Re-Collection ― Art, New Media, and Social Memory

How will our increasingly digital civilization persist beyond our lifetimes? Audioand videotapes demagnetize; CDs delaminate; Internet art links to websites that no longer exist;Amiga software doesn't run on iMacs. In Re-collection, Richard Rinehart and JonIppolito argue that the vulnerability of new media art illustrates a larger crisis for socialmemory. They describe a variable media approach to rescuing new media,distributed across producers and consumers who can choose appropriate strategies for each endangeredwork. New media art poses novel preservation and conservation dilemmas. Given the ephemerality oftheir mediums, software art, installation art, and interactive games may be heading to obsolescenceand oblivion. Rinehart and Ippolito, both museum professionals, examine the preservation of newmedia art from both practical and theoretical perspectives, offering concrete examples that rangefrom Nam June Paik to Danger Mouse. They investigate three threats to twenty-first-centurycreativity: technology, because much new media art depends on rapidly changing software or hardware;institutions, which may rely on preservation methods developed for older mediums; and law, whichcomplicates access with intellectual property constraints such as copyright and licensing.Technology, institutions, and law, however, can be enlisted as allies rather than enemies ofephemeral artifacts and their preservation. The variable media approach that Rinehart and Ippolitopropose asks to what extent works to be preserved might be medium-independent, translatable into newmediums when their original formats are obsolete.

Richard Rinehart is Director of the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University. Jon Ippolito is Associate Professor of New Media and Codirector of the Still Water Lab and Digital Curation Program at the University of Maine.