1. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 1 What’s so Special about Electronic Art?: Issues in Conservation of Digital Works Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard

2. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 2 What’s so Special about Electronic Art?: Issues in Conservation of Digital Works _ 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?

3. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 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--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 4 These are not canvas paintings _ Digital works I’ll discuss may include –Moving image materials –Multimedia –Interactive programs –Computer art _ These share some common characteristics with other strange works like –Performance Art –Conceptual Art –Site-specific installations

5. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 5 The Easy Part of the Problem: Physical storage devices & hardware players

6. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 6 Analog - EIAJ 30

7. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 7 Analog - U-Matic

8. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 8 Analog - VHS & Betacam

9. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 9 8mm video

10. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 10 Digital -128M Optical

11. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 11 Digital - Optical R/W

12. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 12 Digital - DAT

13. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 13 Digital - Syquest

14. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 14 Digital - Zip 100

15. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 15 Digital - Writeable CD-ROM (650M)

16. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 16 Edison

17. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 17 Early Wax

18. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 18 The Hard Part of the Problem: File Formats _ even with text like Wordstar & Word

19. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 19 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

20. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 20 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)?

21. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 21 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

22. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 22 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

23. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 23 What Really is the Work?-

24. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 24 LeWitt: Wall Drawing 340

25. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 25 Installing LeWitt

26. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 26 LeWitt Install Directions

27. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 27 ECI - Imagespace (early 80s)

28. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 28 ECI - Hole in Space (both)

29. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 29 ECI - 84-locations

30. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 30 ECI - 84-Community Memory

31. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 31 ECI - 84-kids

32. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 32 ECI - 84-MOCA

33. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 33 ECI - 84-Annotating Video

34. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 34 ECI - Avatars & Humans

35. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 35 ECI - Avatar Stage

36. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 36 Video Technology to Make the Head Spin (NYT 3/2/00)

37. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 37 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)

38. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 38 More Technical Issues _ Complexity of formats (storage & compression) _ Synchronicity between media/streams _ Persistent IDs

39. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 39 What can we do? _ 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 _ Importance of Standards-

40. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 40 Structural Metadata- _ MPEG 4 _ SMIL

41. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 41 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

42. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 42 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

43. Besser--AIC-Electronic Art 6/9/00 43 Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information  http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/Longevity/  http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/impact/s99/  http://www.ecafe.com/  http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard  http://www.archive.org/ What’s so Special about Electronic Art: Issues in Conservation of Digital Works