Archiving Digital Artwork For Museum Purchase?

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."

WORM Flash

[Hatta]

Apparently Sandisk has some Write Once [sandisk.com] SD cards. Dunno about pricing and availability though.

Choose a different artistic medium

[DirkGently]

Two things.

I'm probably headed towards flamebait, but I think it's rather presumptuous and egotistical to assume that anyone is going to want to see your work fifty years from now. That's not your decision. As the other posters say, give the buyer one, maybe three, copies of your digital files on a convenient & prolific media like DVD-R and then let them decide if it's really worth preserving for the next century.

Second, do master ice sculptors require buyers to have refrigerated viewing galleries? If you're concerned about the longevity of your work, pick a less ephemeral medium.

Re:Yes.

[SwordsmanLuke]

Parent is joking, but honestly, the internet is the single best system of data archival we've ever implemented. It's distributed and automatically updates useful data (for some value of "useful") to the latest formats. I'd be willing to bet that in twenty years we'll still be able to find digital versions of, say, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in whatever the leading formats of the time will be. Of course, they'll probably be pirated, but the point stands.

The internet is for archiving.

Re:Print it.

[Jeremy Erwin]

The Library of Congress has an archive of early films printed frame by frame onto paper, because at the time of deposition, still photographs were copyrightable while motion pictures were not.

Re:Digital archives must be live...

[Maximum Prophet]

lest the source material become unusable, like a wire recorder is today.

Why would a wire recorder be unusable? (I had a friend who had one in high school) It's a lot easier to repair a wire recorder than a CD or DVD player. (Simple vacuum tubes, capacitors and resistors) When the wire breaks, you can just tie it back together. Try that with a broken DVD.

Re:digitalartisnotfineart?

[Maximum Prophet]

It's the same reason that when an art museum pays N million dollars for a piece, then years later finds out it was a forgery, the museum doesn't just say, "Oh, well, it was good enough".

Art is not about beauty or aesthetics. Original art has warmth, depth and soul, similar to the way monster cables appeal to audiophiles. (Not that a *real* audiophile would be caught dead with anything as pedestrian as a monster cable, but I digress)

If you can't see the warmth, taste the depth, or perceive the soul of a piece of fine art, well, you are just a philistine and should just stay the f*** out of the museum.

Anyway people put mystical value on things all the time. The original Declaration of Independence or Constitution aren't really any more useful than the copies, and weren't even originally archived, but we still keep them better protected than most people's bank accounts.

Re:Digital archives must be live...

[Magic5Ball]

Do you remember the GEM image file format from 20 years ago? Does your set-top box/optical disc player show .rm files from 10 years ago? Transcoding previously popular formats is already a problem.

Re:The problem of single-location is more importan

[plover]

That's because you're talking about CDs, and not data transfers among the clouds.

The original audio CD medium was designed to tolerate errors. If a bit goes bad when you're playing it, you don't stop and pop up a dialog to the user saying "ZOMG! BAD BIT ON TRACK 7! Retry, Cancel or Allow?" The player just compensates for the bad bit and keeps on playing. Similarly, a bad bit on a JPEG or in an MPEG stream won't prevent the images from displaying, or you'd never see a digital TV show, ever.

But that's not how you transfer data to and from machines on the internet. TCP is a protocol designed to detect some errors and recover from them. Digital signatures provide almost absolute assurance that the copied data is unchanged from the original. Placing data in just about any modern cryptographic digital envelope can give you the assurance that what is in the envelope is the same as what you put in the envelope.

Even bit torrent is good at providing lossless data storage and transfer.

So no, you can't compare CDs to cloud storage. They are not even close.