Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory

by Richard Rinehart, Jon Ippolito

How will our increasingly digital civilization persist beyond our lifetimes? Audio and videotapes demagnetize; CDs delaminate; Internet art links to websites that no longer exist; Amiga software doesn't run on iMacs. In " Re-collection," Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito argue that the vulnerability of new media art illustrates a larger crisis for social memory. They describe a "variable media "approach to rescuing new media, distributed across producers and consumers who can choose appropriate strategies for each endangered work. New media art poses novel preservation and conservation dilemmas. Given the ephemerality of their mediums, software art, installation art, and interactive games may be heading to obsolescence and oblivion. Rinehart and Ippolito, both museum professionals, examine the preservation of new media art from both practical and theoretical perspectives, offering concrete examples that range from Nam June Paik to Danger Mouse. They investigate three threats to twenty-first-century technology, because much new media art depends on rapidly changing software or hardware; institutions, which may rely on preservation methods developed for older mediums; and law, which complicates access with intellectual property constraints such as copyright and licensing. Technology, institutions, and law, however, can be enlisted as allies rather than enemies of ephemeral artifacts and their preservation. The variable media approach that Rinehart and Ippolito propose asks to what extent works to be preserved might be medium-independent, translatable into new mediums when their original formats are obsolete.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art

313 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Richard Rinehart is Director of the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University.

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book (as a text book) more than the class it was associated with I think. The chapters on remix as preservation especially made me think and the legal stuff was, in my opinion, a solid primer. Worth reading especially if you're with me in the overlap of the venn diagram of "art history" and "digital preservation"

[David Blanar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clearly written with lots of idea worth discussing. It's difficult to discern if the proposed approach is ahead of its time or simply too ambition for the currently available toolkit and capabilities of most production companies.

[Araminta Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

I take classes for fun and personal enrichment. I began pursuing a Digital Curation graduate certificate at the University of Maine with Jon Ippolito, one of the authors/experts of this book. I genuinely love the philosophical lens that digital curation takes in its ongoing effort to both honor the cultural intentions of the works it seeks to preserve and the lifespan of our cultural memories.

One thing I particularly loved about this book was Ippolito's and Rinehart's sometimes truly radical approach to digital curation (specifically for born-digital artifacts, which they describe as any artifact, art or otherwise, that was created using digital media in the first place as opposed to, say, Waterhouse's Circe, which was originally paint on canvas and may be later preserved in a digital space as a vector graphic rendered with pixels to be read by a browser). Two radical approaches they propose include preserving data on DNA (which poses all sorts of ethical dilemma, but also proposes an astronomical boost in storage capacity and longevity), and the other (perhaps more pragmatic) approach: social memory.

The concept of social memory as a preservation strategy is intriguing because it puts the impetus on the social masses. Ippolito proposes that social memory is a stronger method of data preservation as evidenced by the motivation of individuals to maintain resources/thoughts/concepts they truly appreciate. One example is the Mapinguary, which was an Amazonian legend of a beast that was preserved in the social memory of a culture 10,000 years after the creature went extinct. Another example (in a lecture on the subject) was the myriad Doctor Who fans who were able to resurrect episodes in a digital format that were lost by the BBC by stitching together the fragments of VHS-recordings that fans had in their private homes--episodes Whovians wouldn't have access to now if fans hadn't had the social motivation (and social memory) to preserve the content. A similar argument in favor of social memory exists in the archival process for video games as thousands of "die-hard" gamers emulate, code, preserve, and program iterations of loved games of the past (like Oregon Trail, Pong, or Super Mario Brothers), allowing these resources to be accessed by millennials who may not have otherwise been exposed to this swath of geek culture their parents (and grandparents) loved in their heydays.

At the same time, social memory comes with flaws--particularly a tendency to trend in favor of the majority. Wikipedia is a prime example. An encyclopedia crafted, curated, and maintained by the average digital-citizen, references to esoterica are often annhilated by these same digital-citizens when/if they fail to identify "popular citations" to support the presence in the archives. In other words, modern art, minority authors/poets/artists, and folks who may have had incredibly powerful (in terms of cultural impact) publications in pre-digital days that weren't heavily referenced by other resources (and thus "provably 'worth' curating" by wiki editors). If Wikipedia is an example of the preservation power of social memory, then our great grandchildren can look forward to a connectivist learning network of artifacts that survived a popularity contest and an inability (or at least, difficulty) to access artifacts that failed to resonate with the "majority demographic" that edit wikis.

Rinehart and Ippolito also posit some of the situations that threaten the longevity or "life space" of digital media, too, referencing the constant struggle of artists and media preservationists to even simply stay current with browser updates and/or institutional policies. Copyright, they suggest, isn't evolving as quickly as digital media, and these laws that are meant to safeguard artists and their works actually threaten their longevity by wrapping up the ability to preserve them in a complex tangle of rules and legalities.

In short, this book is absolutely fabulous for any person who works with digitalia of any kind. If you are preserving your family photos, if you're writing daily emails that you want to keep, if you make art that you host in digital spaces (or create using digital media), if you use computers or programs or code, if you touch tablets, if you do anything that remotely affects or effects new media, this book will propose a new lens for you to consider. It might help you think about how best to interact with your current digital artifacts to ensure they last a long, long time. It might encourage you to keep that dusty VHS-recorder you have in your closet, along with all your original Nintendo cartridges. It might event expose you to some very interesting art you never knew existed, while also helping you figure out how to maintain your own collection on your own hard drive and server.

[Melody Karle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly an interesting take on personal digital archiving, Rinehart and Ippolito talk broadly about how we manage "new media" and how that creates an interesting (or non-existent?) future for social memory and culture. Basically, we create and preserve things differently with digital tools, and we are at risk because it isn't straightforward. This isn't news to anyone aware of PDA. However, the authors break down the threats and concerns into sections: death by technology (obsolete we, etc.); death by institution (library/archive policy & constraints, etc.); and death by law (copyright etc.). Their final chapter, "only you can prevent the end of history," offers instructions to each group of stakeholders (curators, creators, historians, academics, etc.) for not losing our social and cultural memory.

[amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read our class blog for lots of insightful writing about this book, courtesy of my classmates.

[Mills College Library]

776.0288 R579 2014