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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."
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? :)
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
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.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
How about some of that fancy holographic cube storage I've been hearing about?
At least if it fails it'll be pretty to look at!
g=
All written on vellum.
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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 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.
My work here is dung.
Hey, it worked for Jean Luc Picard when he was trapped in the 19th Century!
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Go for the storage solution with a proven track record: clay tablets!
You laugh... but honestly, I think a barebones ROM chip actually would work pretty reasonably well for what he's trying to do.
Nothing stores ones and zeros better than raw conductors.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Apparently Sandisk has some Write Once SD cards. Dunno about pricing and availability though.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Chisel binary onto stone slabs. 4000 years from now it'll be displayed in a history museum.
Developers: We can use your help.
Make a high-res print out on a big sheet of paper. Museums are pretty good at handling those...
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.
"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" - Linus Torvalds
The problem of having the data in a single location is probably more of an issue than the type of media because of fire or other physical damage rather than the issue of lifetime.
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
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
So it with digital media. The nice thing with digital media are the copies are exact, with no generational loss. Therefore my suggestion would be a working copy and a backup. Backups are rotated to insure reliability. Working copies are kept until a new copy is made from a backup, in the same way we do in commercial environments.
There is no media that will last 100 years unchanged, and few media that will last 20 without care. Just because it is digital does not change the laws of thermodynamics.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
"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/
"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
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/mediamatters/
"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/
"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
"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
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.
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
reads suspiciously as someone interested in pirating.
Yours In Baikonur,
Philboyd Studge
Good idea...if those services (which are still losing money) survive.
The probability of "offline" (Internet-based) backup storage surviving, say, 100 years is asymptotic to 0%!
You're not thinking BIG enough!
Either you make art in the moment, in which case you whisper the feeling of their shapes into a river, or you make art to last, as you seeks, for which you clearly need a dimensionally distributed space-time multiplexor. Everything else is inconsistent.
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.
Give them a CD, let them worry about archiving it since they are the owners. If you aren't happy with this arrangment (you don't trust them to archive it to your satisfaction), then don't sell it to them. Keep it and archive it yourself (suggestions to store multiple copies at seperate locations and periodically copy it to new media and attempt to update it to current versions are good).
If you sell it you don't own it anymore and they can do whatever they want. If they want to hire you as an archive consultant then handle that transaction separately from the art sale.
Old Disney animation cells sell for big bucks. What about using archival grade printing, perhaps on an archival plastic media, and make hard copies. These might have the additional, collector's advantage of being able to be broken-up as well as being non-digital and thus harder to reproduce.
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
While I agree with others that an online mirror at a remote location or copying the data to whatever the current preferred medium is every 3-5 years are good ideas, I think you're reading too much into this. Once you've delivered the information to them, it's their job to safeguard it. Any institution that already has digital media in their collection probably already has an existing plan in place to ensure the safety of that data. I think a better approach would be to choose a good, economical archival-grade medium to deliver the information and let them decide how they want to handle it from there. If you're really worried about it, provide recommendations, but don't force a particular solution on them.
Data on a DVD/CD doesn't all crap out at once. In normal usage, scratches cause some data loss. However for long term storage significant loss would happen when the plastic reflective surface itself degrades. Still, when properly stored, a DVD/CD should last 30 years. To increase the odds of your data lasting, and to spend the least amount of cash, simply make multiple copies of your most precious data. That way, hopefully, each DVD/CD will retain SOME data and it can all be pieced back together from the multiple copies. The more precious the data, the more copies you should make. I think 5 copies stored in a climate controlled safe should last at least 100 years, if not, longer.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
I personally do not believe that there is any single physical solution that will guarantee that your data will last. Even if the was some perfect medium, external forces would have the potential to destroy it. You can reduce the odds of this loss by mitigating risk by using multiple and possibly different formats.
The real answer though would be an active service. A multi-sited, data storage service that actively protects your data is the only real way of making sure your data lasts. There are many professional services out there that will host your data, but finding one that your confident will last the next hundred years is going to be near impossible.
I did a quick search of the Internet and did not find any projects that allow artists to store their data for these purposes. Maybe this is an opportunity to create something more than art. =)
Diplomacy is the art of saying, 'Nice doggie!' till you can find a rock.-- Wynn Catlin
Punch Cards
This is like the 20th Ask Slashdot bitching about the nonpermanence of DVDs and requesting an alternative. If slashdot hasn't answered the question before, it isn't going to answer it now.
The simple answer is there is no archival way of storing it. While the digital media may last for ages, the readers probably won't. This is the biggest issue with digital media.
Just look at things like the (remaining) Apollo tapes. The electronic media that exists works fine, but the machines to read them do not.
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
The top comment there?
- Zlurg; http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1371703&cid=29449669
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.
is the price you pay for digital storage. As of now there is no 'archival grade' way of digitally storing something. If you are storing digital data, you have to go through the rigmarole that we all do. Redundant backups, offsite storage, periodic and consistent data integrity checks and disaster recovery testing.
Good-bye
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.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
Museums are going to have to deal with this more and more. It doesn't seem feasible to have to support each artists solution to archiving. They don't make painters provide a climate controlled storage environment to ensure the longevity of a painting.
