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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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
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.
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