How will our increasingly digital civilization persist beyond our lifetimes? Audio and 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 Jon Ippolito argue that the vulnerability of new media art illustrates a larger crisis for social memory. They describe a variable media approach to rescuing new media, distributed across producers and consumers who can choose appropriate strategies for each endangered work. New media art poses novel preservation and conservation dilemmas. Given the ephemerality of their mediums, software art, installation art, and interactive games may be heading to obsolescence and oblivion. Rinehart and Ippolito, both museum professionals, examine the preservation of new media art from both practical and theoretical perspectives, offering concrete examples that range from Nam June Paik to Danger Mouse. They investigate three threats to twenty-first-century creativity: 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, which complicates access with intellectual property constraints such as copyright and licensing. Technology, institutions, and law, however, can be enlisted as allies rather than enemies of ephemeral artifacts and their preservation. The variable media approach that Rinehart and Ippolito propose asks to what extent works to be preserved might be medium-independent, translatable into new mediums when their original formats are obsolete.
...MoreReview Henry Lowood (2016) Review of "Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory". Technology and Culture (pp. 501-502).
Similar Citations
Essay Review
Fuqua, Joy V.;
(2013)
Visions of Technology, Gender, and Knowledge Production
(/isis/citation/CBB001566402/)
Book
Lui, Lydia H.;
(2010)
The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious
(/isis/citation/CBB001023110/)
Article
Peters, Benjamin;
(2009)
And lead us not into thinking that the new is new: A bibliographic case for new media history
(/isis/citation/CBB001180042/)
Article
Alexanyan, Karina;
(2009)
Social networking on Runet: the view from a moving train
(/isis/citation/CBB001180010/)
Book
Kane, Carolyn L.;
(2014)
Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code
(/isis/citation/CBB001422036/)
Article
Söderberg, Johan;
(2010)
Misuser Inventions and the Invention of the Misuser: Hackers, Crackers and Filesharers
(/isis/citation/CBB001034652/)
Book
Ryan, Johnny;
(2010)
A History of the Internet and the Digital Future
(/isis/citation/CBB001033356/)
Book
Susan Elizabeth Ryan;
(2014)
Garments of Paradise: Wearable Discourse in the Digital Age
(/isis/citation/CBB095885634/)
Article
Wosk, Julie;
(2006)
Designing for safety: Safe: Design takes on risk
(/isis/citation/CBB001180652/)
Article
Georgi Georgiev;
(2019)
Cold War Atmosphere: Distorted Information and Facts in the Case of Free Europe Balloons
(/isis/citation/CBB595787869/)
Book
David Parisi;
(2018)
Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing
(/isis/citation/CBB165147793/)
Book
Park, David W.;
Jankowski, Nicholas;
Jones, Steve;
(2011)
The long history of new media: Technology, historiography, and contextualizing newness
(/isis/citation/CBB001180046/)
Book
Stephanie Boluk;
Patrick LeMieux;
(2017)
Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames
(/isis/citation/CBB008495727/)
Article
Ruxandra Petrinca;
(2019)
Radio Waves, Memories, and the Politics of Everyday Life in Socialist Romania: The Case of Radio Free Europe
(/isis/citation/CBB631038986/)
Book
Kittler, Friedrich;
Enns, Anthony;
(2010)
Optical media: Berlin lectures 1999
(/isis/citation/CBB001180070/)
Book
Elias, Jamal J.;
(2010)
On Wings of Diesel: Trucks, Identity and Culture in Pakistan
(/isis/citation/CBB001202142/)
Article
Fosse, Sébastien de la;
(2013)
Media and Cognition: The Relationship between Thought Structures and Media Structures
(/isis/citation/CBB001201747/)
Chapter
Divall, Colin;
Hemmings, T.;
Randall, D.;
Francis, D.;
Marr, L.;
Porter, G.;
(1997)
Situated knowledge and the virtual science and industry museum: Problems in the social-technical interface?
(/isis/citation/CBB001181445/)
Article
Auslander, Philip;
(2005)
At the listening post, or, do machines perform?
(/isis/citation/CBB001181149/)
Chapter
Gwen S. Antell;
(2018)
Digitization reveals and remediates challenges to research on dispersed museum collections from Florissant fossil beds, Colorado
(/isis/citation/CBB854174352/)
Be the first to comment!