Rescuing an Artwork from Crumbling Technologies (e.g. MS-DOS, Laserdisc)
January 10, 2017 9:09 AM Subscribe
What does it look like when a museum pulls a time-based media installation artwork from storage? MoMA Conservator Ben Fino-Radin tells the story of rescuing and exhibiting the 1994 interactive multimedia work Lovers, by Teiji Furuhashi.
NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation students did the initial conservation assessment to understand the artwork and its components. "Out came LaserDiscs, 35mm slides, speakers, wires, accessories, slide projectors, an eight-foot-tall metal tower containing video projectors with robotics to control which direction they are pointing, two flight cases full of behind-the-scenes control hardware and software, and a hefty folder containing documentation, manuals, installation specifications, and correspondence with the artist and his studio."
This research project revived interest in exhibiting Lovers, and after a complicated process of restoration, documentation, and refined art direction, the work is now on display at MoMA for the first time since its acquisition by the museum in 1998.
Teiji Furuhashi died of AIDS in 1995. He was one of the founding members of the Kyoto-based art/performance collective Dumb Type; he discusses the group's inception in this 1991 Kyoto Journal interview.
NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation students did the initial conservation assessment to understand the artwork and its components. "Out came LaserDiscs, 35mm slides, speakers, wires, accessories, slide projectors, an eight-foot-tall metal tower containing video projectors with robotics to control which direction they are pointing, two flight cases full of behind-the-scenes control hardware and software, and a hefty folder containing documentation, manuals, installation specifications, and correspondence with the artist and his studio."
This research project revived interest in exhibiting Lovers, and after a complicated process of restoration, documentation, and refined art direction, the work is now on display at MoMA for the first time since its acquisition by the museum in 1998.
Teiji Furuhashi died of AIDS in 1995. He was one of the founding members of the Kyoto-based art/performance collective Dumb Type; he discusses the group's inception in this 1991 Kyoto Journal interview.
This is going to have to be a whole new specialty in conservator school, isn't it... I wonder if eventually the art conservators will be the only ones who are able to help government or industry access these older media.
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:45 AM on January 10, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:45 AM on January 10, 2017 [5 favorites]
Amazing work. Would love to see the exhibit. Extremely cool field.
posted by oceanjesse at 9:46 AM on January 10, 2017
posted by oceanjesse at 9:46 AM on January 10, 2017
This was remarkable to read and it's wonderful that such work is being done to preserve and re-exhibit artworks such as this. Thanks for posting!
posted by hippybear at 9:50 AM on January 10, 2017
posted by hippybear at 9:50 AM on January 10, 2017
It gives me some hope for the future that this amount of effort and expense is being spent on preserving art. Thanks for the post.
posted by Rock Steady at 9:57 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Rock Steady at 9:57 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
This was fascinating and reassuring as no media is forever, and I have well wondered what is going to happen with a lot of materials as bit rot kicks in.
posted by Samizdata at 9:59 AM on January 10, 2017
posted by Samizdata at 9:59 AM on January 10, 2017
I liked the bit where part of the art is re-tuning it every time:
posted by clawsoon at 10:06 AM on January 10, 2017 [7 favorites]
Smiling, and ever patient, Takatani, who had stewarded this work for years, explained that the timing of Lovers had been reviewed and refined nearly every time the work was installed. He suggested, therefore, that although we had perfectly reproduced the behavior, timing, and motion of the final snapshot of the artwork as it existed when it was collected, it was now time to continue its active life...It's art that demands revivification every time it's presented; not just the technology, but the essence, too.
posted by clawsoon at 10:06 AM on January 10, 2017 [7 favorites]
This is so interesting- in many forms of art there's no reason to dig too deeply in to the "hows" and "whys" of creating the piece- that's the artist's prerogative, that's why they're the artist and you're the observer. That's where the magic lies. But for preservation of something like this, that magic space has to be carefully probed and examined. It sounds like this was so well done- it was reassuring. (Also interesting that in the final stages, Shiro adjusted the timing, sort of restoring the magic of the piece.)
posted by Secretariat at 10:09 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Secretariat at 10:09 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
I wonder how that process of retuning was documented for those tackling future installations.
posted by hippybear at 10:10 AM on January 10, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 10:10 AM on January 10, 2017 [2 favorites]
hippybear: "I wonder how that process of retuning was documented for those tackling future installations."
Sadly, I don't think it will past a certain point. That is part of the art.
posted by Samizdata at 10:16 AM on January 10, 2017
Sadly, I don't think it will past a certain point. That is part of the art.
posted by Samizdata at 10:16 AM on January 10, 2017
Thanks for posting this!
I'm a little sad that they abandoned the original control system, although I generally understand why they did it. Reimplementing the original controller on a DOS PC would have been a fun project in its own right, and totally viable on modern (albeit specialized) hardware. Pity that the source code was unavailable or inscrutable.