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.
Just like the Rosetta project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project
It all starts at 0
The fact that you haven't thought of tape makes me question how well you know the industry you're in, or how well-connected you actually are. Why can't you put your video files onto DigiBeta or similar? Tape stores well, and with a format like DigiBeta you're pretty much guaranteed compatability for at least 50 years+ (since there's so much TV back catalogue stored on tape, and there will always be a need by broadcasters to get to that content). I don't want to come off as rude, but it just sound like you don't really know much about video production and archival, despite the fact you've chosen to produce video installations and artwork. You're not the first person in the world to do this kind of thing - there are established proceedures for dealing with and archiving video installation work. This still doesn't entirely solve your problem of storing your raw data, but since you specifically talk about .mov files I'm perplexed that you haven't already thought of tape.
I suspect you're going to get a lot of answers here that are wildly impractical for a gallery or go well beyond your means - but the fact is this: if a museum or gallery is looking to purchase your work, they should already have a curator who knows the medium. If they don't have a curator who can discuss with you the formats he/she would like the work in, the gallery probably needs to rethink what it's doing in the business!
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?
Frame by frame image captures into JPEG (or TGA if you aren't hurting for storage) and then save the audio track in raw wav file.
At least I think that will be the most compatible in 100 years.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Etch the 1s and 0s into a steel plate. Then seal it in one of those food vacuum seal bags. Then put that bag in another bag.
That should do it. It'll last forever, and can be manually recovered easily.
Side note:
This was on the bottom of the page: " There's nothing like a girl with a plunging neckline to keep a man on his toes. "
find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown
Have a look at the Digital Intermediate process. To quote the wikipedia article regarding the process: "The digital master, created during the Digital Intermediate process, is recorded to very stable yellow-cyan-magenta (YCM) separations on black-and-white film with an expected 100-year or longer life." So essentially you are creating a very high resolution analog copy of your digital master. This way, if the digital media craps out, you have a long-life analog way of recreating it. This is a way some Hollywood studios are approaching the problem.
There are special DVD media to be had that are meant for archiving, and they do seem to last quite bit longer than normal media. I don't remember the brand name, but I recall that the Taiyo Yuden media have about the same durability. Taiyo Yuden media are not available in stores, but places like newegg.com sell them.
digital -> film transfer
35mm or 16mm film will last at least two hundred years in a controlled environment....
and museums already know how to handle film media....
For serious archiving there's just one reliable option: magnetic tape. A state-of-the art device will store some hundered Gigs per medium and cost up to about 1.000 â/$ used ones are available in all price ranges. You will probably need to extract samples from your long time archives for your customers as there are different standards of tape drives, if you're not only going to sell DVD or blue ray media and leave the archiving problem to them. Any institution collecting digital arts will have to find a way to cope with long-time storage anyway. The arguments for magnetic tape are obvious: - there are so many important data on standard tape (QIC/DDS) that these devices will definitely be available for the next few decades - the life time of magnetic tapes is usually 25 years - tape drives are usually connected via SCSI or USB, both standards are not likely to be abandonded in the way standards for "customer grade" hardware are and you'll always get external adapters for them - if you stick to one of the newer and more popular tape systems, museums or arts collections that are maintaining their own archives are likely to compatible - magnetic tapes are quite reliable. Optical media are not
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
Use paperback. It allows you to print out the data on standard paper (which any museum or library will be very familiar with archiving safely.)
In the event that something happens to their original, the paper can be scanned back in with any TWAIN interface supporting scanner.
It's even released under the GPL.
http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/
Your local arts and crafts store should have acid-free DVDs specifically for things like this (and storing digital scrapbooks of that trip to Arizona with the grandkids.)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
use real archival media like the etched in stone stuff at http://www.millenniata.com
Well I fail to see how this is your problem really but at a certain point art sales is about presentation, so:
1) Get a pair of usb hard drives or some kind of solid state devices, depending on storage requirements.
2) Get a a pair of small, attractive fireproof cases and cut out some foam inserts for your storage.
3) Profit!
-sean
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only way to remove the digital artwork from the digital format cycle would be to build a dedicated viewer. a simple computer with enough storage for the artwork hard wired to a screen or projector. that way you could control the viewing experience as well. And you would be creating a physical item for the museum to care for and maintain, a process that they are used to and good at. An interesting project would be to develop a standard box that could be used by different artists, perhaps with a tab that is snapped off after the artwork is loaded, locking the artwork just like the little tab on a VHS or audio tape. of course you still rely on the museum for power, but i think it is fair to expect them to find an adaptor to plug in the artwork.
Archive.org is free and has multiple location backup. Of course, you have to be happy with them sharing it with the world indefinitely -but that just provides more backup.
Digital information isn't books and pictures, and there's no reason it should be stored like it is.
Rather than files full of "archive media", which incurs regular conversion charges and risks both media degridation and "missing one" in the conversion resulting in it being unreadable: I recommend institutions work with live storage.
Setup a SAN, keep the data there, keep a live replica at another location. Backup the SAN on schedule.
As failures of storage media occur, they are detected (because the system is live, not dead stored disks) and can be replaced. Migration becomes "two SANs" not "thousands of tapes, flash drives, DVDs, and BlueRays".
