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."
Blended solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would provide backups in tape, cd, dvd, usb flash, sd card, external hd and anything else that can hold the work. Hopefully they will keep adding other backup technologies, but once you're dead who cares. Right? :)
Don't worry about it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry about it. Give it to them on a DVD. It'll then be up to the museum to take care of the art the same way they take care of the other art they have. I don't think it's realistic to expect to be able to read a DVD 100, 50, or even 30 years from now. I'm sure that the museum will move the data to an appropriate storage medium as technology advances.
Digital archives must be live... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem: a digital archive MUST be a live archive.
Every X years (with X being a reasonably low number, probably 3-5 is good for safety), everything in the archive must be both copied AND transcoded, with both the original and transcoded version saved.
The original requirement is obvious, and keeps data degredation from having an effect, but transcoding: opening it up in the latest software version and saving it in the software's most up to date format, is also necessary, lest the source material become unusable, like a wire recorder is today.
digitalartisnotfineart? (Score:3, Insightful)
Whoever tagged this story "digitalartisnotfineart" needs a cluebat. I'd like to hear a good argument for that -- ideally one that's not a rehash of the "video games are not art" debate.
Offer Them a Backup Plan, Not a Single Media (Score:4, Insightful)
No other artist or institution I know of have come up with any real solution to this issue yet ...
I don't know if we'll ever have what you're thinking of as everything we've designed has a finite shelf life. There might even be some fundamental law about entropy increasing in a closed system that could prove you'll never be 100% okay.
But instead what I would offer them is a plan as a solution, not a type of media. Offer to deliver it on whatever they are most comfortable handling. You could deliver a DVD or Solid State Storage device such as an SD card or USB stick and suggest they store that offsite in a vault or something fireproof [everythingfurniture.com] while you give them additional copies to retain and use locally that they can put on a networked RAID. Then at the end of the proposed shelf life, routine maintenance is performed on the stored media in the vault to bring it up to date while the local copies are still good. If they maintain this sort of redundancy and check the status of the media, they should be okay. They might even hire someone like Iron Mountain or another storage solution to maintain their backups.
Expensive? Very. Your other option is to do the same on your end and (don't promise this or tell them to rely on you) hopefully your kids will continue with it to persist your life's work.
A link (Score:3, Insightful)
to a site on the internet?
Setting aside how lame this is, the Museum already has a program for maintaining acquired works. Part of that maintenance could just be backing up the works.
This way it's always on a recent medium.
The point of a museum is to have a place to share unique works with the public.
Now digital work can be downloaded and as such doesn't really need a museum.
Re:Don't worry about it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Moreover, if you don't try to prevent copying, they should upgrade it to their newest technologies as time goes by.
I don't expect the video tape I bought 25 years ago to be useful forever, but I should be able to copy it to DVD... then BluRay.
I should be, anyway.
Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Chisel binary onto stone slabs. 4000 years from now it'll be displayed in a history museum.
Old school solution (Score:1, Insightful)
It may sound silly but going back to safety film, 35mm or better, is one of the most stable ways to go and the odds are strong that they'll still be able to transfer it to other mediums in a 100 years or more. I know a number of museums with major film and clip collections. They just need to be stored in climate controlled conditions. Modern unscreened films should last a 100 years or more. It's temperature and light exposure that is going to tend to degrade the film stock.
Re:digitalartisnotfineart? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's the unilateral opinion that anything that isn't physical, or can be easily copied, is suddenly lacking of all artistic merit and value.
The problem of single-location is more important. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you decide to back up the data on writable DVD, you have a lifetime of 2-10 years. With flash, (e.g., a thumb drive,) the general advertised time is 10 years. Even if there is a medium which guarantees a longer period, you still have the problem of multiple secure sites.
You can solve both problems at once by going with an on-line data warehouse who will guarantee data integrity and mirrors data to multiple locations. This leaves the issue of media life to them, and solves the multiple-location issue.
