Ken Goldberg, Ouija 2000, 2000
Nice piece on NPR about preservation of digital art including interviews with artist Ken Goldberg and Digital Media Director & Curator Richard Rinehart of the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM). Rick discusses working with artists to create a script for variable media, a preservation strategy that emerged from the Guggenheim's Variable Media Initiative. On the BAM site, Archiving the Avant-Garde is a great resource and includes a link to Rick's paper A System of Formal Notation for Scoring Works of Digital and Variable Media Art.
This is something I talked to Carl Goodman from Museum of the Moving Image about at MW2007, though our conversation was about preserving video games and gaming history, given that’s the area we’re both interested in. In some ways the gaming community is ahead of various museums on preservation, with the work of folks like MAMEDev and various dumping projects, although the challenges here are simpler than new media art as the targets aren’t as wide ranging (every art project may have different hardware and software requirements, whereas thousands of games may be run on a single platform). What the gaming community lacks though is a real historical context. It’s mostly loose knit and somewhat scattered, whereas museums tend to do a very good job in that area. The IGDA has a special interest group dedicated to game preservation, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much activity on it.
Comment by Brent Gustafson — 4/17/2007 @ 11:59 am
Hi Robin, Brent,
Thanks for blogging about this. The NPR was great coverage for a burning but kind of hidden issue. Brent, I agree that the game community is ahead of museums in some regards with this digital preservation stuff. We held a one-day symposium on this topic at the Berkeley Art Museum Jan. 18 (full podcast of the day’s talks onlinehere), and more than one speaker mentioned agreed with this. Of course the gamers don’t have a 500 year perspective, but still there’s a lot we could learn here. My paper is linked online, as Robin mentioned, but a shorter, perhaps more digestable version appears in the latest issue of LEONARDO. I’ll post that as soon as I’m allowed :)
Keep in touch about what you are doing at the Walker on this too - with your digital art study collection and the like. Thanks!
Comment by Richard Rinehart — 4/17/2007 @ 1:05 pm