Other than that: I can only suggest "give them three identical disks", so that partial failures of a disk can be recovered by comparing it to the other disks.
Load it into the buffer and do a continuous CRC check until someone coms around to rematerialize it.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Someone, please, mod this up!
If you make sure that you have licensed the work properly to the museum, then, as previous posters have observed, you can leave it in their hands as to how they will preserve your digital artwork for posterity.
If you mess up the licensing, they could easily be stuck in a situation where they aren't sure if it is legal for them to do the required copying and format transformations.
Someone like Creative Commons should think about this problem. Unfortunately, everyone has their own spin on how this should be accomplished. I suppose the CC guys would just say, use a CC license, for example, when this artist seems to be more interested in giving a particular organization (and no one else) the right to preserve his works until they enter the public domain. AFAIK, no one has invented an "archival" or "preservation" license like this artist needs.
it will live forever in multiple copies all over the internet
the digitalartisnotfineart tag is of course an ignorant troll, but digital art IS different from other forms of art in that it can effortlessly be made into 1 billion copies, with no difference between any copy. of course this is also true of music and books, etc., but enjoying them in analog formats is still a possibility, and some might argue about aesthetic superiority in that difference (i wouldn't though)
of course immortality via internet puts a crimp in your thinking about people buying and selling your digital art, but you are excused for making this error, as the entire world is only beginning to grapple with the economics of effortless infinite digital works and its implications on the economics of art
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
they exist- they play video of dead people right over the grave...
they've had the same problem, and been around a while....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
If money is no issue, you could get some professionally pressed with a company like Disc Makers. Of course I'm not sure how long that would last either, but it's got to be a decent amount longer than recordable dye-based solutions...
... It'll be seeded for decades.
Contact the Rosetta foundation, and use his physical format to give your data a lifespan of ten millenia.
What's in a sig?
Archival quality printing is also not cheap, but at least it's a fairly solved problem.
Personally I don't think you can do much better than printing it for an option that doesn't involve frequent migration - density isn't great, but I'm confident there'll still be optical scan devices at least for historical works, so if you print out all your bits in an OCR-friendly font, it won't be TOO much work for someone else to read them (if they really want to!) You should also include in the same format the source code for the decoder - even if that's not directly compilable in the future, it'll be a relatively clear indicator of how to do it, to the limits of what's possible.
You could probably do even better by e.g. punching holes into gold sheets a la The Baroque Cycle. Or stone tablets, etc. But those are all questions of "what's the most resilient format for PRINTED text" which is a topic at least we have a bunch of data on.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
There will probably always be new media, so just set up the program to review and take action every few years as warranted.
rewriting history since 2109
Archive your work in glass, stone or fired clay tablets. Its the only thing that even somewhat reliably lasts for thousands of years. If you can get a data density of 1 byte / cm^3 a 4 gig data file will only take up a block of stacked tablets a little over 16 meters cubed. I am pretty sure you could get slightly better data density though.
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You could have DVDs actually pressed instead of using a home burned dye-based DVD. This is of course if money is a non-issue, which seems to be the case.
Yeah, but shit still happens. You need to use _multiple_ storage clouds :)
10,000 years from now no one is going to care about your cat and explosion videos.
They're going to be trying to figure what caused the great famine-flood-nuclear-hurricane-iceage of 2075 AD that suddenly caused the human population to disappear and be replaced by a race of extraterrestrial manbearpigs.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Take a look at http://www.millenniata.com/ -- their tagline is "Write once, read forever." It's a group out of BYU, which is tied to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who have the largest collection of genealogical records in the world. They've been storing everything on microfiche in a massive vault, and would really like to switch to digital media but for the archival problems you mention. Millenniata grew out of research into making stable DVDs--they guess that their DVDs are stable enough to last 1000+ years (the way I've heard it, they don't know of any particular process that would cause them to decay, but you never know).
Acius the unfamous
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.
If were talking serious archiving here, the method mentioned above would have to account for cumulative data errors in all that moving around in the cloud with backups, restores, etc. As in the example, you rip a CD, burn a new CD from that rip, rinse, repeat X times and then do a bit for bit comparison of the first and last CD, they won't match.
I know printing it out in binary format has already been mentioned, but there is actually a tool for this. If you use high quality paper, it might last for centuries.
Here's the (free) software: http://ronja.twibright.com:8080/optar/
This topic comes up every couple years or so. There is a good thread about archival media that is still surprisingly relevant today. My original response to the question is available here. "For my clients, I always suggest the use of stone and / or clay tablets for all mission critical data archive projects, regardless of size or scope. Bablyonian and Greek models of data retention from as far back as 4,500 years ago are (in many cases) superior to the models we commonly use today, with much of the physical media having survived electrical storms, tornadoes, floods, fires, and wars on every scale imaginable with a data corruption rate of zero and without the benefit of a climate controlled room, dedicated security staff, or even a closet for media storage. Imagine the elegance of a 84'3/4 STROM (Stone Tablet Read Only Memory) machine hooked up to your Slackware Archive server for performing restorations, and the ST Binary Writer you have networked to your backup systems and kept physically over by the quarry... nice! The TCO for slab is far less than that of tape archives, considering you can store the media in a pile of mud and hose it down when you are ready for a restoration." M
I read a news article recently about a new type of DVD (and an accompanying writer), which is readable in regular drives, which carves the data into non-organic (i.e. not plastic) layers. It's supposed to greatly increase shelf life. Here's a link: http://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/article_b25c9a30-7242-11de-9feb-001cc4c03286.html. But I agree, saving the data is only half the battle - keeping the data in a readable format (i.e. a dynamic archiving approach) is the other half.
