Digital preservation in museums: net art between computing clouds and clouds of oblivion
Full text: Preservação digital em museus: a net art entre nuvens computacionais e de esquecimento. (Paper presented at Besides The Screen Conference 2018: Vaults, Archives, Clouds and Platforms: Archiving and Preservation in the 21st Century. CIAC-ISMAI, Porto, Portugal, July 5–6, 2018.)
This paper discusses digital preservation in contemporary art museums through an analysis of net art created in the 1990s. It addresses transformations associated with cloud computing, which introduced new standards incompatible with the programming used in the earliest art websites.
In this context, conserving net art has come to involve ideological obsolescence as well as technological obsolescence. The discussion highlights the case of O livro depois do livro (1999), by the author, and its incorporation into the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP).
Difficulties accessing the website because of new Internet security standards prompted a discussion about procedures for conserving net art and incorporating it into a museum collection. Instead of restoring the system, a complete update was chosen. The result is a new original, or “second-generation original,” to be published to mark the work’s twentieth anniversary (2019).
Keywords: digital preservation, net art, cloud computing, technological obsolescence, contemporary art museums