The Conservation-Restoration of Digitalarts: Summary(ies)
p. 58-70
Texte intégral
1Imagine eleven articles on the conservation-restoration of digital arts and literatures. Now imagine eleven summaries of those articles.1
SUMMARY NO. 1.
2000-2010, the golden years of the preservation of digital art
Due to the obsolescence of software, hardware, and infrastructure, digital artworks - and perhaps net artworks still more - are extremely fragile and vulnerable. Furthermore, in recent years, pioneer artists have begun to pass away, in some cases taking their archives and skills to the grave. For historical reasons partly related to the art market, the preservation of digital art has not received as much attention as contemporary art.2 Though earlier texts on the conservation-restoration of digital art exist,3 the topic truly became an issue in the mid- 2000s with the publication of articles and books from curators and artists such as Richard Rinehart,4 Olivier Grau,5 Pip Laurenson,6 Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito and Caitlin Jones,7 Christiane Paul,8 etc. Performance art has since served as a model for reflecting on the conservation- restoration of digital arts.
SUMMARY NO. 2.
Digital art from the perspective of its conservation-restoration
Digital art has many definitions; one would even be entitled to question its existence.9 Nevertheless, digital art is here defined as a pragmatic, aesthetic category that makes it possible to examine the conditions of the conservation-restoration and patrimonialization10 of artworks written and read on computers. As a writing machine (a data-recording and -processing machine) and as a reading machine (involving a data- storage system), the computer is a medium.11 For this reason, artworks merely produced with a computer (as a “tool”), such as drawings made with plotters or printed images,12 lie outside the scope of our study, because the practices of conservation-restoration of works on paper and of photography apply in such cases. Since the computer indiscriminately writes and reads sounds, texts, and images in binary code, it is unnecessary to distinguish between digital art and literature.
SUMMARY NO. 3.
How performance art became a model for the conservation-restoration of digital art
Comparing the conservation-restoration of digital arts to that of performance art brings digital arts into the realm of the living. The object of performance art is the plasticity of bodies, placing it in the realm of the plastic arts more than in that of other performing arts. It is nevertheless an art of impermanence and the approach to its preservation is the same as for the theater, dance, circus arts, or concert music in that preservation here mainly consists in documenting what happens in the form of a recording or score.13 The paradox is that the performing arts were given that name by contrast with the audiovisual arts, with which digital art is often associated.14 But the fact that performance art (especially in the case of Fluxus) and digital art both rely on a set of instructions (a protocol for the former, a program for the latter15) justifies the comparison.
SUMMARY NO. 4.
The metaphysical dualism of the theory of variable media
Although it is true that the comparison between the longevity of artworks and that of living beings is nothing new (its genealogical origins would no doubt trace back to Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, and to the idea of Renaissance itself, when culture rediscovered it was alive and mortal), it is equally true that the comparison comes to life in performance art. By using the latter as the model of its own durability, digital art becomes an allographic art, in Goodman’s sense of the term.16 That is why the theory of variable media17 supports the reinterpretation of the digital arts.18 This approach is based on a metaphysical dualism that distinguishes the material from the immaterial dimension of the artwork, that is, its recordable idea as a trace.19 Far from new, this assumption echoes the distinction between body and soul on the basis of which idealistic philosophy explained the immortality of the soul.20
SUMMARY NO. 5.
The founding principles of the preservative method for digital art
Founded on an immaterialist conception of art,21 the conservation-restoration of digital artworks is termed “preservation.” One preserves a work of art in the way that Plato took “care of the soul.”22 Emphasizing the “immaterial” aspect of the artwork (the material aspect is condemned to the grave), attention focuses on the source code. The point is not only to preserve it as such by replacing the data- storing equipment, but also to preserve its readability in spite of hardware changes. To meet the challenge, the preservative method23 primarily involves: 1) emulation, which makes it possible to read an obsolete program on a current machine by simulating its original environment24; 2) porting, which entails rewriting the code in order to adapt it to a new digital environment25; 3) reinterpretation, which entails recreating the artwork.26 In each case, the original relationship between code and material is destroyed.
SUMMARY NO. 6.
