Preservation Services
Rhizome's preservation team specializes in the conservation of net art, born-digital artworks, and multimedia publications. We are offering services to collecting institutions, community organizations, and artist studios who are looking to offer long-term access to a web project, a CD-ROM, an artist-made game, etc., online or offline.
Since 2014 Rhizome has built sophisticated conservation infrastructure that manages legacy software environments, accessible on the web or on local computers. This encompasses encapsulated servers running obsoleted versions of ColdFusion, PHP, Ruby, etc. to desktop systems like a 1999 version of Mac OS or Windows 98, including contemporaneous browsers, plugins, and other dependencies.
Rhizome’s approach is economical, by necessity. We focus on methods that can be applied to large numbers of artworks. Instead of rewriting old source code so an artwork performs in current software environments, which quickly become obsoleted yet again, we instead focus on maintaining access to legacy environments—every artwork is different, but every instantiation of Windows 2000 is roughly the same.
Offerings
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Providing online or gallery-based (offline) access to legacy CD-ROM art and software art. Rhizome can host fully interactive copies of your works, embeddable into any web page, or set up in a robust environment for museum exhibition. Currently supported platforms: Microsoft Windows 95 to XP and Apple Macintosh System 7 to OS 9.
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Bringing legacy net art back to the web. Rhizome offers stable, isolated server environments and frontend access environments required by internet art projects created from 1996 to about 2010, with browsers such as Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari version 3, Flash, Shockwave, RealAudio, and much more, all accessible and usable for regular visitors on the web.
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Capture and stabilize art on the web. Artists often use corporate platforms to create work, which may be deleted or distorted at any time by a basic platform redesign or policy change. Rhizome is offering a white glove web archiving service to capture online art ranging from bespoke artist websites, online video, to social media performance, and make available it for edition or exhibition.
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DIY tools and bespoke options. Let's talk!
Partnership structure
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Rhizome assesses the work’s condition and creates a preservation plan. This requires collaboration with stewards and possibly creators of the work, as well as initial or complete data made available for evaluation. Depending on the artwork in question, costs range in between $500 and $1500 for this phase.
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Rhizome executes the agreed-on preservation plan. Costs depend on the required labor and are determined in phase 1.
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Rhizome hands over an encapsulated version of the artwork including instructions on how to make it accessible independently from Rhizome. Optionally, Rhizome can host the work on its own infrastructure for public or restricted access, for a fee determined in phase 1. Costs range from $300 to $1200 per year.
Our Partners
Museums
- Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
- Vienna Museum of Science and Technology
- Museum of the Moving Image, New York
Artist Studios
- Seth Price
- Taryn Simon
- Cory Arcangel
Estates
- Michel Majerus
Select Reserach Publications
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Dragan Espenschied, Klaus Rechert: Software Preservation After the Internet. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES2023). University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2023.
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Dragan Espenschied, Digital Objecthood. In: Selçuk Artut, Osman Serhat Karaman, Cemal Yilmaz (eds), Technological Arts Preservation (PDF, epub). Sabancı Üniversitesi, Istanbul, 2022.
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Dragan Espenschied, In between performance and documentation. In: Annet Dekker, Gabriella Giannachi, Documentation as Art. Routledge, London, 2022.
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Dragan Espenschied, Klaus Rechert, Fencing Apparently Infinite Objects. In: In: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES2018). MIT Libraries, Boston, MA, 2018.
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Dragan Espenschied, Klaus Rechert, Thomas Liebetraut, Oleg Stobbe, Exhibiting Digital Art via Emulation. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES2016). Swiss National Library, Bern, 2016.
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Dragan Espenschied, Isgandar Valizada, Oleg Stobbe, Thomas Liebetraut, Klaus Rechert, (Re-)publication of Preserved, Interactive Content –Theresa Duncan CD-ROMs: Visionary Videogames for Girls. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES2015). University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015.