Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 1 Preserving Electronic Art: What’s the problem & What can we do about it? Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 2 Preserving Electronic Art: What’s the problem & What can we do about it? _ The Problem: Maintaining Accessibility to a Work over time _ The Easy Part of the Problem: Physical storage devices & hardware players _ The Hard Part of the Problem:File Formats _ Problems with Many Types of Digital Works Today _ Special Characteristics of Electronic Art _ What is the Work? _ Some approaches to solutions

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 3 The Problem: Maintaining Accessibility to a Work over time _ Preservation techniques for Physical artifacts do NOT address the problem of preserving digital works

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 4 Electronic Art is not like canvas paintings _ In the future these may include –Moving image materials –Multimedia –Interactive programs –Computer generated art _ These works share some common characteristics with other “strange” works like –Performance Art –Conceptual Art –Site-specific installations –Experiential Art

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 5 Thinking of the Future _ Screens will be different resolutions and different aspect ratios _ CRTs won’t exist _ A decade or 2 from now, today’s user interfaces will look like arrow-key navigation looks like today

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 6 New products & Shifts in user expectations _ VCR led to user expectation of time-shifting, which in turn created market for video-on-demand and cinema multiplexes with staggered times _ WWW will further increase expectation of immediacy, as well as: –viewing massive amounts of related materials –viewing material in fragmented ways _ DVDs are even further increasing need for ancillary materials, as well as for interactivity and viewing fragments

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 7 Key Paradigm Shifts for Museums/Archives (also implications for artists) _ From archiving completed whole works to asset mgmt of both component parts of works and ancillary materials related to the work _ From preserving a physical artifact to saving a digital work that has no tangible embodiment

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 8 The Easy Part of the Problem: Physical storage devices & hardware players

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 9 Analog - EIAJ 30

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 10 Analog - U-Matic

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 11 Analog - VHS & Betacam

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/ mm video

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 13 Digital -128M Optical

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 14 Digital - Optical R/W

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 15 Digital - DAT

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 16 Digital - Syquest

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 17 Digital - Zip 100

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 18 Digital - Writeable CD-ROM (650M)

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 19 Edison

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 20 Early Wax

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 21 The Hard Part of the Problem: File Formats _ even with text like Wordstar & Word

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 22 Problems with Many Types of Digital Works Today-  Disappearing Information  The Viewing Problem  The Scrambling Problem  The Inter-relation Problem  The Custodial Problem  The Translation Problem

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 23 The Viewing Problem  Digital Info requires a whole infrastructure to view it  Each piece of that infrastructure is changing at an incredibly rapid rate  How can we ever hope to deal with all the permutations and combinations

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 24 The Inter-relation Problem  -Info is increasingly inter-related to other info  -How do we make our own Info persist when it points to and integrates with Info owned by others?  -What is the boundary of a set of information (or even of a digital object)?

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 25 The Translation Problem  Content translated into new delivery devices changes meaning – -A photo vs. a painting – -If Info is produced originally in digital form in one encoded format, will it be the same when translated into another format? – Behaviors

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 26 Conceptual Approaches to Digital Preservation _ Refreshing always necessary due to volatility of physical strata –Impact on evidential value _ Migration -- advantages & disadvantages _ Emulation -- advantages & disadvantages

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 27 Groups Working on the Big Problem  CPA Task Force  Getty “Time & Bits” Conference & Follow-ups-  Emulation experiments in US and Europe  NEDLIB, CURL, Michigan  Internet Archive  Long Now

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 28 Special Characteristics of Electronic Art _ What Really is the Work?- _ Enormous number of elements can, at times, be very important to preserve (pacing, color, format, original artifact, elements used to construct the artifact) _ Pieces and Boundaries _ Dynamic & Lack of Fixity _ Interactivity _ Historical context _ Recontextualization (Postmodernism) _ Difficulty of authentication over time

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 29 What Really is the Work?-

