Presentation by Michael Takeo Magruder
As technological advancements have always informed creative thought and provided new frameworks for artistic expression, the history of art has continuously progressed alongside a history of preservation in which society has developed strategies and mechanisms for conserving new forms of art deemed culturally significant. At present, the pervasive growth of digital media and its rapid uptake by artists has created different, currently problematic sets of challenges for those seeking to preserve emerging forms of technology-based work within contemporary art.
Now that experimental use of digital technologies in art has fully expanded outside its previous confines of self-contained software and hardware systems, digital creativity has become firmly enmeshed within wider, complex and often non-digital contexts. Progressive work in this area commonly relies upon hybrid means of creation, like blending digital elements with traditional analogue materials; distributing processes and outputs across varying combinations of virtual, physical and networked space; and incorporating seemingly endless permutations for interaction and dialogue with spectators/participants. The adoption of such possibilities, whilst opening new terrains for artistic exploration, has also necessitated a fundamental rethinking of historically straightforward issues regarding preservation, in particular, defining what constitutes the actual 'artwork' to be documented and conserved.
This presentation will showcase various examples of complex digital creativity in contemporary arts practice and explore the challenges of maintaining and archiving such work. The discussion will then focus on how the long-term preservation of these kinds of artworks cannot be resolved from adopting purely technical approaches based on existing software and hardware conservation methodologies, but rather, will be dependent on developing new strategies that can more adequately address notions of hybridity, trans-locality and ephemerality in the digital age.