Far from obsolete

Museum guests can currently make their way through a jungle of digital art works at the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media (ZKM). A giant bank of 50 television screens flickers as if someone is constantly zapping the channel. Next to it, visitors can pedal a real bicycle through a virtual world, steering their way through words projected onto an enormous screen. They can also use an iPhone App to create a random painting.

But despite the differences in when, how and why they were created, the works in this exhibition titled "Digital Art Works: the Challenges of Conservation" have one thing in common: They are all in danger of disappearing.

"In the last 10 years, we had to realize that the possibility to present these artworks is fading away more and more, that we are losing the possibility to show these artworks to the public," said Bernhard Serhexe, curator of the exhibition.

The show presents 10 case studies resulting from a joint Swiss-French-German project, which is testing different strategies to preserve digital art. There are several big issues still to surmount, according to those involved.

Taking stock

One example is particularly visible. "The television sets date from the early '90s, and they no longer exist on the market," Serhexe noted.

To combat problems of obsolete hardware, the ZKM, like other similar institutions, is desperately stocking up on spare parts. For example, they recently brought 1,000 old television sets.

A trip to the museum's storage room, full of old gadgets and mechanical parts, is a step back in time.

"We have a lot of stuff, for example, the old Macintosh computers, or MIDI interfaces, also audio stuff like ultrasonic speakers and parts like controllers used in the interface technology in the museum," said Martin Haeberle, the head technician for the center.

He and his colleagues are constantly searching for old parts on eBay and through specialist electronic dealers. But at some point the parts will run out, raising the issue of how to keep the artwork running.

"We have software that is decades old, that doesn't run on the new hardware. What we can we do to keep the old-fashioned software running?" said Haeberle of his work.

The death of immortal art

One solution is to rewrite the source code, but hiring programmers that can still tackle old code is often expensive.

Faced with ever-changing hardware, operating systems and data storage formats, should artists focus on creating digital works that will potentially last longer?

It's a suggestion that Bernd Lintermann absolutely rejects. Lintermann is the head of the Institute for Visual Media at ZKM and also an artist who writes his own programs to create complex virtual worlds using 3D images and sounds.

"I am creating it doing the best with the resources that are there. Thinking about the future limits me, limits me to what might be, what my thinking of the future is," Lintermann said.

That amounts to a very different vision than many artists have, who hope that their works may achieve some kind of immortality.

"As opposed to painting and sculpture, where you can always refurbish and regenerate the original, I think with digital art works there will be a certain end. This end usually also ends with the death of the people who made it," Lintermann added.

But that also means that the world faces the losing some of its more inventive and innovative contemporary art. More money and research are desperately needed to find ways to preserve these items of cultural history, said the show's curator.

For now, guests can marvel at the digital art conservation exhibition at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe through February 12, 2012. It will then move on to the cities of Bourgogne and Strasbourg in France.

Author: Kate Hairsine / gsw
Editor: Kate Bowen