Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 77

as a consequence of the immaterial nature of software”. But as discussed
earlier, the digital is by no means immaterial, be it in terms of technicality
or in terms of context. And even the most material of objects is still bound
to degenerate eventually. Correlatively and from an audience’s perspective,
Lin (����) suggests that “art has never been a solely tangible experience
anyway; we’re not meant to ‘touch’ paintings in order to experience them,
and any materials used to create so-called tangible art won’t last forever—
thus, making all art inherently time-based.” Temporariness is therefore an
inevitable feature of artworks.
As such, rather than judging the future sustainability, and by extension the
“legitimacy”, of digital art projects against that of physical museums and
analog collections, one needs to rethink the idea and practice of preservation
itself in light of the dynamic materiality and fluid temporality of digital
objects and platforms. For this, new modes of conservation and different
strategies of documentation and preservation need to be explored and
encouraged in order to tap into and harness the potential of interactivity,
adaptability, performativity, and reproducibility that are characteristic of
the digital ecosystem. In their interview on the use of new media for the
collection and preservation of digital art, Rinehart and Ippolito (����) argue
that:
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We should be looking at paradigms that are more contingent than
static […]. Casting a wider net can help preservationists jettison
our culture’s implicit metaphor of stony durability in favor of one
of fluid adaptability […] Digital preservationists can learn from
media that thrive by reinterpretation and reuse […] Change will
happen. Don’t resist it; use it, guide it. Let art breathe; it will tell
you what it needs.
In a concrete sense, a new media-driven paradigm of art preservation would
entail a number of strategies and steps that are at once technical as well as
conceptual, and which need to be integrated into the overall plan of digital
collection management. These include keeping abreast with the technological
developments in new media forms and digital infrastructures in order to
establish the optimal ways of storing and displaying digital material, and
overcoming potential incompatibility of software; periodic migration of
materials onto new formats or platforms to ensure continuous functionality;
regular system maintenance and backups; sustaining the interactive features
of Web �.�-based platforms; and, on a more epistemological level, reevaluating
and challenging traditional perceptions around the value and