Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, and: Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives ed. by Julia Noordegraaf, Cosetta G. Saba, Barbara Le Maitre, and Vinzenz Hediger (review)

In order to salvage the rich array of creative practices born during the last century, society has to move from preserving media to preserving art. In the process we will have to view change not as an obstacle but as a means of survival.

—Jon Ippolito

Along the “archival turn” in the humanities and its counterparts in film and media studies, the challenges created by media convergence for the long-term custody and study of media artifacts have brought research on media art preservation to the foreground.¹ In this endeavor, media scholars are joined by practitioners and researchers from a diverse array of disciplines. The reviewed titles, while not equivalent in their subject’s treatment, cover in tandem most of the issues shaping the heterogeneous life of media artworks beyond their cycle in the gallery or the film theater.

Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, two early and influential proponents of innovative approaches to preserve new media art, cowrote Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory to address what they consider the main sources of threats to current media culture: technology, institutions, and the law. This arrangement allows the authors to frame the problem of new art preservation at the macrolevel of social memory, the cultural practices that allow a “civilization” to persist beyond individual generations. Rinehart distinguishes two manifestations of social memory: formal (canonical and institutionalized) and informal (folkloric and popular). New media have an impact on social memory by transforming its cultural objects, as well as the means and tools of remembering. In this typology, formal social memory often preserves cultural objects as fixed forms, while informal social memory re-creates cultural objects to maintain them alive.

The formal/informal distinction fits the book’s central category: variable media. The notion of variability has been fundamental in Ippolito’s work both as curator and as new media artist, and it guides the book’s arguments. His use of the term differs from Lev Manovich’s. For the latter, variability describes the condition of new media. For the former, it also points toward a common condition between conceptual art and other nontraditional art forms. As much as digitality foregrounds media art preservation challenges, its quandaries are similar to the ones in other nontraditional media art forms such as earth, performance, conceptual, and bio art.² As more creative production transitions from a regime of art as objects to one of art as events, their preservation will be assured not by any durable support but by having them remain variable. Whereas storage has been the longest-term strategy to preserve old media, it has proven to be a short-term solution to always rapidly obsolescent new media.

Part 1 focuses on offsetting the risks and vulnerabilities associated with rapidly changing media environments and proprietary technologies. New media art is as much visual and artifactual as performative. Since its practices are ephemeral, documentary, and technical and its media become obsolete rapidly, new media art disrupts traditional approaches to collecting, documenting, and preserving art. The variable media approach to preservation calls for “fluidly creating and recreating works,” as well as encouraging creators to “define a work in medium independent terms so that it can be translated into a new medium once its original form is obsolete” (11). Ippolito explains that this approach favors migration, emulation, and reinterpretation strategies in opposition to storage. The former privileges “working function” in opposition to the latter’s univocal concern with form.

While attention is drawn to open software solutions, embracing variability and artistic intent ultimately entails adopting new documentation solutions that employ meta-data intensively and creatively. If...