1. 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 http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

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

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

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

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

12. Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 12 8mm video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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)?

25. 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

26. 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

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

28. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

43. 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)

44. 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-

45. 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

46. 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”

47. 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

48. 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)

49. Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 49 Standards for encoding artists intentions (group efforts) _ Artists Interviews Project, Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage 1998-1999, Modern Art: Who Cares (http://www.icn.nl/english/6.4.2.html) _ TechArcheology: A Symposium on Installation Preservation (SFMOMA) _ IMAP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

59. 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

60. Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 60 Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Longevity/ http://www.longnow.com/10klibrary/TimeBitsDisc/ http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Metadata/UC-May00/ http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/ http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/impact/s99/ http://www.ecafe.com/ http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard http://www.archive.org/ Preserving Electronic Art: What’s the problem & What can we do about it?

61. Besser--ICHIM Milan 9/5/01 61

62. 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

63. 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