Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito (review)

Historians of technology may not be called on to solve the problem of long-term digital preservation, but the solution (or lack thereof) surely will have an impact on their work. Historians of computing are not the only readers of Technology and Culture who will feel this impact; it is difficult to imagine a historian of technology working in any field involving technologies of the “computer age” (say, of the last half-century) whose work will not suffer from losing access to historical software, data, games, simulations, email, websites, and new media artworks, the subjects of this book.

Until the last decade or so, the ratio of handwringing and handwaving to solid practical work in digital preservation has been quite high. This has changed in recent years. Progress has finally been made in several important areas, such as web archiving and digital repositories. Analysis of the digital preservation problem that takes legal, policy, and other “soft” factors into account also has begun to bring scholarly attention to intellectual, cultural, and historical issues that affect digital preservation. Recent books that illuminate these topics include Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008), James Newman’s Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence (2012), and Raiford Guins’s Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (2014). These authors all pay close attention to issues of interest to historians of technology and computing.

Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito have provided a fresh approach to digital preservation in Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory. The approach, examples, and topics covered reflect the authors’ extensive and also particular experience with two aspects of the general problem: new media art and museum curation. Their approach is original for two reasons. First, their discussion of new media preservation sits between practice and analysis. I choose the word “analysis” rather than “theory” to describe their writing about the issues hampering and the insights behind new approaches to preservation, because the argument is built up from consideration of a mix of projects, exhibits, technical impulses, and more. This mix is quite eclectic, and at times it is difficult to follow the lines connecting the dots in the authors’ argument. The associative threads in the penultimate chapter, in which they attempt to relate DNA computing, evolution, and other biological topics to new media preservation are particularly difficult to tie together. The second distinction is that this book, quite simply, is radical in both tone and content. No other book on digital/data curation is as adventurous, imaginative, or deeply critical. The authors acknowledge that some readers will not be satisfied with this critical stance. In a nod to the “working preservationist,” Rinehart and Ippolito partly fill this gap in the concluding chapter with a “twelve-step program” of practical advice.

The argument, in a nutshell, hinges on the notion of “variable media” that they have developed over the years through a series of important projects. The basic idea is that of disrupting the intellectual habit of linking preservation of creative works of “new media” and preservation of the specific original media configuration of any particular work. In other words, a creative work, whether digital art, a “mixed reality” piece, or a digital game, will need to last longer than the medium that originally delivered it. But how? The medium or the equipment to play back the work is very likely to degrade, become obsolescent, or fail at some point in the future. If the medium thus will have to change, can we preserve the original work in a way that makes it accessible to future users such as historians and museum visitors?

Rinehart and Ippolito break this question down by exploring both new ways of thinking about the variability of new media art and old structures that hamper these new ways of thinking. They convincingly divide the hindrances into the categories of technology, institutions, and law. The criticism of institutions...