Archiving the digital (was: Steve Dietz Out at Walker Art Center)

Eryk wrote:

> While they added more
> than one
> piece a day to the archive last year, the principal strategy seems to
> be
> "emulation" which is, they will re-write the code to work for new
> browsers.
> At this rate by 2010 they will have something like 5000 archived
> pieces of
> art in the artbase. Why they would prefer to hire a coder to "restore"
> these
> pieces to work with new browsers [destroying the integrity of the
> original
> work] as opposed to simply running a simultaneous "browser museum" is
> anyone's guess.

Eryk, you seem to be using a definition of "emulation" I'm unfamiliar with. In this context I'd guess that emulation would mean writing virtual browsers – maybe in Java, though that'd be slow as molasses – that could switch between rendering engines for Netscape 3.01 or MSIE 3.5 Mac. (A specious proposition at best; emulation projects seem to succeed when there's a lot of fun involved, cf the quite successful MAME project.)

I suppose I should admit that this particular problem is barely on my radar, not least because the problem is both quite daunting and quite distant. I can say that in my short tenure here the option of hiring people to go through old net-art and rewrite it to be XHTML-CSS-XML-ActionScript-compliant has never come up. I would never suggest it, myself. Beyond the cost, the idea sounds a bit onerous from a historical viewpoint. You don't go rewriting Shakespeare just 'cause nobody knows what a nunnery is anymore.

What we can do is the absolute minimum: We preserve the code. There are other projects that are preserving browsers, God bless 'em. Maybe 10 years in the future, some online arts organization will figure out the best way to make the browser archives and the net-art archive work together. If I don't have to worry today about archiving different browsers (ugh) I get to focus more on archiving net-art. Seems to make sense to me.

Unless, Eryk, you think that the changing nature of the ArtBase demands a different operational focus. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on that.

Francis