Myth Number 8
Interessting article I found on the New York Digital Saloon website. As the title ‘Ten Myths of Internet Art’ says it pretends to deconstruct ten myths on the features of so-called Internet Art. For instance myth Number 8 is relevant in the debate between musem and new media…
Myth Number 8: Internet art is impossible to collect.
Although the “outside the mainstream” stance taken by many online artists contributes to this impression, the most daunting obstacle in collecting Internet art is the ferocious pace of Internet evolution. Online art is far more vulnerable to technological obsolescence than its precedents of film or video: In one example, works created for Netscape 1.1 became unreadable when Netscape 2 was released in the mid-1990s. Yet the Guggenheim is bringing a particularly long-term vision to collecting online art, acquiring commissions directly into its permanent collection alongside painting and sculpture rather than into ancillary special Internet art collections as other museums have done. The logic behind the Guggenheim’s approach, known as the “Variable Media Initiative,” is to prepare for the obsolescence of ephemeral technology by encouraging artists to envision the possible acceptable forms their work might take in the future. It may seem risky to commit to preserving art based on such evanescent technologies, but the Guggenheim has faced similar issues with other contemporary acquisitions, such as Meg Webster’s spirals made of leafy branches, Dan Flavin’s installations of fluorescent light fixtures, and Robert Morris’s temporary plywood structures that are built from blueprints. Preserving those works requires more than simply storing them in crates-so too immortalizing online art demands more than archiving Web files on a server or CD-ROM. Along with the digital files corresponding to each piece, the Guggenheim compiles data for each artist on how the artwork is to be translated into new mediums once its original hardware and software are obsolete. To prepare for such future re-creations, the Guggenheim has started a variable media endowment, where work of interest is earmarked for future data migration, emulation, and reprogramming costs.
read the rest of the article here.