Digital preservation in museums: net art between computing clouds and clouds of oblivion
This paper discusses digital preservation in contemporary art museums by analyzing works of net art created in the 1990s. It addresses transformations related to cloud computing, which introduced new standardization regimes incompatible with the programming of early art websites.
In this context, beyond technological obsolescence, the conservation of net art has had to deal with ideological obsolescence. The discussion highlights the case of O livro depois do livro (1999),, a work I created, and its incorporation into the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP).
The difficulties of accessing the website due to new Internet security standards developed into a discussion about conservation procedures and the inclusion of net art in a museum collection. Rather than recover the original system, a complete update was chosen. The result is a new original, or “second-generation original,” to be published on the work’s twentieth anniversary (2019).
Keywords: digital preservation, net art, cloud computing, technological obsolescence, contemporary art museums
(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.)
Full paper, here