Archiving Digital Artwork For Museum Purchase? 266
An anonymous reader writes "I am an artist working with 3d software to create animations and digital prints. For now my work just gets put on screening DVDs and BluRays and the original .mov and 3d files get backed up. But museums and big art collectors do want to purchase these animations. However as we all know archival DVDs are not really archival. So I want to ask the Slashdot readers, what can I give to the museum when they acquire my digital work for their collection so that it can last and be seen long after I am dead? No other artist or institution I know of have come up with any real solution to this issue yet, so I thought Slashdot readers may have an idea. These editions can be sold for a large amount of money, so it doesn't have to be a cheap solution."
Media Arts Preservation resources (Score:5, Informative)
"The Variable Media Network proposes an unconventional new preservation strategy that has emerged from the Guggenheim's efforts to preserve its world-renowned collection of conceptual, minimalist and video art and that is supported by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology. The aim of this affiliation is to help build a network of organizations that will develop the tools, methods and standards needed to implement this strategy."
http://variablemedia.net/ [variablemedia.net]
"Matters in Media Art is a multi-phase project designed to provide guidelines for care of time-based media works of art (e.g., video, film, audio and computer based installations). The project was created in 2003 by a consortium of curators, conservators, registrars and media technical managers from New Art Trust, MoMA, SFMOMA and Tate. The consortium launched its first phase, on loaning time-based media works, in 2004, and its second phase, on acquiring time-based media works, in 2007."
http://moma.org/explore/collection/conservation/media_art [moma.org]
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/mediamatters/ [tate.org.uk]
"From March to December 2003, the archive team of V2_Organisation (a center for culture and technology in Rotterdam, the Netherlands) has conducted research on the documentation aspects of the preservation of electronic art activities -- or Capturing Unstable Media --, an approach between archiving and preservation."
http://capturing.projects.v2.nl/ [v2.nl]
"DOCAM's main objective is to develop new methodologies and tools to address the issues of preserving and documenting digital, technological and electronic works of art."
http://www.docam.ca/en/?cat=17 [docam.ca]
"Inside Installations: Preservation and Presentation of Installation Art is a three-year research project (2004-2007) into the care and administration of an art form that is challenging prevailing views of conservation."
http://www.inside-installations.org/home/index.php [inside-installations.org]
Aw geeze - again!? (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, Slashdot editors, can we put a moritarium on these "whrrr what medium do I choose to back my stuff up on so that it will still be readable N year from now???" stories?
We just HAD one of these less than two weeks ago!
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/09/29/1646251 [slashdot.org]
The top comment there?
- Zlurg; http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1371703&cid=29449669 [slashdot.org]
Slashdot askers: could you please, please, just browse back a month or two to see this discussion dealt with over, and over, and over?
No. Your mentioning that this is for a *museum* doesn't change anything - all of those discussions are from people who want to achieve immortality through archived proof that they once lived and want their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren to see the bodyshots they took off of their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.
No. Your mentioning that this doesn't have to be cheap doesn't change anything either - all of those discussions will have replies varying in cost, right on up to suggesting you etch the data into a platinum carrier.
I'll summarize the replies from all of those discussions for you here.. by the time I'm done, they'll probably all appear as replies in -this- 'story' again as well.
A. Back up to any media, make duplicates, refresh these duplicates onto whatever media is now-current and reliable enough that it doesn't die the very next morning, keep the old ones around. This ensures that you always have overlapping technologies so that you -can- transfer the data just fine, and that the data will live on until somebody gets sick and tired of doing this. Note that the burden with this falls onto the museum - in both time and cost - but thankfully they can then do so for entire collections, and not just your stuff.
B. Drop it on a filesharing network, invoke the "once it's on the internet" claim.. although good luck finding, say, Fearless (1993 movie, not the Jet Li thing) which -was- easily found at least 5 years ago (I should know, I grabbed it to check out the plane crash; didn't care for the rest of the movie). So, scratch that.
C. If graphics: turn them into archival quality negatives. If audio: slap 'm on a phonographic record. Yes, they will degrade, but they will degrade 'gracefully' and even if some future generation has no idea what the heck to do with an SD card, figuring out negatives (or positives if you will) and records is rather simple.
Re:Offer Them a Backup Plan, Not a Single Media (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget error correction and recovery. Undetected bitrot for long term archiving is not a good thing. Just having CRCs and/or cryptographic signatures will just tell you that something got corrupted, but won't help fix it.
On the DVD front, something like DVDDisaster and a MD5 signature utility should help there. For data files in general, something that does .PAR records, or an archive format (WinRAR, StuffIt Deluxe) that supports built in recovery records. Of course archive formats suffer the issue of making sure the archiving program is still around in the future.
Um....tape??? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Digital archives must be live... (Score:1, Informative)
Transcoding of formats like .gif and .jpg have not been required since their inception, and I doubt that they ever will be.
Re:Blended solution? (Score:5, Informative)
none of those are proved to last centuries.
tape might be a durable medium, but is still requires a compatible drive. even if you supply the drive, the bus/port/connector might not be available in the future, also electronics degrade over time (specially the ones that store firmware in flash memory and/or contain capacitors). so even if you sell your work with: a) computer; b) operating system and software; c) drive; d) tapes. there's no guarantee.
the same is true for all of the media mentioned by parent.
only solution guaranteed to last centuries ?
*** PAPER AND INK ***
yes, your heard me. ink and paper. well stored it can last thousands of years. you have to print your files as a very compact, machine readable data matrix [wikipedia.org], store it along with human readable books explaining the technology neccessary to read the print-outs, including schematics, source code, etc. no need to mention that the file formats and software need to be open source, or you need a license to the code.
this way future generations will have everything neccessary to put toghether a hardware/software combination capable of reading the data matrices, convert the bits to files and display the result.
this could be an art project on itself, since you can embed paterns and colors on the data matrices. check wikipedia page for "QR codes" to see examples of data matrices with embeded art. very cool stuff.
Re:Offer Them a Backup Plan, Not a Single Media (Score:3, Informative)
MD5s won't help except to detect corruption, as you say in your first sentence. I imagine having duplicate copies of the DVD, recorded identically would be a cheap, low-tech alternative. Even if some blocks on one copy get destroyed, chances are those same blocks are good on another. With enough parallel copies, you can be sure to find a good version of each block on at least one.
While DVDs might only last a decade, it's not like they'll entirely go *poof* on day 3653. They'll begin degrading, but each one will degrade differently.
Re:Don't worry about it. (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't read where the poster said that, I think you may have misread the article.
Re:Yes. (Score:4, Informative)
One big flaw with that plan though. If you sell a piece of digital art to a museum for some large sum and then tell them that you also plan to upload a high-resolution copy to a file-sharing site, they may object. Possibly strongly.
Re:WORM Flash (Score:3, Informative)
If you checked the link, you'll see that Sandisk advertises them as good for 100 years. Of course, they haven't been around for 100 years yet, so who knows what the longevity actually is.