How about just letting it be known that there is only a finite amount of time for people to enjoy it in its original form. The things future art lovers think worth saving will be passed on generation to generation as legend and as such will change in each retelling, giving them a life of their own.
Nullius in verba
... sung to the tune of the Cookie Monster singing "C is for cookie". As a side note, I'm sure the Cookie Monster would feel ill if he read this.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Once there, it can never disappear.
is flipbook one word or two?
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.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
There is something to be said for the redundancy offered by the Internet, but even it isn't as effective as having lots of copies that can last a long time. As L.Sprague deCamp wrote in "Lest Darkness Fall", even the most diligent barbarian can have trouble extirpating the written word when the minimum edition of any publication is 1500 copies.
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
One sided with a good laser-printer on white paper. Best in OCR-B. Should last several centuries if handled carefully. Include interpretation instructions.
Yes, this sounds strange, but currently the only other viable solution for realy long-term backup is to copy to a new set of redundant media every 5 years or so keep the data on redundant servers with also regular checks and updates.
One technology that can do this is MOD, but its market share was never good and has dropped dramatically enough that long-term drive availability is very questionable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Just about everything in art rots and falls apart. From festering underpants on Traci Emins bed, to newspaper cuttings stuck on Picasso montages. If what you have made is of value, they will be forced to think of a way of slowing that rot.
You could make art out of rock; it could end up as landfill if it is crap enough.
You best bet at longevity is quality.
My response would be 'goodluckwiththat'
The museum can't play fast and loose with the law.
It can't play fast and loose with its donors - or significant works go elsewhere and donors sue for recovery.
Time for a reality check:
When Paramount presented the original Enterprise model from the Star Trek series to the Smithsonian do you think the gift came without restrictions?
you could try UDO media from plasmon http://www.plasmon.com/archive_solutions/media.html and as you want it expensive,you could supply a whole system to read it too
Stop being cheap and print to 35mm. It will cost $250-400/min from post houses in Seattle, Santa Monica, Boston and New York. Get it properly color corrected.
While it will cost $6,000 for ten minutes with post, all the museum needs is a nice lightbulb and $350 for a print.
obviously we have already established that the digital format you are putting your art on now is not stable. since the 1970's there has been no real (archival) improvement. basically you need to get it in an analog format. my suggestion is to put your stuff on tape. from there you can have extra backup copies. the only thing you need to control is the environment in which you store them. you are looking at 5-20 years depending on who you read.
for more information i would go to the society of american archivists at http://www.archivists.org/ - take a look at these books too http://www.archivists.org/catalog/index.asp?keywordID=42
Disclaimer, I work for a large contemporary art museum in New Media. We deal with this stuff all of the time and it's something I have an interest in (obviously). The answer for you is there is no tried and true method for archiving digital media. Every arts institution struggles with this, especially when it relates to computational or internet enabled or social media works of art. There are various opinions on what it even *means* to archive some of this stuff and there are varying degrees of opinions out there about all of it.
That said, several things you can do to help yourself. One, any museum worth their salt and who actually wants to acquire your work will work with you to get it in the format they are most comfortable with. New Media art tends to have varying requirements on what needs to be in place to replicate it, what that means, how it works, etc. A museum putting your work into their collection should work with you to define those things and how to keep it working and usable for the long term. That is the museum's *job*.
Second, if you want it to last you need to have original source material. Almost 100% of the time that is what the museum will want. If it's a video they do not want a compressed DVD, they'd rather have the uncompressed DV files or 35mm film if they can get it. If it's an application they want the app, the hardware used to run it, the docs used to create it, etc. Sure, you don't have to give these things up if you don't want to, but you can bet the museum will want as much of the original source and documentation of it as they can get. This will help them down the line when they need to convert the original into yet-another-new-format, and help them catalog the work for later generations of staff (and viewers for that matter, meta data is gold).
Basically, let the museum help you, that's what they're there for. In the meantime, backup, backup, backup, until such time as you have your work acquired by a professional institution.
Instead of worrying about DVD's/etc why don't you just upload it to the AWS Cloud? S3 has 3 copies of the data at any one time and they must already be managing their harddrive life cycles.
Let them do the work for you to keep your data always there.
What abot the new phase change memory? I know it's not mainstream right now but phase change memory has the potential to become a better way to archive. Anyone have data on it's longevity?
I suggest DVD-RAM as archival DVD media. Even the caseless variant tends to be sturdy. There's also plenty of drives out there that can read / write them. Other than that, a set of DVD (original + copy), or USB sticks should work, too. You could also add some parity files, to help ensure small errors can be recovered from (generate additiional par2 format files, for example).
