Notwithstanding a glut of Slashdot posts on archiving in general, I can assure you as one of the founders of the Variable Media Network (mentioned by another commenter above) that the challenge of preserving new media art can be much trickier than archiving scientific data or home movies. Art often depends on the look and feel of its technological platform, making it impossible to advise every artist to, say, migrate to the latest screen resolution or run outdated software in an off-the-shelf emulator.
Each artist will require a different strategy depending on what is most important to preserve about their particular work. Software artist Mark Napier advises future conservators to reverse-engineer the Java applet running his project net.flag, because it is ultimately reducible to a set of clear instructions. Other works, such as Nam June Paik's TV Crown or Cory Arcangel's Super Mario Clouds, depend on hardware hacks that wouldn't make sense if the images they display were pried loose from the specific technologies employed by the original works (in this case, a CRT and a Nintendo cartridge system).
To explore these divergent preservation strategies, the Variable Media Network has organized exhibitions that let viewers compare emulated artworks side-by-side with versions running on the original hardware (
Seeing Double). Given that it is impossible to preserve all of the aspects of a new media artwork, we've also created a questionnaire that helps artists specify which aspects of their work are most important to preserve (the
Variable Media Questionnaire).
Even relatively straightforward media such as 3d animations still present several possible preservation trajectories, and a museum with limited resources may need to prioritize among them. Rick Rinehart of the Variable Media Network tells the story of a visit from Pixar representatives to the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives to ask how to preserve Toy Story. After lecturing Pixar about cold storage and safety film, Rick's colleague was taken aback when the Pixar reps clarified that they didn't want to save the
film, but to save the
movie. In other words, the physical film stock was less useful to them than the 3d data files from which the movie could be recovered.
Standards for preserving film are more established than for preserving 3d data, so in this case it really depends on whether the artist is more concerned with fidelity to the original resolution and color depth (film) or adaptability to future display methods (movie).
