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."

Comments

WORM Flash

[Hatta]

Apparently Sandisk has some Write Once 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: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.