I wrote a thesis on this. It is a major problem with no great solutions at this point. My conclusions for video were as follows:
1. Make an analog film copy if possible. Despite tape being popular and touted among IT types, it actually was reported as having the highest rate of failure among filmmakers. This included partial failure where some information was garbled. Film fared the best and hard-drives did well too. There is not enough data for flash devices yet, and optical isn't great even in optimal conditions.
2. Make a digital print to MJ2 (Motion JPEG-2000). It is the only well accepted loss-less video standard at this point. Follow the SMPTE guidelines and make sure you save a decoder or at least note which encoder you used - this is the current shortcoming of this format (see this publication for details).
3. Keep the video in its original format or MPEG-2 as a backup (follow ISO specs if you must convert the original; if keeping the originals note what hardware and software they were created with - THIS IS VITAL!).
4. Store the data on at least two mediums in at least two locations. If they will be actively using DVD, I recommend DVD and Flash in the museum and Hard Drive and Optical media in another offsite location. Be sure to label with permanent ink the software needed, the platform used, and the disk format. Follow official ISO formats whenever possible when mastering the media. It is essential that you mark what you used to encode so it can be decoded later! Don't assume it will be obvious. As mentioned earlier, if possible use film. It has the advantage of not needing to be decoded by any specific piece of hardware that might go obsolete or break. Light will be around for a while!
5. Copy, copy, copy. Nothing lasts forever. The museum should already have a policy of duplication and set storage conditions for warehoused items. Make sure they follow it for their digital collections too. Many museums and libraries are lax on this and if things don't change there will be significant cultural losses over the next few decades.
6.Suggest licensing the same piece to two museums with an ageement that one museum can duplicate the other museums copy should one or the other fail. This is a great fail-safe and reduces the cost of long-term storage.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Get a web developer
There are Archive quality DVDs....
TDK states their metal-stabilized Cyanine is also stable for 70 years.
Mitsubishi went in a different direction and produced what is called a Metal Azo dye, that they claim is stable for around 100 years.
Then there is Matsui?
http://www.mam-a.com/
New Lifetime Test results:
Expected Lifetime:
MAM-A Gold Archive CD-R: 329 years
MAM-A Gold Archive DVD-R: 116 years
Duplicated the data on 5+ disks (like in a RAID structure - maybe even RAID 10 if cost is no object). Supply the whole system to read the data and then have back up hardware in triple redundancy.
The cheaper solution would be to make a bit torrent of it and have various museum's host the entire bit torrent.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
Engrave it in nickel... http://www.norsam.com/hdrosetta.htm
I called it a mighty Sperm Whale, she called it Finding Nemo.
You know. It's one thing to say that clay tablets are cool because some
survived but how many really survived. You're not interested in Hamad's
clay tablets with Yak receipts. You're interested in YOUR clay tablets
with your awful Vogon poetry on it.
The question isn't can 'some' clay tablets survive 5000 years but will
your particular clay tablet survive that long.
Chances are No.
The fact that you probably don't live, work and store your stuff in
an arid climate like a desert probably won't help your prospects either.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Most video archivists I have talked to are behind LTO tape.
Magnetic tape is something that archivists have a pretty long record with, and they feel fairly confident about its ability to survive long periods of time in climate-controlled conditions.
LTO is being used at the Library of Congress National Audio-Video Conservation Center (NAVCC).
LTO is being used by most Hollywood studios and a large number of television stations for digitizing their archives.
Digital tape hard error rate for tape is about 2 orders of magnitude better than disk.
There is an expectation that there will need to be LTO tape migration every 2 generations or so.
Since you said you're using 3d software to make animations, etc., give them those files. Not just the output. They can always re-render later.
Get off my launchpad!
I work in an art museum and we have some digital artwork in the form of mpeg and mov files. They were given to us on external USB drives. One of the drives gave up the ghost. It was a recovery nightmare but once we got everything back together, we settled on the following solution. The works total close to 200GB and are backed up to LTO tape. Whenever they are needed for a show, they are spun off of tape and onto the external drives for display purposes.
I realize that some other posters have called into question the reliability of tapes. I have never dealt with a bad backup tape. I've had experience with DLT, DDS and LTO tapes going back to the mid-1990s. I think the realistic problem with archiving to tape will be maintain the drive to read it. The tape drive will go out long before the media experiences problems.
There isn't a universally agreed upon way to deal with digital artwork. One of the best resources out there is the following mailing list. Ask your question there.
http://www.lsoft.com/scripts/wl.exe?SL1=MUSEUM-L&H=HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM
My wife sells her photographs via the art website deviantART. They have an interesting culture surrounding visual IP involving various resolutions and watermarks, with online purchase available through normal e-commerce paths. It's an interesting site with a good moderating scheme, attractive page composition and a fairly large following. Stuff actually gets sold, and for decent prices. A support culture of high quality printing and framing has grown around the static pieces. There are worse ways to archive your art, and I strongly recommend it.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
You just render out the seperate RGB channels to black and white film via a film recorder and make sure they either gold tone or selenium tone the film. Then its pretty solid for longevity. To get it back the film is scanned each channel screened against R G and B and voila you have your images back in color. (you are making a color separation and then mixing it back). Basically technicolor process. This is who major films are starting to be stored by both technicolor and deluxe. You can do the same with still and you can render them whatever size you like up to 8x10 res 80 which is an obscene size. Film recorder to 3 separated plates. Black and white film is pretty stable stuff. LIke 300 years when cared for properly.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
Dump the data to a series of microfilms, store in a canister, decode later.