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 30 LeWitt: Wall Drawing 340

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 31 Installing LeWitt

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 32 LeWitt Install Directions

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 33 ECI - Imagespace (early 80s)

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 34 ECI - Hole in Space (both)

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 35 ECI - 84-locations

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 36 ECI - 84-Community Memory

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 37 ECI - 84-kids

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 38 ECI - 84-MOCA

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 39 ECI - 84-Annotating Video

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 40 ECI - Avatars & Humans

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 41 ECI - Avatar Stage

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 42 Video Technology to Make the Head Spin (NYT 3/2/00)

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 43 Special Characteristics of Electronic Art (again) _ What Really is the Work? _ Enormous number of elements can, at times, be very important to preserve (pacing, original artifact, elements used to construct the artifact) _ Pieces and Boundaries _ Dynamic & Lack of Fixity _ Interactivity _ Historical context _ Recontextualization (Postmodernism)

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 44 More Technical Issues (no time for details) _ Complexity of formats (storage & compression) _ Synchronicity between media/streams _ Persistent Ids- _ Website mgmt-

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 45 Pieces of the General Solution (1/2)  -We need to insist upon clearly readable standardized ways for digital objects to self- identify their formats  -We should discourage scrambling  -We need to better understand information inter-relates to other Info, and what constitutes “boundaries” of Info objects

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 46 Pieces of the General Solution (2/2)  -People and organizations wishing to make information persist need guidelines of how to go about doing it  -We need to better understand how translating from one storage or display format to another affects the meaning of a work  -We need to save the “behaviors” of a digital object, not just it’s “contents”

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 47 From the technological point of view: Standards offer the best hope of overcoming Impediments _ Easier to maintain a single set of standards over long periods of time _ Puts your institution in the same large boat with lots of other institutions who will face obsolescence and migration problems periodically throughout the future

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 48 What can we do specific to Electronic Art? _ Works themselves may no longer even exist; in many cases, what we can save amounts to forensic evidence _ Enormous number of elements can, at times, be very important to preserve (pacing, original artifact, elements used to construct the artifact) _ Too complex to save every one of these aspects for every type of material _ Importance of saving pieces, representations, and documentation _ Involve the artists to capture their intentions _ Importance of Standards _ Familiarize ourselves with recent conservation developments (Who Knows?, TechArcheology, Tate, IMAP)

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 49 Standards for encoding artists intentions (group efforts) _ Artists Interviews Project, Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage , Modern Art: Who Cares ( _ TechArcheology: A Symposium on Installation Preservation (SFMOMA) _ IMAP

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 50 Structural Metadata Standards for Encoding Multimedia- (no time for details) _ SMIL _ MPEG 4

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 51 Saving Ancillary Materials

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 52 Not just saving the Work, but also saving Conservation info about the Work

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 53 Condition Report UK National Trust

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 54 Annotated Image Mississippi State, Heather Gray

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 55 Polarizws Image Mississippi State, Heather Gray

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 56 X-Ray Investigating the Renaissance--Portrait of a Man, Fogg Museum

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 57 Underdrawing Investigating the Renaissance--Last Judgment, Fogg Museum

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 58 Cross-section Investigating the Renaissance--Last Judgment, Fogg Museum

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 59 Concluding Remarks _ Use Standards wherever possible _ Museum should develop an institution-wide plan for saving electronic works –Refreshing and either migration or emulation –Standard encoding schemes –What is the work? And prioritize what needs to be saved –Save ancillary materials and records

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 60 Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information Preserving Electronic Art: What’s the problem & What can we do about it?

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 61

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 62 Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) _ For repurposing and reuse in different ways _ Use XML to reference various pieces in different ways _ Supported by Realmedia but not Microsoft or Macromedia

Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 63 MPEG 4 _ Object-oriented _ Very low level of granularity (even objects vs backgrounds) _ Scaleable bandwidth use _ Binary Format for Scenes (BIFS) borrows concepts from VRML