Collecting the virtual: acquiring digital media

In order to arrive at processes for acquiring digital media, we need to explore the complex inter-relationship between art, technology, and the museum. I would like to begin by exploring a work of multimedia art which is held in the Griffith University Collection, namely the CD ROM, Virgin with Hard Drive (1999) by young Brisbane-based artist Lucy Francis.

Virgin with Hard Drive adopts its narrative and aesthetic from popular culture and science fiction. We enter the work in the passive, voyeuristic mode of the consumer - we are given instructions, advertisements, and told we have won a trip to Earth. The year, we are told, is 2082, the Earth has become a giant museum, looked after by drones or keepers who perform the role of cataloguer and conservator. It has been this way since 2010, when Cultural Reorganisation occurred - the event that stopped history. We are invited to travel back to earth and live life for one week as a keeper. In the next level we read the diary of one keeper, sent to Earth to restore the precious treasures of the past, but who finds greater beauty and pleasure in destruction.

The artist, Lucy Francis, writes "Virgin with Hard Drive is intended to satirise the unthinking adoration of and preference for old art over new art. In the most intense form of this religious adoration, all new art might be portrayed as pointless/impossible opening up the theoretical basis for vandalism as an affirmation of the present. The skepticism towards new art reaches its most virulent intensity in the area of new media art in this work. The idea of ecological conservation is extended to art as a natural environment - where vandalism appears to be a precondition for change, its function being to allow natural cultural evolution to restart."

Virgin with Hard Drive contains many levels of authorship. There is the fictional story itself which contains within it the story of the vandal. Then there are the appropriated authorships of the masterpieces from the past. There is also the collaborative technical team which produced the CD ROM and wrote the code etc. There is also Lucy's musical composition / soundtrack, a 4 part classical fugue, which destroys itself over time. However the invitation to the viewer / audience, is not help participate in and contribute to the great creative act of artmaking. Rather, it is an invitation to vandalise and destroy. Instead of collaborating, we are invited to collude in illegal and secret acts. The viewer's original detached and safe voyeurism, becomes a culpable collusion - ideally suited to the intimate one-on-one environment of the CD ROM experience.

Virgin with Hard Drive is a dangerous desiring machine, capable of rewriting our histories, hacking our identities, and undermining our beliefs and the sacred value of our icons of the past. It is an anti-museum - for where the museum pieces together the past, ordering knowledge and telling 'truth', Virgin with Hard Drive fragments and destroys itself and potentially our own (pre)conceptions of beauty, truth, and Art. Of course these actions are 'only' part of a fiction and they are 'only' virtual. Yet if we understand that they are also, in some sense real, that this is a real artwork at least, then we may perceive that all histories, identities, and truths are virtual fictions. Moreover, our virtual actions make apparent, or actualise, the fragmented nature of all writing, authoring, and knowing - and the equally fragmented nature of reading viewing, seeing, and experiencing. To experience Virgin with Hard Drive is to allow ourselves to become activated by the incorporeal space of the virtual.

The role of the museum is becoming an increasingly complex one. It is no longer simply a caretaker, presenter, warehouse, or official educator of art (if indeed it ever was). Today, there is a convergence occurring between systems and economies of primary production, distribution, and interpretation: viewers are becoming users; primary producers / or sole traders are building-in systems of distribution and interpretation; curators are becoming designers; and so on. There are multiple levels of authorship involved in making multimedia art, in producing international art exhibitions, in interpreting collections. The museum is being called upon to become an interactive and dynamic production house in all facets of its business. It will need to be intensely consultative with artists and other industry professionals in order to forge a creative dynamic between interpretation, exhibition design and presentation, commissioning and production, archiving and creating audience access pathways. This requires interdisciplinary and multi-skilled thinking at the highest level.

Our galleries and museums were founded upon 19th century economies of acquisition and collection. What is the role of gallery/museum in the digital age? And what is its relationship to the 21st century economies of reproduction and distribution?

I first faced these questions years ago when, in my role as curator of the Griffith University Art Collection, I embarked on a project of acquiring video art. It quickly became apparent that there was no sense in acquiring a vhs tape (something which would deteriorate in five years or far less depending on how often it's played). Griffith Artworks had to acquire a master and for that we needed a copyright license. The master had to be digital so that it may become platform non-specific (in other words, able to be transferred to another format without any loss in quality). For all our theoretical talk of the "death of the author" and "the loss of the original", how many institutions have actively facilitated the on-going reproducibility of certain artforms?