I wrote a paper about this problem in 2003. I was examining practical innovations that - while expensive - could virtually guarantee recoverability 1000+ years into the future.
Here are my criteria:
Must not depend on industrial infrastructure (Mad Max scenario)
Media must withstand fire, burial or submersion in seawater
Media must contain detailed instructions for reading it in multiple languages
Encoding scheme (and metadata) must be straightforward and obvious
Encoding must be sufficiently redundant to withstand significant damage
Tough, eh? There are solutions. One solution is to also build a reader/decoder that can withstand burial, submersion, fire, physical damage, etc.
On a shorter time horizon, if you allow for an industrial infrastructure, microfilm has an estimated lifespan of 500 years. It can't withstand fire; but it should withstand burial and submersion.
Since low cost is not a strict requirement, how about storing the data as hard-wired/burned logic gates in a read-only memory chip, like a motherboard's BIOS? I don't know what the useful life for properly stored silicon chips is exactly, but I am willing to bet it is much longer than flash memory, pressed CDs or magnetic tape. After all, an Atari 7800 stored improperly in the attic for the past fifteen years still boots, and the games still work, so there must be some hardiness to those chips.
techsoldaten is on the right track. Stone is hard to beat for longevity and resistance to damage. Hieroglyphics are sufficiently decipherable to allow scientists to decode them from scratch. Any serious millenial-class storage would need to take these features into consideration. Remember: If all you care about is longevity - to quote Dr. Strangelove out of context - "there's no limit to the size!" Nobody said it would be cheap; but take a look at what it costs to house, maintain and restore ancient artworks. techsoldaten has it right.
If you want your art to be recoverable (in some form) 5,000 years from now, you need to make assumptions about not only the temporal journey and potential hazards therein; but also the nature and technical sophistication of the society that is likely to attempt to recover it. The fewer incorrect assumptions, the more likely it will be recovered.
I find this topic fascinating, on many levels. It's all the more fascinating because even serious archivists can't seem to get beyond the next 100 years or so before their preservation schemes break down.
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.
John
"Yes, you can give me a lot of money and I will provide you with rock-solid assurances about things that will or will not happen after you die."
Dude, why not just give your money to a church?
That's kind of a silly argument. It basically boils down to, "if you don't verify your copies, you'll probably get errors, so CDs are bad".
All you have to do is verify each copy as you go, and there is no error to accumulate. Good ECC will prevent errors cropping up during the life-time of a single disk.
I thought the main purpose of a museum was to share/promote/purvey culture and art. Why would they be opposed to others enjoying a piece of culture/art they feel worthy of archiving? That's like if you sold a copy of a book to a library and then told them, "btw, I'm also giving a thousand copies away"—why should they even care? It's not like they're a book publisher. Do museums purchase works of art just to place licensing restrictions on them? That seems more like the mentality of a film studio.
Therefore you should NOT transcode. You keep digital artwork in its original form, therefore it loses nothing with each generation copy. Transcoding is lossy.
But yes, keeping current backups is a good idea. Also using archives with error correction helps.. There are various formats (even RAR) that allow you to make extra n files that can replace any n file in a set that become unreadable.
only solution guaranteed to last centuries ?
*** PAPER AND INK ***
Utter tripe. Paper is subject to a vast array of environmental hazards and will degrade quickly and messily if subject to any of them.
The usual response to this is that books have survive thousands of years intact...but no they haven't. They're heavily degraded, and the vast majority of them didn't survive (do the maths on monastical book production and surviving examples). The ones that have survived have been patched and repaired and maintained, often poorly, and have only survived because generations of people spent a lot of care on them. As a long-term data storage solution, paper sucks.
Using a data matrix you'd need to trade off resolution size and storage space. Assuming 1 bit takes up 1 square mm (reasonable to resist degradation from ink seepage over the first hundred years, after which it would probably be unreadable), then an A4 page (allowing for margins) can hold around 56kb (7KB) with no error correction or compression. That's 146 pages per Meg, or 150,000 pages per gig. A standard ream of paper is 500 pages which would contain 7MB of data if you use both sides of each page.
Assuming your graphic file is 1GB in size, that's 142 reams of paper. Assuming 1Kg per ream (depends on the density of the paper, so arbitrary amount used), that's the weight of two average human beings (or a slashdot reader + laptop). Not really portable, so it'd need to be stored somewhere.
The storage would need to be environmentally controlled and sterile. The paper is vulnerable to moisture, fungal or bacterial colonisation, insect attack, fire, sunlight, and will degrade naturally with time anyway (rate depending on the paper used).
I carry a pocket USB stick around with me that has 8 Gb on it...in paper storage that's 1,100 reams of paper, or just over a metric tonne. Point made.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
The article on PCM might be the answer. A digital medium that stores information by physical structural change would potentially offer much longer life however given the tech is similar to CD/DVD-RW you might be puting your eggs into a basket no better than DVD. Papyrus, tried and true for centuries.