Preserving an artwork means preserving its writing
Under the pretext of the reproducibility of computer files and the possibility of obtaining identical tangible effects in different languages, the notion of original writing seems to have disappeared. This is an argument in favor of rewriting or reinterpreting code for the sake of preservation. It is true that any program can be reduced to binary code and, ultimately, to differences in voltage such that, in this sense, no artwork is ever actually obsolete. Yet every digital artist is first of all an explorer of her medium: in this case, code, hardware, and networks. The tangible effects of the artwork are the result of a dialogue between the human and the machine, of which the very act of writing becomes a trace. Therefore, beyond the question of respect for the artwork’s historicity, of which the original version is an integral part, is it at all right to dissociate writing from its effects, as reinterpretation and porting suggest that we do?27
SUMMARY NO. 7.
The archeological layers of digital artworks
Every digital or literary work of art is a form of writing whose possibilities are conditioned by the machine. In a computer, these conditions have to do with a stacking of software, the lowest level of which allows a shift from the symbolic to the real, in other words, to electronic and electrical material. Ontologically speaking, digital writing, whether artistic or not, be it sound, image, text, movement, or all at once, relies on a succession of layers which not only makes that writing possible but also gives it a meaning.28 However, the specificity of the digital artwork is that it is dependent on the industrial laws that apply to all these layers. This is particularly manifest in Net Art.29 A digital artwork is nothing more than the product of a singular relationship between the creations of an industrial world - an economic, legal, techno-scientific, and political world - and an artist who has come to explore its effects.
SUMMARY NO. 8.
The three aspects of art
The preservation of digital artworks cannot overlook the fact that artworks are not only born in an artistic environment but also in a given industrial environment. First, this means that the relationship between the artist and the machine is conditioned by specific structures, legal rules, and industry standards30; second, that the future of the artwork is conditioned by the course of industrial innovation, as a consequence of which these artworks become “obsolete”31; third, that artworks express de facto a historical relationship between the viewer and this industrial environment.32 The aesthetics and historicity of the digital artwork thus lie at the crossroads of these three instances,33 which every endeavor to conserve- restore must take into account: the media-technical instance (the act of writing as a relationship between the artist-author and the machine), the industrial instance (presupposing a certain “state” of technoscience, law, and economics), and the artistic instance (the artistic environment).
PAMAL, Cette pièce est en cours de maintenance. Merci de votre compréhension (installation), “Vision” exhibition (Palais de Tokyo, 2016). Detail; second original of DOEK (1990-93) by Annie Abrahams and Jan de Weille. Production PAMAL and IUT d’Arles. Computer: Amiga 500.

© PAMAL – Emylou Mahon, 2016.
SUMMARY NO. 9.
The second original as a remedy to the obsolescence of digital arts
How does one counter the logic of obsolescence without denying the materiality of the digital artwork? The “second original” provides a possible answer. It entails duplicating and rebuilding, be it with losses, a work of art that is lost or considered “obsolete” by using its original writing- and reading- machine (its hardware and software). The “second original” does not rule out emulation or simulation,34 which can serve to reconstruct certain parts of the artwork (for instance when a given type of network no longer exists).35 The “second original” is an archive of the artwork. The loss is not reincorporated but, just like the traces of the process itself, exposed.36 From an epistemological point of view, it allows us to grasp what, aesthetically and in the digital environment, is missing.37 We call this materialist method of art preservation “mediarcheological.” Its virtue is to help preserve both the artworks and the industrial heritage.
PAMAL, Cette pièce est en cours de maintenance. Merci de votre compréhension (installation), “Vision” exhibition (Palais de Tokyo, 2016). Detail (foreground): study for the conservation of Albertine Meunier’s AngeliNo. Production PAMAL

© PAMAL – Emylou Mahon, 2016.
PAMAL, Cette pièce est en cours de maintenance. Merci de votre compréhension (installation), “Vision” exhibition (Palais de Tokyo, 2016). Installation produced with works from: Annie Abrahams and Jan de Weille, Grégory Chatonsky, Eduardo Kac, Albertine Meunier, Antoine Schmitt.

© PAMAL – Emylou Mahon, 2016.
SUMMARY NO. 10.
Should we apologize when an artwork no longer works?
