currently few conservators are specifically trained with a focus on digital art, many "objects" conservators (trained to work with more "traditional" media) are beingness co-opted to undertake this work. This requires conservators as well as museum staff to extend their skills to cover a wide range of digital technology and multimedia equipment.
Fortunately, preparation for digital art preservation is becoming more widespread. In 2018, New York Academy, which already had a long-continuing Thousand.A. in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, launched a chief's caste program in Fourth dimension-based Media Art Conservation. This programme, "offering an overview grade on time-based media technologies and their care in the first year of the plan and advanced technological training during the second and 3rd years of study," (21) is the first of its kind in the U.s..
For established conservators wishing to enhance their skills, workshops are at present becoming available such as the recent "Documentation and Risk Cess of Complex Time-based Media Works," offered as part of the American Constitute for Conservation's 2019 annual conference. Though it was primarily aimed at conservators, I was fortunate to attend this workshop delivered by Mona Jimenez and Jeffrey Martin, both experts in the field. This was their first workshop on time-based media preservation. I expect more will follow.
Finally, workshops are being targeted at non-conservators, which is a benefaction to those organisations that (like Mia) exercise not take ready admission to digital fine art conservators. MoMA, with funding from the Andrew Due west. Mellon Foundation, began offering almanac workshops in 2017 as part of its five-year "Media Conservation Initiative", which seeks to "advance new strategies in the field of time-based media art preservation and care."(22) Their 2017 workshop advertised "an in-depth overview of the processes and workflows which can be implemented at collections without dedicated time-based media conservators."(23) While the first museums accepted to these workshops were only those in the Early Maturity group holding larger fourth dimension-based and digital media fine art collections, I am confident that similar workshops will soon be bachelor to museums of whatsoever size collection.
Conclusion
The complication of digital artworks, with their reliance on engineering, places new burdens on the museums that collect them, particularly as that technology ages and ultimately fails. The challenges are meaning and cannot be ignored if nosotros intend to fulfill our mission to preserve these artworks for future audiences. Yet, the community of artists, collectors, museums, conservators, and a wide range of museum professionals across the Innovation Adoption Lifecycle are working together to create a network of shared resource and collaboration in the United States and beyond.
Frances Lloyd-Baynes
Caput of Collections Information Management, Minneapolis Institute of Fine art, United States
Endnotes and References
1. Minneapolis Plant of Art collections site, new.artsmia.org/fine art-artists/explore/
2. Rees, Arran. "What Does it Meme?: When social media becomes part of the museum collection." https://museum-id.com/meme-social-media-becomes-part-museum-collection/ (accessed 29 May 2019)
3. Chan, Seb. (26 August 2013) Planetary: Collecting and Preserving Code as a Living Object. https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2013/08/26/planetary-collecting-and-preserving-lawmaking-as-a-living-object/ (accessed 28 May 2019)
4. Moore's Law, or how overall processing power will double every two years, http://www.mooreslaw.org/ (accessed 29 May 2019]
5. Wikipedia, "Moore'due south law", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law (accessed 27 May 2019)
6. Wikipedia, "Accelerating change", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change (accessed 31 May 2019)
7. Wikipedia, "Improvidence of innovations", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations (accessed 31 May 2019)
8. Electronic Arts Intermix, http://world wide web.eai.org/
9. Guggenheim, "Time-Based Media", https://www.guggenheim.org/conservation/time-based-media
10. Matters in Media Art, http://mattersinmediaart.org/
xi. Smithsonian Time-Based Media Working Group, https://www.si.edu/tbma/
12. Cummings, Mike. (thirteen Feb 2018) "Project revives old software, preserves 'born-digital' data", Yale News, https://news.yale.edu/2018/02/13/projection-revives-onetime-software-preserves-born-digital-data. Come across as well Yale University Library, https://guides.library.yale.edu/digitalpreservation/services
13. Rhizome, http://rhizome.org/
14. Voices in Contemporary Art, http://www.voca.network/
xv. International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art, https://world wide web.incca.org/
xvi. Electronic Media Group of the American Institute for Conservation, https://www.culturalheritage.org/electronic-media-group
17. NDSR (National Digital Stewardship Residency), "About", https://ndsr-program.org/virtually/ (accessed 28 May 2019)
18. National Digital Stewardship Residency | Art, "About" [http://ndsr-pma.arlisna.org/about/#over (accessed 28 May 2019)
19. Ibid
20. For more than data see this case study on Mia's NDSR Art residency work: Lloyd-Baynes, Frances. "Preserving Mia's Fourth dimension-based and Digital Media Fine art", https://new.artsmia.org/art-artists/research/case-studies/preserving-mias-time-based-and-digital-media-fine art/
21. NYU The Found of Fine Arts, http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/conservation/time-based-media.htm
22. MoMA, "Media Conservation Initiative" https://world wide web.mediaconservation.io/#new-page-ii (accessed 29 May 2019)
23. "Workshop: Getting Started – A Shared responsibleness, Caring for Time-based Media Artworks in Collections (MOMA), AIC Web log (Archived)." Posted in: Conferences, Courses, Workshops & Seminars, Electronic Media conservation, December 27, 2016. http://www.conservators-antipodal.org/2016/12/workshop-getting-started-a-shared-responsibleness-caring-for-time-based-media-artworks-in-collections-moma/ (accessed 30 May 2019)
Starting time published in Museum-iD magazine (Issue 24, Sep/Oct 2019) / published online 7 February 2020
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Source: https://museum-id.com/preserving-digital-art-the-innovation-adoption-lifecycle/
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