No, The Internet Is For Porn!
Five years from now, they'll be running it on a different computer. 25 years from now, it'll be running on a radically different computer. All you can do is to put it in a common, well supported format on a medium that they can read today. Do that and you've done your job. Then it's their job to make backups and copy the file(s) to new storage media as appropriate. My question in all of this is how can you be certain that whatever platform/framework/format you choose today will be supported 100 years from now? While it's not strictly your responsibility, if you choose something that falls by the wayside quickly, your work may cease to exist (remember laser disks?).
linquendum tondere
Contact some modern art facilities like Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, they often have 'new media' as part of their holdings and must have some sort of solution for this sort of work that they use when they obtain them. Lastly, contact the Internet Archive folks and see if you can work out a deal for it to be put into storage in wait for when it will hit public domain. Perhaps they could hold it for public domain use for free if you were willing to voluntarily reduce your copyright term to something more reasonable than a habajillion years past death. :)
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Use DVD or something commonly in use now that is easily moved to new media - just don't use DRM otherwise your original might be worthless and not because of the media.
The museum should enter into an agreement with an escrow or backup company to maintain a copy of the data. Its nuts that every museum in the world needs to think all this through and implement their own solutions themselves, or accept home brew solutions from the artists themselves. Go to the experts who know this stuff and get storage and insurance contracts drawn up to cover lossage should the worst occur.
" only solution guaranteed to last centuries ?
*** PAPER AND INK *** "
Absolutely right!!!
Dear artist,
Change your mode of operation. Consider the work on DVD as a realization -- a working out-- of your ideas. Other workings out ( working outs?... ok 'realizations' ) are possible. The DVD has the advantage of being the artist's own realization ( think of it as a composer's own performance of his composition ). It is the urtext, the original text.
What you should be providing to the museum, in addition to YOUR realization of the idea, is a booklet, printed on archival paper, giving detailed instructions to recreate the work.
If you want to remind the museum staff that DVD or other physical or playback medium is not the piece---- that they need to conserve the expression, and that means transfering it to current playback technology--- well, you can do that.
But the important thing is the idea. Bach's fugues, whether played on a harpsichord or an organ or a piano or a synthesizer, are unmistakenly his expression.
Paged laser etching of quartz or diamond cubes would be the best way to store the data. Then you need a passive reader also made of diamond or quartz, that lasts as long as the data. You could devise a solar (or some other bright light source) powered crystal reader, a self contained system, completely photonic, minimal moving parts, with a virtually infinite life expectancy. Finally, you need a series of primers that begin by providing a simple binary key to the stored data, then systematically providing primers of growing complexity, ultimately explaining how to reformat and play the data. The good news, is that if you do it once, you can place the same information as a header on every crystal data cube to ensure that any single cube found in the future can be read. With enough cubes in the world, the data formats will become defacto standards. Cubes could be stored in geologically safe warehouses with museums, private owners, and galleries being able to access the art remotely (ownership and rights of use would be managed through a legal body of some kind.)
funny.thank"/ 1"
Other than stone tablets, one proven very long term data storage medium is interstellar space. For example, the data reaching us from distant stars and galaxies may be millions or billions of years old and yet it is preserved in pristine condition. One suggestion is to encode your work in a suitable format along with decoding instructions and then radiate the data into space using high power antenna's such as JPL's Deep Space Network. Your work is now effectively immortal. Reading the data "later" will require some finesse, as you must travel FTL to intercept the transmission. Alternatively, you can position reflectors on the Moon and Phobos (orbiting Mars), for example (you might choose other Solar bodies for engineering reasons) and bounce the signal perpetually between the two. With no atmospheric interference the signal would not be expected to degrade for quite some time depending on energy, wavelength and reflective material you use. Just a thought. You said price was not an issue.
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
Tell the museum to get involved in a LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe - http://www.lockss.org/) private network. For an example, see the Alabama Digital Preservation Network (http://www.adpn.org/).
You know. It's one thing to say that clay tablets are cool because some
survived but how many really survived. You're not interested in Hamad's
clay tablets with Yak receipts. You're interested in YOUR clay tablets
with your awful Vogon poetry on it.
The question isn't can 'some' clay tablets survive 5000 years but will
your particular clay tablet survive that long.
Chances are No.
The fact that you probably don't live, work and store your stuff in
an arid climate like a desert probably won't help your prospects either.
I dismissed clay tablets... primarily because they would be difficult to reconstruct significant amounts of data from in any sort of efficient manner.
You however do not know the location of where I live. In fact, I grew up in an arid environment. I no longer live there, because I grew tired of the weather.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
the data stored electronically and retrievable through the internet must be maintained constantly. Hard drives crash, cd's/dvd's go bad, tape backups fail, etc..
the internet itself is merely a means to communicate information from one system to another. This constant sharing of information does help the archival effort but eventually without maintenance information is lost.
Think about the Rosetta stone. When we found that was there a society of "keepers" with it, transcribing and maintaining it? keeping it from getting too worn down or broken? no. it was unattended.
we have to assume that eventually either no one will be around to maintain the data, or it will be forgotten.