When a digital artwork no longer “works” in an exhibition, it is common to find an apologetic label next to it. Wouldn’t it be preferable to suggest an alternative, a label informing the visitor that “due to the natural life cycle of machines, certain parts may no longer function”? Industrial obsolescence makes the comparison between artworks and the living relevant.38 Do we not perceive the conservation of artworks in the light of how we view the preservation of our own bodies? But to which side should we push the comparison? Must we rewrite the artwork’s source code and update all of the devices, as if, in the manner of our own human fantasies, we could turn the work into some immortal cyborg? Or must we change our view of art by coming to terms with the loss, dysfunction, death, fragility, and vulnerability of works of art?
SUMMARY NO. 11.
What is to be done?
The endless rush of industrial obsolescence hinders our access to digital artworks. The stakes of the issue involve both cultural heritage and curation. Must we favor the artwork’s materiality at the risk of showing merely a “dead” work of art? Or, in order to keep it “alive,” should we accept thoroughly transforming it, even if it means turning it into a different artwork and, by doing so, wiping languages and material from the memorial map? The solution to the dilemma may entail admitting the vulnerability of works of art.39 Does an artwork whose system has ceased to “function” not continue to “function” (aesthetically) in another way? The idea is to invent a dramaturgy and design of vulnerability that could highlight dysfunction and incompleteness without losing the possibility of a sensible experience of the artwork. This is a genuine challenge that calls into question the conventions governing works of art as well as their exhibition and preservation.
Notes de bas de page
1 A dynamic version of this article’s footnotes is available at: https://wiki.pamal.org/wiki/La_conservation-restauration_des_arts_num%C3%A9riques_en_r%C3%A9sum%C3%A9(s).
2 A distinction is drawn here between digital and contemporary art, the latter referring not to present-day art but to an aesthetic genre defined by specific practices and discourses (see Catherine Millet, Contemporary Art in France, trans. Charles Penwarden [Paris: Flammarion, 2006]). However, contemporary art is itself facing obsolescence. See Cécile Dazort, “La conservation-restauration à l’épreuve du consommable,” MCD 75 (Sept-Nov. 2014).
3 Several major articles on the preservation of digital data were published in the late 1990s. In 2000, Stewart Granger already emphasized the notion of emulation. See, for instance, Jeff Rothenberg, Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 1998); Seamus Ross, Digital Archaeology: Rescuing Neglected and Damaged Data Resources, A JISC/NPO Study with the Electronic Libraries (eLib) Program on the Preservation of Electronic Materials (University of Glasgow, 1999); Stewart Granger, “Emulation as a Digital Preservation Strategy,” D-Lib Magazine 6: 10 (2000). For an overview of the various conservation-restoration methods of digital artworks, see “Methodological Diagram of the Preservation of Complex Digital Objects,” part of the Digitalis project (http://www.pamal.org/Digitalis/EN/curen.html). Most of these methods are derived from theories from the 2000- 2010s.
4 Richard Rinehart, “Media Art Notation System: Documenting and Preserving Digital/ Media Art,” Leonardo 40: 2 (2007): 181-187.
5 Oliver Grau, ed., Media Art Histories (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).
6 Pip Laurenson, “Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installation,” Tate Papers (fall 2006).
7 Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito, and Caitlin Jones, eds. Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach (Montreal and New York: Daniel Langlois Foundation and Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2003).
8 Christiane Paul, “Context and Archive: Presenting and Preserving Net Art,” in Netpioneers 1.0 – Contextualizing Early Net-based Art, eds. Dieter Daniels and Günther Reisinger (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2010), 101- 120.
9 See, for instance, Bernard Stiegler, who declared that “digital art does not exist and never has” in his conference at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, February 8, 2004.
10 As a “young” art, digital art is scarcely present in public or private collections.
11 This borrows from Friedrich Kittler’s definition of the medium (pl. media) in Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986).
12 Wolf Lieser, Digital Art (Potsdam: Tandem Verlag, 2009).
13 Alain Depocas, Digital Preservation: Recording the Recoding. The Documentary Strategy (Montreal: Daniel Langlois Foundation, 2002): http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/f/page.php?NumPage=152. Also see Richard Rinehart, “A System of Formal Notation for Scoring Works of Digital and Variable Media Art,” Annual meeting of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, Portland, Oregon, June 4, 2004 (Berkeley: University of California, 2005): http://archive.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about/formalnotation.pdf.
