Restoring Digital Art : it gets OLD so fast!

As an electronic artist, I often faced the same fact with my creation, specially with videos: for example, the software I was using ages ago is not available anymore, and maybe my video resolution in 1998 was like 320 x 240 (very fine for those times)...

 

and now it haves to confront with streaming full hd content.

now 4K

And I cannot re-render it...

Or let's think about interactive artworks, or even video games : how hard it can be to play them in a modern machine? I was pleased to see how this problem is getting focused even in Museum, art galleries and Universities..

Probably the new generation of art restaurateur will have to have a programmer background, to be able to face the art evolution...

We are very used to talk about "art restoration".

Old frescoes keep aging , and the quality of the color and the support are subject of deteriorating.

As an electronic artist, I often faced the same fact with my creation, specially with videos: for example, the software I was using ages ago is not available anymore, and maybe my video resolution in 1998 was like 320 x 240 (very fine for those times)...

and now it haves to confront with streaming full hd content.

And I cannot re-render it...

Or let's think about interactive artworks, or even video games : how hard it can be to play them in a modern machine? I was pleased to see how this problem is getting focused even in Museum, art galleries and Universities..

Probably the new generation of art restaurateur will have to have a programmer background, to be able to face the art evolution...

Or, more probably, everything will disappear, like tears in the rain.

Restoring Digital Art In A Digital Age | New Hampshire Public Radio http://nhpr.orgThu, 27 Jun 2013 14:10:47 GMT

A conservation conundrum, that’s what the Whitney Museum of American Art faced recently when it set out to restore a piece of early digital art…

it was uncharted territory for the cadre of conservationists who are typically tasked with matching paint colors and cleaning centuries-old sculptures.

But in 1995 when the Whitney acquired Douglas Davis’s digital creation

How galleries are learning to restore digital art | The Verge http://www.theverge.comMon, 10 Jun 2013 09:07:41 GMT

As modern art galleries expand their collections to include digital exhibits, restorers are being forced to learn increasingly complex techniques to maintain them.

Unlike paintings, where teams of experts match colors and use old brush techniques to touch up a decaying piece, digital art and the technology used to create it often becomes obsolete over time http://recodeproject.com/Reviving and Restoring Digital Art - Blog of the Long Now http://blog.longnow.orgWed, 27 Feb 2013 14:17:55 GMT With the ever-accelerating evolution of hardware and software, we stand to lose much more than reels of data.

A vast collection of computer art risks slipping into digital darkness, as well. Concerned about this impending loss, NYU student Matthew Epler recently founded the ReCode project: a community-driven effort to create an active archive for the products of “creative computing.”

But lest the idea of an “archive” should call to mind anything stuffy or rigid, theproject involves much more than preservation alone.

Epler hopes to revive computer art by translating it into acontemporary programming language, and thereby making it available for others to learn from and use in their own creative pursuits. (This isn’t storage – it’s “movage.”)