Ilya Kreymer x Zeynep Pehlivan

PAMAL Group X Lozana Rossenova

Memo Akten X Prof. Selim Balcısoy

Ben Fino-Radin

The exhibition and display of software based works of art that have demanding graphics requirements can be challenging. Dedicated hardware can be expensive, requires maintenance, and limits accessibility of the work to in-person experiences only. Ben will present developments in the field of GPU powered cloud virtualization platforms that are redefining the limits of how one can exhibit and provide access to software-based art, and share how Small Data Industries is leveraging these technologies to make art more accessible.

Selçuk Artut X Osman Serhat Karaman X Cemal Yılmaz

Louise Lawson

The presentation focuses on the challenges of preserving and conserving performance-based artworks as they enter, live and evolve within a collection. Exploring how within conservation there needs to be a shift to protect and sustain our relationship with the unknown outcome and embrace this. Accepting that such artworks cannot be easily wrangled into our existing processes and that within conservation they are asking or pushing us to do something different. It will highlight the current work and how our conservation process has become a living and evolving one in response to the nature of these works and the challenges they present. There will be a focus on documentation, looking at how such works are currently documented and captured, touching on new modes of documentation as digital technologies develop.

Vasıf Kortun

Daniel Heiss X Morgane Stricot X Matthieu Vlaminck

Due to obsolescence of software and hardware, digital and media artworks have, compared to other artworks, a short lifespan. In recent years, artworks have begun to disappear, letting their precious archives and related knowledge dying with them.

Media archaeological reconstruction or „second original“ is defined by PAMAL (Preservation and Art – Media Archaeological Lab) as a duplication or reconstruction of an artwork that has disappeared or is considered "obsolete" with its original writing and reading machine (i.e. the hardware and software). This reconstruction does not exclude either emulation or simulation, which can be used to recompose a particular part of the work. This reconstruction can be considered an archive of the work itself. Its advantage is that it helps preserving the artwork as much as the industrial heritage.

ZKM (Center for Art and Media) is applying this complementary conservation strategy for its collection to promote the conservation of its media and digital artworks in their historical technological environment. Technology and code as a form of expression are not neutral. Media archaeological reconstruction gives the public a unique chance to see concrete form of past media in action. Through practical case studies, Virtual Sculpture (1981) by Jeffrey Shaw, Yuppie Ghetto With Watchdog (1989-90) by Paul Garrin and Wipe Cycle (1972) by Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, we will explore how is this strategy applied and which aims does it fulfill according to each case study.

PROF. Siegfried Zielinski

‘The seemingly paradoxical abstract mixtum compositum that is prospective archaeology consists of a practice that operates in accordance with two opposing arrows of time. One of these arrows is oriented vertically into the deep time of cultures that still remains to be explored and that, for me, is forever remade by virtue of interdependencies in the relationships among the arts, sciences and technologies. The other arrow points from the now into an enduringly and unremittingly opaque future. Where the utopian potential of media-archaeological activity and its associated artistic practices resides is in the possibility of bringing these two arrows of time into relation with one another, such that the passengers inside this particular time machine aren’t torn apart in the process. To keep on seeking and finding in the old only the locus of multiplicities and particularities which are no longer accessible because no longer existing is boring and inevitably leads to a profound melancholy. But to learn and intellectually profit from the heterogeneity and wealth of relations in past constellations, for the sake of future presents, is an alluring challenge. Only in this way can our experimental time machine become a generator of surprises.

Patricia Falcao

Artworks with digital components started to make their way into the Tate Collection in the mid-90s. These were initially audio or video components, but since then digital components are part of almost all the time-based media artworks in our Art Collection. We categorise artworks that use the media of film, video, audio, software and performance as time-based media and Tate has had a section specialised in the conservation of these artworks since 1998. Over this period, Time-based Media Conservation has approached the preservation of these works as opportunities for research in the preservation of the different media. We have used the acquisition and display moments to develop our knowledge of the technical aspects of these works, to increase our understanding of the production processes and the different ways in which artists use the different media, the relation of the media to the artworks as well as the technologies available for preservation. All these aspects are essential to define the object of conservation, and to understand what needs to be preserved. In 2019 the Tate Collection owns over 600 artworks with digital components and we are acquiring about 30 new works per year. This trend is likely to increase, as is the number and type of technologies conservation will need to support. This paper will address these multiple aspects from the view of the Time-based Media Conservation Department at Tate, and we will discuss the strategies that we have put in place, and how we were able to develop them. This will highlight the importance of the research currently taking place both within Tate, with artists and their teams and with external experts on different fields.

Cemal Yılmaz

In this talk, I will take a look at the problem of preserving software-based digital art from the perspective of software engineering and software-related technologies. I will start off with a quick introduction of the software and hardware stacks available on today’s general-purpose computing platforms and briefly discuss the sources of the technical issues regarding the preservation of software-related art. Next, I will demonstrate that some of the issues faced in this domain are the same with (or similar to) the ones we, as software engineers, face in our own projects, thus the same and similar solution approaches, which are often referred to as technical preservation, emulation, migration, cultivation, hibernation, and deprecation in the context of software preservation, can be leveraged. Then, I will argue that there are also some domain-specific technical issues waiting to be resolved, which may draw the attention of software and system researchers in both the academia and industry. Finally, I will conclude with some simple, yet quite practical and effective guidelines that can profoundly increase the chances of preserving digital art for the decades to come.

Dragan Espenschied

The preservation of net art requires an approach quite different from traditional objects, time based media, or conceptual art. With works located in between fine art and performance art, it is sometimes difficult to define what their boundaries are, in what technological and cultural context they need to exist, and how they can be historicized. Preservation Director Dragan Espenschied of Rhizome, a born-digital arts non-profit founded in 1996 on the internet, will introduce strategies and productive abstractions to handle the institution's ever-growing holdings of 2000+ net art pieces.

Selçuk Artut