We need a system by which the data will survive on it's own just by the medium it's stored on. And history has shown stone tablets to be the best way of doing that.
Unfortunately storing digital data on stone isn't practical because a) there's far too many bits and even if we came up with some base-1024 number system that might solve that problem we'd still have b) no one would know what it means or how the bits are to be used?
is it text? should we consult an ascii chart? is it an mp3 file? what is it?
I think the best way to approach this problem is assume that humanity is going to cease to exist for a few millennia and then suddenly re-emerge. How can we communicate to this next iteration of humans?
I guess we could have plain-english rfc's lying around which instructs how to decode the data.
This IS a huge problem, which I have been researching for about 5 years. My research has been successful, and we have started a company to finish development and sell an archival DVD which WILL last for many, many years. We're targeting 1,000 years, and have proof that our DVD lasts MUCH longer than any of the "archival-quality" DVDs available. It is the ONLY solution for permanent data storage. See www.millenniata.com for more details. Or email me at luntb@byu.edu, or call me at Brigham Young University at 801-422-2264.
I have been waiting for someone to start putting 2-D bar-codes on silver-halide film. If you use heavy duty film with a nice thick silver-halide layer and don't try to micro-size the bar-code blocs too much then it should last for hundreds of years. Sure it is a bit bulky and doesn't look uber high-tech but it works. Plus, it is possible to include a text description and a black and white picture of what the work is supposed to look like right on the film for easy cataloging and sorting without using any technology at all. It is the best of both worlds.
I am a digital painter and thus create large files that I store on Hard drives, DVDs and CDs. Mostly due to the huge file sizes, I find that multiple Hard Drives have been the most sensible. I keep them in varying locations. I have not found that DVDs are failing at all. I keep them in a cool and dry dark room and thus, they are not exposed to UV or visible light or humidity and as such they are likely to be better preserved than most examples of this product. I worry about the HDs however as they do fail from not using them as much as from using them. It is a real problem for a single person who cannot afford some sort of huge back up array or network system which after all is only as good as the monthly payment to keep the material archived. I print all my best work on archival paper and inks so at least one copy of everything worthy in my opinion of my works will exist when the digital files finally die in some horrid silent invisible death. What can one say? Art is transient no matter how hard one tries to make it forever. Paper is paper and plastic is just that..plastic in the sense that artists use the word..changing and mutable. One can only hope that civilisation does not crash and burn but you and I know that it will once again and then again after that. The Conquistadors destroyed all the gold idols and writing of their conquered peoples so even the most archival of materials are at the whim of other people. One man's creation is another's gold ingot. My suggestion is to have many copies, recopy to later formats, suggest that this be done by museums that own the works, hope they do it from time to time. Keep separate and distinct formats, keep up with the latest and greatest ones and treat them as I do..an archival location so that at least while you yourself are still here on the planet, the work is preserved. What happens after? Ask Von Gogh. Some of his paintings were used to keep the chickens in the coop. Sadly, we have no control over serendipity. What survives..survives and what does not....digital or otherwise, does not.
There was actually a slashdot article in July about a startup from Ohio that was developing 1000 year shelf stable DVD's.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/17/1213203
You mentioned that the solution didn't have to be inexpensive, so you might want to contact these folks and see just how expensive their gear is.
Notwithstanding a glut of Slashdot posts on archiving in general, I can assure you as one of the founders of the Variable Media Network (mentioned by another commenter above) that the challenge of preserving new media art can be much trickier than archiving scientific data or home movies. Art often depends on the look and feel of its technological platform, making it impossible to advise every artist to, say, migrate to the latest screen resolution or run outdated software in an off-the-shelf emulator.
Each artist will require a different strategy depending on what is most important to preserve about their particular work. Software artist Mark Napier advises future conservators to reverse-engineer the Java applet running his project net.flag, because it is ultimately reducible to a set of clear instructions. Other works, such as Nam June Paik's TV Crown or Cory Arcangel's Super Mario Clouds, depend on hardware hacks that wouldn't make sense if the images they display were pried loose from the specific technologies employed by the original works (in this case, a CRT and a Nintendo cartridge system).
To explore these divergent preservation strategies, the Variable Media Network has organized exhibitions that let viewers compare emulated artworks side-by-side with versions running on the original hardware (Seeing Double). Given that it is impossible to preserve all of the aspects of a new media artwork, we've also created a questionnaire that helps artists specify which aspects of their work are most important to preserve (the Variable Media Questionnaire).
Even relatively straightforward media such as 3d animations still present several possible preservation trajectories, and a museum with limited resources may need to prioritize among them. Rick Rinehart of the Variable Media Network tells the story of a visit from Pixar representatives to the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives to ask how to preserve Toy Story. After lecturing Pixar about cold storage and safety film, Rick's colleague was taken aback when the Pixar reps clarified that they didn't want to save the film, but to save the movie. In other words, the physical film stock was less useful to them than the 3d data files from which the movie could be recovered.
Standards for preserving film are more established than for preserving 3d data, so in this case it really depends on whether the artist is more concerned with fidelity to the original resolution and color depth (film) or adaptability to future display methods (movie).
Is COBAL the latest open source COBOL compiler?