Digitally mastering videotape was a fairly straightforward and indeed an exciting solution. The cost of mastering the video works is equivalent to the cost of framing an average work on paper or photograph. Currently we are mastering onto digital betacam tape which, of course will also deteriorate over time. However, the cost of transferring the master to another platform in 5 or 10 years (be it DVD or whatever), is probably equivalent to an average conservation cost for a work on paper or photograph - if indeed they are not irredeemably damaged (faded, scratched, stained, and so on). Perhaps we will have works in video forever.

Of course, the idea of art as reproducible, as, in fact, reducible to a set of instructions (to information), is by no means restricted to the digital realm. It has a long history, originating in the conceptual, process and performance art movements from the 60s and 70s - I'm thinking of Fluxus performances and compositions, Dan Flavin's installations, or Sol LeWitt's expandable wall drawings. A few years ago, Griffith Artworks acquired one of Kerri Poliness's O wall drawings - we received a set of instructions and a nikko pen and the right to infinitely reproduce a series of nine works (an unlimited edition).

Unfortunately, acquiring works in CDROM has not been such smooth sailing. CD ROMs, and the same applies to Internet Art, are made to run in certain computer system environments - many require specific plug-ins. While much computer hardware and software these days is 'smart' and 'backwardly compatible' (ie able to read previous versions of itself), this does not guarantee the original viewing experience will be preserved. For example, the increasing speed of computer processors alone drastically alters the speed at which many of these works run - this can fundamentally alter or potentially even destroy the artist's intended aesthetic. Or in the case of plug-ins, we already have a work which requires Quicktime 2.5 to run on and which simply won't play with Quicktime 3 or later versions of Quicktime.

In respect to these works, Museums are facing the following choices. Firstly, acquire the original hardware and software that the work was produced for - but who will have spare parts for Mac Classic even now let alone know how to fix it when it breaks down in a few years time! Secondly, migrate the work, translating and updating it to run on the latest available technologies, but this will probably involve re-writing the source code, effectively destroying it as a document of its time. The third possibility is emulation, where custom-built program applications mimic the original softwares - but this is extremely costly and complex. It is unlikely museums will have the resources to develop such emulating softwares, but where the business sector demands it, museums may be able to utilise this option. What we have started to do at Griffith Artworks so far is to develop a thorough cataloguing system for these works which documents exactly what works in CD ROM are made from and how they are built. "To date, we have identified that each artwork requires the collection and identification of an elemental set of comprehensive metadata. This will not only provide a detailed record of information regarding the specific and varied hardware and software requirements of the CD-ROM artworks but will also note vital provenance information."¹ This is indeed the best way to provide for the conservators of the future. When conservators have worked on paintings, for example, in our collection, they have often explained to me that the problems the work is facing as it ages are due, not or not only to the ways in which it has been exhibited and handled, but to how it was made - an ill-prepared canvas, drying cracks from thickly applied paint, a cracking varnish, a masonite backing board, etc.

Ironically, the most extreme departures from the material object, digital or otherwise, are ultimately the ones whose future depends on the very institutions they were designed, in many ways, to render obsolete. Or perhaps works such as these were not simply anti-institutional, but were challenges, calling for a change in institutionalised practices. All artworks are both actual object and virtual image. And just because the museum houses the actual object does not mean it possesses the virtual image. For the virtual image, like the significance or meaning of the work, was and is site-specific. The museum must continually re-present the works in its collection and continue to view them with new eyes.

Another method of preservation which is being explored and developed by Jon Ippolito in his 'variable media' project at the Guggenheim, is reinterpretation.² Artists are asked to list the qualities of their work which they would most like to see preserved over time. A variable media artwork is also one which could have more than one medium as its possible realisation, 'multiple actual deliverables' from virtual information - an on-line version of the work, a set of digital prints, a particular installation for a gallery environment, etc). Of course this involves the museum negotiating with artists, perhaps even collaborating with them. But what it has the potential to result in is, rather than the museum as mausoleum, a house of dead objects, the museum as incubator, keeping objects alive. To quote UK based artist and academic, Roy Ascott: "the museum must change its role as guardian of an official reality to being that of guide to an Emergent Reality, to Nature II, and to entirely new forms of collaborative experience."

"The future is all that museums can provide for. We know now that there is no absolute history, that the past is written in the present. We are irredeemably futures-oriented, and our museums as well as our institutions of learning must come to reflect that. One thing is certain. Nothing is given, neither the past, present, nor future: all is constructed, and the site of that construction is our own consciousness. It is well recognised that consciousness is a field, and that telematic systems are part of its evolution."

Ippolito, Jon, Variable Media Essay - The Museum of the Future: A Contradiction in Terms? Artbyte, June-July 1998.