14 In France and Quebec, for instance, digital art is supported by public institutions that fund cinema and audiovisual creation (in France, the CNC-DICRéAM).
15 On the notion that machines “perform,” see Phillip Auslander, “At the Listening Post, or, Do Machines Perform?” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 1: 1 (2005). The notion that machines perform, which reverses J. L. Austin’s argument (How to Do Things With Words), is not a new idea in art. See Tinguely’s machines and Stephen Cripps’s “performing machines.”
16 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976). In his lectures from the 1960s, Goodman argues that notation is characteristic of allographic arts, where the artwork can be “instanced” multiple times (e.g., a play, a musical performance, etc.). According to the theory of variable media, digital art would then qualify as an allographic art.
17 Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito, and Caitlin Jones, eds., Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach, op. cit. See the website for the variable media network: http://www.variablemedia.net/. In this sense, one of the pillars of the theory of variable media is Goodman’s distinction.
18 Reinterpretation consists in interpreting an artwork affected by technological obsolescence based on the immaterial part of the work, that is to say, the artist’s intention. This approach, which lies at the core of the theory of variable media, applies equally to digital art, contemporary art, or aboriginal art (see Jon Ippolito, “Émulation, migration & re-création,” Art Press 12 [2009]) in that these aesthetic categories all refer to “living” arts. See Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, Re-collection, Art, New Media, and Social Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014). Perhaps we should consider performance art, as a living art, as the paradigm for contemporary art in general, defined by the power to act – both in the sense of a gesture (in Duchamp’s sense) and an action (in the artworld).
19 Documentation plays a crucial role in the conservation of digital artworks (just as in performance or music). For some theorists, it even serves as a form of preservation. See for example, Oliver Grau, “For an Expanded Concept of Documentation: The Database of Virtual Art,” ICHIM (Paris: École du Louvre, 2003), 2-15. A similar idea can be found in the DOCAM project of the Daniel Langlois Foundation: http://www.docam.ca/en.html. Artist Rafael Lozano- Hemmer, drawing on the idea of source code as musical score, has suggested a conservation protocol based on documentation. See Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Best Practices for Conservation of Media Art from an Artist’s Perspective” (2015): https://github.com/antimodular/Best-practices-for-conservation-of-media-art.
20 Plato, Phaedo, in Meno and Phaedo, eds. and trans. David Sedley and Alex Long (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 78b-80c; and The Republic, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 611a-e.
21 See Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
22 On the care of the soul, see Plato, Phaedo, op. cit., 107c-d. The comparison between the philosopher and the doctor is recurrent in Plato, who grants the doctor a privileged status in the social hierarchy. See Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 248d. On the “care of the soul” as a paradigm of European thought, see Jan Patocka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). It would appear that conservation-restoration is no exception. Remember that for Plato the “body is a tomb” (Phaedrus, op. cit., 250c).
23 What I mean by “preservative” method is any conservation-restoration “strategy” for the digital arts based on an analogy between the digital arts and performance. It refers to the conservation-restoration practices of performance: “re-enactment,” “reinterpretation,” “proliferative re-creation,” “delegated performance” (see Claire Bishop, Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity [CUNY Academic Works, 2012]), etc. The analogy between digital art and performance art justifies the reenactment of the artwork, independently of its “original” material (hardware), as is the case in emulation, migration, porting, visualization, and reinterpretation.
24 Emulation involves running an obsolete program on a current machine by reproducing its original environment. “Environment” is meant in the limited sense of the term, i.e., the software environment, the goal of emulation, as with other “preservative” approaches, being to “free” artwork conservation-restoration from hardware. Emulation must be distinguished from virtualization, which makes it possible “to run the software environment of a digital object on a current machine having the same architecture thanks to a virtual machine.” (Morgane Stricot, “Methodological diagram of the preservation of complex digital objects”: http://www.pamal.org/Digitalis/EN/curen.html#).
25 Porting involves rewriting and making necessary modifications to the source code so that it runs on the target environment. In porting, rewriting is usually done in a new programming language.
26 Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito, and Caitlin Jones, eds., Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach, op. cit.
27 See, for instance, artist Casey Reas’s article, who writes that “the code-source is not the work” ( “Conservation,” Reas/Studio [2016]: https://github.com/REAS/studio/wiki/Conservation).
