Presentation by Richard Rinehart
If we return to the roots of new media, to the first modern theories of computation developed by Alan Turing and his contemporaries, we may discover that what we need for the preservation of new media art turns out to have been built into technology from the very beginning: variability. However, artworks operate at levels other than their technological substrata. New media may be variable, but are new media artworks? In this presentation, Rinehart argues that some art is better served if it is considered media-independent, but not that the artwork should be considered apart from media altogether. Here, Rinehart will consider the exact relationship between an artwork and its medium and the impact of that consideration on preservation.