Cheers!
-Todd
Bar codes? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe instead of chiselling 1's and 0's onto the slab, he could use something like bar-code encoding when he chisels. That way, to 'read' the data, all one has to do is fill the depressions with some suitable bright-colored paint or pigmentation, then use a laser to scan it.
Tagged 'digitalartisnotfineart' (Score:3, Insightful)
We have trolls in the tags now? How cute. Here's a clue for you, every new art form is not considered fine art by crusty old timers. Then the old timers DIE and times move on and presto! It's fine art. It isn't about the medium in the first place. If I spatter paint on a canvas, it isn't going to be fine art. When Jackson Pollock did it, it was. My 3d models look nice, but they are a craft, not fine art. The guys who designed, oh say, Wall-E? Fine artists by any stretch of the imagination. Get it? It isn't the media, it is the artistic quality that determines whether something is fine art or not.
Whoever added that tag, the only connection you've got to art are the lead paint chips you ate as a child.
This isn't your problem. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why God Why (Score:4, Insightful)
A problem best solved by the institutions? (Score:1, Insightful)
Fortunately, the nature of digital art makes a solution easy if the museums cooperate. They could simply backup each others archives. This way a copy of any piece of digital art is stored at every major museum in the world. Loss of data would be a sign that much worse things were happening in the world.
Of course, encryption would probably be used to protect exclusive showing rights. Oh well.
Re:Aw geeze - again!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Choose a different artistic medium (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Um....tape??? (Score:1, Insightful)
Not just DigiBeta, but there's also D2, 1" and other archival tape formats that will last and be readable for years. Of course, with all of these you're still in a digital format and need the proper hardware and software to decode. The U.S. Archives has been working for ages to try and find a method to store the millions of photgraphic prints and negatives both for posterity and cataloguing, without success.
It comes down to this (in my opinion) - any media that will last indefinitely into the future must be tangible. A medium for digital media does not fit in here. The medium is tangible, but the media is not. Therefore, your only solution is to take your video art and have it printed to 35mm (or larger) film. Of course, film also degrades. Modern film, however, should fare far better than some of the Technicolor films of yore.
In 200 years, if the digital files can't be read, someone can shine a light through the frames and figure out what's going on there. It may be degraded in quality, they may play it back at the wrong frame rate, but something will be there.
Re:Tagged 'digitalartisnotfineart' (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes. (Score:1, Insightful)
So, it remains a Good Idea to have actual hard copies of one sort or another, that can be relied upon to last a long time. So far the champion archival medium is the Magneto Optical disk; its technology is based on a Natural phenomeon that allows geophysicists to determine the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field as it was, many millions of years ago. There simply isn't any better form of data retention widely available at this time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive [wikipedia.org]
Re:Offer Them a Backup Plan, Not a Single Media (Score:3, Insightful)
I would store the digital archives in multiple locations (at least 3). Each location should have a disk farm with ZFS, so bit rot could be detected and fixed. Periodically (cron job, whatever) copy each file to a different volume, check for errors against the parent and parent's offsite siblings, then erase parent file. Tape backups should exist for disaster recovery purposes, and should also be refreshed from time to time. The hardware and software for the project will need updating from time to time. As hardware improves, I would expect costs to drop, but there will be a cost to maintain it. Power, people, real estate, replacement equipment, etc.
Medical institutions have to back up huge amounts of data for a long period of time (CAT scans, MRIs, etc), and people here with experience in medical IT might be able to enlighten you about planning for long-term storage of digital files.
How big are these files? How many of them are there? How many more are anticipated?
Re:Digital archives must be live... (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember the JPEG format from 10 years ago. Try harder.
This is why you use open formats to begin with rather than trying to find the most obscure thing you can find.
If it's a platform specific format (Spectrum/Degas) or an application specific format then chances are that your format will be obsolete before all of your storage media fails.