Forging the Future: New Tools for Variable Media Art Preservation

While the number of tools for making and distributing
culture has exploded in the last half-century, it
is hard to find a tool for preserving inherently ephemeral
media, such as performances, installations, and digital
artifacts that have been created using digital, biological,
performative and other variable media. The increased
use by artists of multi-media, digital and internet media
raises questions about conventional strategies by
which society preserves, cares for, and redisplays these
cultural artifacts. While the most obvious vulnerability
of new media art is rapid technological obsolescence,
the study of its other aspects that defy traditional conservation—including
hybrid, contextual, or ‘live’ qualities—has
provoked an investigation into new strategies
for ephemeral media art preservation. While we can preserve
something of new media art, it will inevitably be
changed. Forging the Future, a consortium of museums
and cultural heritage organizations, aims to fill the gap
with a free, practical toolset designed to rescue variable
media works from oblivion by understanding possible
alterations, distilling which matter most to the artist, and
planning accordingly.
The Forging the Future tools are based on research into
innovative preservation standards and strategies by its
members as part of the Variable Media Network (VMN)
and Archiving the Avant-Garde working group. These
include the Franklin Furnace Database, which catalogs
past versions of a work and variable media artworks and events contained in small to midsize collections; the Digital
Assets Management Database, which manages digital
metadata that is directly relational to all the tools; the
Variable Media Questionnaire (VMQ), which contains
data and metadata necessary to migrate, re-create, and
preserve cataloged variable media objects: What is the
work in its original incarnation? What could the work be
in later incarnations? Beta versions of these tools are in
use by institutions ranging from major museums such as
the Whitney Museum of American Art to small alternative
spaces such as New Langton Arts.
Scheduled for a public release in Spring 2009, the Forging
the Future toolset will include features that help the
separate tools interconnect with each other and with potential
databases in museums, libraries, and archives. In
addition to the Franklin Furnace database and the third
generation VMQ web service, these include the VocabWiki,
a multi-institutional effort to define key terms
applicable to new media and variable media artifacts;
Media Art Notation System (MANS), an XML specification,
based on MPEG-21 for translating data and
relationships among tools; and the Forging the Future
Metadata Registry, which enables users to track the same
creator or work across different collections.
This poster presents the Forging the Future interconnected
tool set, and focuses specifically on the VMQ and
its integration with MANS, complimented by the VocabWiki
and the Metadata Registry. The VMQ is an instrument
for determining creators’ intent as to how their
work should be categorized, seen, and (if at all) recreated
in the future; it records opinions which may vary based
on the work, the artist, the interviewer and date, about
how to preserve variable media. MANS metadata is derived
from the VMQ interview(s) which separates logical
information from physical hardware. It is a metadata
framework that accommodates description of physical
and digital assets at the same level. Rinehart uses the
metaphor of a musical score, as a form of declarative
and conceptual notation of music, and likens Media Art
to musical compositions that are able to maintain their
original integrity while being realized by different instruments
or in different arrangements, over evolving
time periods. Ippolito’s VMQ is a very complex method
for focusing an artist’s attention on those aspects of the
work which need to be most enduring. The VMQ and
MANs were designed to serve the needs of documentation,
recreation and preservation of variable media.
A crosswalk of the MANS notation system or ontology
to ten library, art, and preservation metadata standards
(METS, PREMIS, EAD, FRBR, PBCore, etc.) verified
the need for a domain specific schema for structural
and administrative metadata. This poster demonstrates
how the heart of the process, the VMQ, collects essential
preservation information that MANS supports in a
unique, infinitely extensible structure. MANS is derived
as an interpretation of the MPEG-21 standard, primarily;
the Digital Item Declaration Language (DIDL) a type
of XML that allows for greater, more granular descriptions
of multi-component digital objects. The intent is
for MANS to act as a backbone to the artwork by being
specifically suggestive though not overly prescriptive of
how best to delineate and then, later, reinterpret an artwork,
and thereby address long-term preservation strategies
for variable media art such as storage, emulation,
migration, reinterpretation.
References
Bekaert, K., Hochstenbach, P. and Van de Sempel, H.
Using MPEG-21 DIDL to Represent Complex Digital
Objects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Digital
Library. V.9, No.11, November 2003, D-Lib Magazine
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november03/bekaert/11bekart.
html
Forging the Future Alliance. http://forging-the-future.
net/
Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records,
Final Report. IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements
for Bibliographic Records. http://www.ifla.
org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf
Introduction to Metadata Pathways to Digital Information,
Metadata Standards Crosswalks. Version 2.1, 2008.
http://www.getty.edu/research/conduction_research/
standards/intrometadata/crosswalks.pdf
Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard: Primer
and Reference Manual, Version 1.6 September 2007.
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/METS%20Documentation%20final%20070930%msw.pdf
MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration WD V2.0 http://xml.
coverpages.org/MPEG21-WG-11-N3971-200103.pdf
PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata,
Version 2.0. http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/index.html
Ippolito, Jon. Death by Wall Label. http://vectors.usc.
edu/thoughtmesh/publish/11.php
Rinehart, Richard. 20XX. A System of Formal Notation
for Scoring Works of Digital and Variable Media Art.
University of California, Berkeley User Guide to PBCore, Public Broadcasting Metadata
Dictionary. Version 1.1. http://www.pbcore.org/PBCore/UserGuide.html.
Variable Media Network. http://www.variablemedia.net/