*He's the Man.
"Preservation of Media Arts: Interview with Jon Ippolito by Karina de Freitas
Publicado por: Karina de Freitas Postado em: julho 24, 2012 Em: News, News In English | Comentários : 0
"Jon Ippolito is an artist, educator, new media scholar, and former curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He’s a graduate in physics and astrophysics at Harvard. In the art world he found his place as conservator of digital culture. In 2002 Ippolito became part of the Department of New Media at the University of Maine, USA. That same year, along with the teacher Joline Blais, he founded Still Water, a laboratory dedicated to the study and construction of creative networks. He is part of The Variable Media Network, an international consortium of museums which aims to develop strategies to preserve works of media art, regardless of medium used. Among other projects, Ippolito is one of the authors of The Variable Media Questionnaire, a database to assist artists and museum professionals in understanding the needs of the works, establishing potential issues to consider when displaying media art.
"Next year, along with Richard Rinehart, Jon Ippolito launches the book Re-collection: New Media and Social Memory, which covers the preservation of new media. (((That oughta be good. I hope that book doesn's have any plug-ins or extra moving parts.)))
"For them, the historical record of our era will be unrecoverable [without] a drastic change in technology, institutions and laws governing cultural preservation at the time. I invited him for a special interview for Tecnoartenews. In it, Ippolito presents an updated view on the conservation of media arts by museums, discusses the reasons to preserve media art, the criteria that define the works to be preserved, and also provides a comparison between Variable Media Questionnaire and ‘proliferative preservation’.
"Karina de Freitas – Why preserve the media art?
"Jon Ippolito - No matter how many times I’m asked that question, it always seems peculiar to me. I’m having trouble thinking of another form of cultural expression that a historian would slug in that blank: “Hey, why are we preserving ________________, anyway?”
"Why *wouldn’t* you want to preserve media art? Is it because media art is not relevant to the future, or too difficult to preserve, or somehow inappropriate to preserve?
"It’s easy to find things we preserve that are a lot less relevant, either in historical or economic value. Individual users archive tens of thousands of useless e-mails a year. The US Library of Congress preserves 10 million tweets each day, whether their subject is Barack Obama or Justin Bieber.
"Personally, I believe new media art represents a critical coming to terms with the dramatic influence of technology in our lives at the turn of the millennium, and hence is more important for the future then just about any other artform happening today.
"So that leaves difficulty and appropriateness as obstacles to preservation.
"Sure, it’s complicated to preserve a Shockwave animation, because we know the clock is ticking for the plug-in, browser, operating system, and computer it once depended on. (((Aieee.))) It’s also hellishly difficult to preserve one of Eva Hesse’s sculptures made of latex poured on cheesecloth. But we try anyway. New media give us a toolkit of clever preservation solutions like emulation. And because of the common software protocols and programs underlining many digital works, solutions found for one artifacts can often be applied to others.
"So that leaves appropriateness. When would it not be appropriate to preserve a work of art? Maybe if it does actual harm. Medical ethicists question whether to preserve the last remaining strains of the smallpox virus. We could ask whether it is ethical to preserve computer viruses. While some artists have experimented with virus-like artworks, such as Eva and Franco Mattes and Jaromil, their snippets of code are about as threatening as a toy lightsaber–more show than schadenfreude. These experiments would certainly be of more value to historians than to terrorists.
"Perhaps a better criterion for appropriateness is whether the art was intended to persevere or meant to be ephemeral. The only way to know if the work had an expiration date is to interview the artist and others associated with the work. There might still be a good reason for preserving our work meant to be ephemeral, but there are benefits to interviewing the artist anyway, so why not do it? That’s why we built the Variable Media Questionnaire.
"Karina de Freitas – Often, the museum was seen as an institutional entity not adapted to certain artistic practices of media art. Though slowly, the museums have realized the socio-cultural importance of collecting these types of works. There is talk about possible limitations that artists could suffer due to suit your process of creating to the criteria of inclusion in the museum collections. Many artists believe that institutionalizing the art media could endanger its character of freedom and easy access. How do you see this question. How the institutions has dealt with these “contradictions”? And what role they play to write the history of media art, as well as the formation of a market value for these artistic practices?
"Jon Ippolito - You’re right, the traditional focus of museums on exclusivity as a marker for value make them a tricky dance partner for new media artists, many of whom are looking to maximize exposure and participation. That said, if museums and creators can adapt to be “both/and” dynamic of digital media, they can have their cake and eat it too. For a his work net.flag commissioned by the Guggenheim in 2002, Mark Napier wrote into his acquisition contract the right to host the project at his own Web domain if the museum couldn’t keep it live in the future at Guggenheim.org for technical or economic reasons.
"An example of an artist who reached even further outside the art world is Scott Snibbe, who produced sophisticated interactive experiences for museum galleries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While engrossing, these interactive installations were expensive and complex to produce, so they appeared in a couple dozen venues over the decade. Once Snibbe looked outside of the white cube and began adapting versions of its works for the iPad, his audience grew from hundreds of gallerygoers to hundreds of thousands of users. At one point his work Gravilux was the number one free iPad app in the Apple App Store, and was downloaded 500,000 times.
"Museums can aim for this tremendous reach by opening their Web sites up to broader models of distribution and access. Or they can collect the source code now, and then in 20 years when today’s popular digital platforms are extinct, they’ll regain their role as cultural standard-bearers by working with artist to renovate their works. In fact, I believe in the future museums will be known less as warehouses that mothball works and more as laboratories that re-create them. (((That would indeed be remarkable. Nice premise for a sci-fi story. "Here we're recreating the hopelessly degraded archives of "I Love Lucy," a mainstay of global culture three centuries ago," etc)))
"Karina de Freitas - We are in the era of digital media, the technological obsolescence occurs at an unprecedented speed. In a time in which so many works of art are created (only in Rhizome’s Artbase are over 2,500 works of net.art), and given also the cost of the conservation process of media art, what are the criteria that defines today which works are more relevant to conservation?..."
