[-empyre-] new media archives into the future

[Timothy Murray]

>As a new media curator who is not at all a coder, I find your 
>conception very interesting.  I have understood my role in building 
>Cornell University's Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art (URL 
>below) as more akin to an activist researcher who strives to 
>understand the international breadth of both new media art and its 
>emergence from electronic art and conceptual thought and who strives 
>to bring together a critical mass of material that will serve the 
>conceptual and historical interests of the artists and researchers 
>relying on the collection.

Preservation, the pull of the future, is only part of the issue, 
although it's becoming a more critical part daily.  For this, I rely 
on the Library's technical staff who possess the expertise in 
computing and manuscript preservation that I lack.   Of course I 
understand my obligation to lead the discussion, to understand the 
technical perils of the collection, and to partner with affiliated 
institutions and collections.  But the future of the Goldsen Archive 
also will depend on its conceptual flexibility and material 
adjustments over the years.   While I  understand, realistically, 
that we're likely to house many art materials from the 1990s and 
beyond that soon won't be readable in their "original" state, I also 
am working in field that has rendered suspicious earlier artistic 
notions of "originality,"thus permitting us to think about providing 
translations, migrations, or perhaps even traces of this work to 
researchers.

My sense of the Archive and my role in developing it also has been 
altered very much by its movement into the future.  I came to 
acknowledge somewhat early on, in dialogue with artists and curators, 
that the proper archival framing of "new media art," while based on 
computing, need also position itself via the develpment of electronic 
art and tools, and even critical theory, throughout the past fifty 
years.  So we're also working on developing the collection to provide 
users with access to the history and theory of video and electronic 
art.  While I did not set out initially to do this, the materials 
that our contributing artists sent into the Archive (most of our 
Archive has been established collaboratively through the generosity 
of artists who wish to join our collective efforts, many of who are 
-empyre- subscribers) called upon me to adjust my own "codes" and to 
continue to think flexibility about the materials that should be 
available to artists and writers researching "new media art."
Of course, part of the learning curve has included increased 
knowledge about software and hardware along the way.  But for the 
implementation of hardware systems and technology, I depend on our 
technical specialists.

Thanks for raising the question of the future of preservation.

Tim


  In this regard, much like

>gh comments:
>
>There's a discussion afoot on what constitutes a new media archive 
>and a new media curator.  I envision a new media curator as a person 
>who is trained in code and hardware systems and  technology.  They 
>are able to assemble show that range from finding old hardware to 
>assessing the artists intention and updating the work to new 
>hardware. Going along with that I always assume that whatever 
>software you use or if you hand code you will be using a variation of 
>c or c++ etc..  Therefore part of any new media piece should be a 
>general description of how what the intention of the work is by the 
>artist, how it is to be shown and the underlying coding structure and 
>any files or database associated with the work.  It should be that an 
>astute new media curator can re-constitute a work using the latest 
>hardware and software for these elements. This allows for the curator 
>to function somewhat like the conductor of an orchestra using the 
>score of a musical work and interpreting.
>
>The other aspect of new media is maintaining a new media archive.  
>This is essentially a server/database that contains all the files and 
>copies of one's ouevre. This Archive can  be either maintained online 
>run as a server and/or also be gifted to a university, museum or 
>library.  With these parameters I think one can begin to define what 
>*digital art* will look like in the future and what it will be like 
>looking back.
>
>In anycase none of this has to do with markets and the art world and 
>gross materiality. It does however point to a direction for the 
>future of art no matter what the current object obsessed art world  
>demands. Think about this, the global manufacturing system has 
>reached a plateau of objects where the only path now is to make every 
>person on earth live like an American.  If this happens there won't 
>be an earth. Object making and manufacturing are not only not 
>sustainable they are not forward looking.  This goes for art as well 
>as general manufacturing.
>
>
>On Jan 18, 2009, at 7:50 AM, Julian Oliver wrote:
>
>>  there's work i've made that i can't run on modern systems  - far 
>>  beyond a
>>  problem of mere emulation. in many ways software based art degrades 
>>  with the
>>  hardware (and software) on which it depends.
>
>G.H. Hovagimyan
>http://nujus.net/~gh/
>http://artistsmeeting.org
>
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>_______________________________________________
>empyre forum
>empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>http://www.subtle.net/empyre


-- 
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853