28 This analysis is drawn from Friedrich Kittler, “Protected Mode,” The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 209-218.
29 Net Art is not only “dependent” on the obsolescence of software and hardware but also on the various materialities present in the network, such as infrastructure and international – still primarily American – decisions on internet norms.
30 The conservation-restoration of digital artworks regularly comes up against so-called “proprietary” software rights. “Proprietary” software does not become “free” when it is abandoned. This makes it legally impossible to act upon the source code in any way.
31 The artwork is not itself industrial, although it depends on the industrial environment. In other words, digital art is “ephemeral” because of its industrial nature and not because of its kinship with performance. The analogy between the two arts and the idea that the artwork first of all resides in the artist’s intention obfuscate the reality of the condition of digital art and serve to a certain extent to mask the industrial logic at work. Another possible solution consists in “exposing” this dependence, that is, the vulnerability of digital art, by letting the artwork die and, in particular, by showing the reasons for its death.
32 This relationship occurs within a given ecosystem. A media-technical ecosystem is like a micro-episteme (in Foucault’s sense) or, more precisely, an inscription microsystem, to borrow from Friedrich Kittler’s concept (Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metter [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990]; see Emmanuel Guez, “Art et archéologie des médias,” Newsletter [HEAD, 2016]: http://pamal.org/wiki/%22Art_et_arch%C3%A9ologie_des_m%C3%A9dia%22).
33 We refer here to Cesare Brandi’s concept of istanza (Teoria del restauro [Bologna: Piccola biblioteca Einaudi, 2000]; Theory of Restoration, trans. Cynthia Rockwell [Firenze: Nardini, 2005]). The aesthetic, historical, and, to a lesser extent, technical instances make up the criteria for assessing an artwork’s restoration. For the digital arts, these instances are media-technical, (technical-) industrial, and artistic.
34 Emmanuel Guez, Morgane Stricot, Lionel Broye, and Stéphane Bizet, “The Afterlives of Network-Based Artworks,” The Journal of the Institute of Conservation (ICON) 40: 2 (2017).
35 The point is not to emulate, simulate, or transfer the entire artwork but to overcome isolated difficulties by using these techniques. For instance, in the case of a telematic artwork, a server can be simulated if the network no longer exists.
36 The more incomplete the reconstitution, the more we are removed from its ecosystem, and the more it interests us. It allows us to explore the temporal and epistemological ruptures, in other words, what is lost to Western culture – not only the artwork as a whole, but also the digital environment, that is, human-machine interactions (i.e., a certain relation to the body), industrial strategies, discourses and practices, software, hardware, electronic components, and infrastructures.
37 Museums of Science and Industry exhibit non-operating machines in glass cases. Art museums preserve dead artworks. The idea is quite simply to restore the latter with the former, whereby the machines’ preservation will simultaneously improve. Beyond the fact that the collaboration benefits both sides, the issue is also theoretical: must we, in the case of the media-technical arts and especially the digital arts, continue to distinguish between art and technology? The distinction, the stakes of which are the autonomy of art, is maintained by aesthetics, whose very existence depends on it. But insofar as the aesthetic effects of media-technical artworks can be understood and analyzed by technical media studies, is the distinction, and hence aesthetics as a discipline, still relevant for such artworks?
38 On the notion of biopower and biopolitics, see Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), especially Chapter 5, “Right of Death and Power Over Life.”
39 This is what PAMAL (the Preservation & Art – Media Archeology Lab) strives to do in its exhibitions. The exhibition “Une archéologie des média” (May-June 2015, Aix-en-Provence) took place in two rooms. The first room, black, was dedicated to artworks that were dilapidated or dying. The visitor could wander from table to table, which might be compared to the various units in a hospital: operating room, intensive care, recovery, rehabilitation, etc. Since the artworks could deteriorate and old machines stop working during the exhibition, facilitators were instructed to draw up a day-to-day report of their status, but in no way try to repair or apologize for the fact that a machine no longer worked.
Auteur
-
Emmanuel Guez
Artist, philosopher, curator, and teacher. He is the co-founder of the research department PAMAL (Preservation & Art - Media Archeology Lab) at the École supérieure d’art d’Avignon. Websites: https://writingmachines.org / http://pamal.or.
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