The Gap Between Now and Then - on the conservation of memory

Let’s play hide-and-seek with future generations. We hide. The seeker is not among us yet. He or she lives in another era, a time yet to come. We don’t know if he or she will be a finder. We are not even sure we want or need to be found. We might simply just jump from our lair one day, reveal ourselves, unexpectedly, to win the game. What triumph would it be, to have the seeker, the finder, an innocent, ignorant player, a victim of our simple game with presence, placement and time, be startled by our sudden re-appearance, his jaw dropping, his eyes blinking, his mind racing to understand who or what we are and whence we came from. Yet looking at the reflection in his eyes, would we recognize ourselves?

Embracing the Unpredictable
It is hard to say how a ghost from the past will fit in the future present. Many of us would nevertheless, despite obvious uncertainties, like to somehow put our mark on the development of history. In some ways, one could say we humans can be quite self-aggrandizing, bordering on arrogant. We easily confuse our pride of our specific cultural heritages with the instinctual drive for a continuation and evolution of our entire species. We even congratulate ourselves when pushing our thoughts and inventions onto future generations, preferably in a prescriptive manner. We shall and must prevail.
Yet, even if our findings and creations might be of vital importance for future generations, their shape cannot be exactly defined, let alone maintained. What part of our heritage remains or is continued, cannot be completely controlled and predicted. This is one thing we can say with certainty.
As more and more artworks are created in mediated environments, often across (or connecting) different media platforms and physical spheres, the question arises how we can save the growing amount of these works and other cultural ‘objects’ in this unstable environment for posterity. What is easily cast aside in debates about this issue is that many artworks were not meant to last forever in the first place, or at least: many were not meant to stay ‘whole’. Sometimes there never even is a ‘finished product’. Artists working with ephemeral materials generally accept and even expect complete or partial loss as part of their work.
Of course, when put on the spot, almost every artist can be tempted to express some sort of regret over the lack of any remaining traces of his or her work. As time passes and someone’s individual art practice evolves, what was once a tactically applied, bold or logical use of materials for a certain artistic period can suddenly feel too valuable to be entirely lost forever. Some choices of material and form however seem to have been made consciously, in order to express issues of temporality or change.

This text is, in some ways, about the relationship between conservation and loss. In the area of art conservation loss is generally defined as physical decay, destruction or disappearance of the art object, as a negative event. In the past few decades however, other forms of loss besides that of a degradation of material properties have started to grow in importance. In the context of new media art, net art and interactive art a specific form of loss has started to haunt the conservation issue. This is the loss of control.
The traditional conservator tries to control the art object and its environment carefully. This is a logical strategy when the conservator wants to maintain unique and unchanging cultural artefacts in their original state. In order to do this, the object is protected from outside influences. Its contact with the world is carefully regulated, and touching the artwork is problematic.
With medially diffuse or digital born artworks however separation of the object from the world (in this case: the entire complex of media networks) and creating a closed, controlled structure around it might not be the best way forward. It can in fact easily cause the artwork’s complete demise. The work can wither or disappear by a lack of context or constructive audience engagement.

Of course, process based, interactive and participatory net artworks will often include a radical change of shape, but the work’s identity will almost always entirely depend on how this change is provoked or realized. Works that rely on deep audience participation will turn from original artwork to mere documentation (or notation, with possible re-enactment) overnight when archived separate from the public domain. These works are made to have a connection to the network, as both a material property and for its vital relation with the audience. Without this openness to actual social environments, the work is incomplete or cannot really exist.
Closing the work off from a living, engaging context and dooming it to a static or literary existence is however not the only issue. Given the known problems with the maintenance of different media systems over the years , the entire disappearance of a work is not unthinkable if only one or few of such ‘copies’ of a work exist, even if these are stored in specially designed, well-equipped archives. Both openness to a vital context and openness in terms of physical, material and technological accessibility may well be the best way forward to conserve art in the environment of new, networked media.

This text is really about conservation through loss. We may have a lot to gain by loosing control over digital objects. We might consider the ability of some artists to embrace an inherent loss of control over their work less to be a challenge to conservation, and more as an inspiration to a solution.