The decisions made during the restoration process also seem to have been highly pragmatic and well-informed -- there doesn't seem to have been much hand-wringing about dispensing with the 20-year-old LCD projectors, and I really admire the process by which they faithfully restored the original artwork, and later chose to evolve the work after carefully concluding that Teiji Furuhashi would have done the same.
They also got really lucky that the LaserDiscs were intact. They're... not exactly archival-grade.
Looks like I need to plan a trip to New York before April...
posted by schmod at 10:19 AM on January 10, 2017 [4 favorites]
I'm a little sad that they abandoned the original control system, although I generally understand why they did it. Reimplementing the original controller on a DOS PC would have been a fun project in its own right, and totally viable on modern (albeit specialized) hardware. Pity that the source code was unavailable or inscrutable.
The decisions made during the restoration process also seem to have been highly pragmatic and well-informed -- there doesn't seem to have been much hand-wringing about dispensing with the 20-year-old LCD projectors, and I really admire the process by which they faithfully restored the original artwork, and later chose to evolve the work after carefully concluding that Teiji Furuhashi would have done the same.
They also got really lucky that the LaserDiscs were intact. They're... not exactly archival-grade.
Looks like I need to plan a trip to New York before April...
posted by schmod at 10:19 AM on January 10, 2017 [4 favorites]
I wonder how that process of retuning was documented for those tackling future installations.
In the box, there's a post-it with a tinyURL link to a Google Doc that explains the process.
posted by schmod at 10:19 AM on January 10, 2017 [12 favorites]
In the box, there's a post-it with a tinyURL link to a Google Doc that explains the process.
posted by schmod at 10:19 AM on January 10, 2017 [12 favorites]
I wonder if their task would've been easier or harder if any of them had the skill to read machine language. The faced an "impenetrable binary file" and they thought there was "only one way to find out... what the PCs were doing."
posted by clawsoon at 10:20 AM on January 10, 2017
posted by clawsoon at 10:20 AM on January 10, 2017
On the one hand, you can use a standard format to deliver digital art (a wav file, an mp4 file, a CD, a DVD) and not only will it remain accessible, people will happily make their own copies for free instead of buying them from you.
On the other hand, you can use doomed formats and there's a good chance nobody even bothers maintaining availability of your work. The company that made your tech will go out of business and people will forget how it works.
The Scylla and Charybdis of digital art.
posted by idiopath at 10:32 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
On the other hand, you can use doomed formats and there's a good chance nobody even bothers maintaining availability of your work. The company that made your tech will go out of business and people will forget how it works.
The Scylla and Charybdis of digital art.
posted by idiopath at 10:32 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
Another testimonial to the usefulness of the Saleae Logic.
Seriously, if you are in this line of work and don't own one, run - don't walk - and order one. They are invaluable.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:33 AM on January 10, 2017 [4 favorites]
Seriously, if you are in this line of work and don't own one, run - don't walk - and order one. They are invaluable.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:33 AM on January 10, 2017 [4 favorites]
> I'm a little sad that they abandoned the original control system, although I generally understand why they did it. Reimplementing the original controller on a DOS PC would have been a fun project in its own right, and totally viable on modern (albeit specialized) hardware.
All of the original components (hardware and software) were preserved and stored, so someone still could! They replaced projectors and abandoned the control system in order to install this exhibition of the work, but everything they did is reversible.
posted by desuetude at 10:39 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
All of the original components (hardware and software) were preserved and stored, so someone still could! They replaced projectors and abandoned the control system in order to install this exhibition of the work, but everything they did is reversible.
posted by desuetude at 10:39 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
MoMA does very good work on this. I've seen folks from MoMA in the forums for the emulators I work on, and they seem to really know what they're doing!
One of the big questions in this area is whether we can keep these tools working. SheepShaver only barely compiles on modern computers, and has had several project leads leave over the years—there's obviously no money in emulating twenty-year-old Macs. Getting it working for normal people requires downloading ROMs that are of dubious legality, which makes it hard to spread the word. It would be great if companies like Apple, Microsoft and Nintendo could declare that they're not bothered by this use, since it hardly threatens their business model.
And then what about the future? Organizations like archive.org do a great job preserving web pages. But will museums twenty years from now be able to run artworks in the form of iPhone apps?
posted by vasi at 10:55 AM on January 10, 2017 [3 favorites]
One of the big questions in this area is whether we can keep these tools working. SheepShaver only barely compiles on modern computers, and has had several project leads leave over the years—there's obviously no money in emulating twenty-year-old Macs. Getting it working for normal people requires downloading ROMs that are of dubious legality, which makes it hard to spread the word. It would be great if companies like Apple, Microsoft and Nintendo could declare that they're not bothered by this use, since it hardly threatens their business model.
And then what about the future? Organizations like archive.org do a great job preserving web pages. But will museums twenty years from now be able to run artworks in the form of iPhone apps?
posted by vasi at 10:55 AM on January 10, 2017 [3 favorites]
puredata is being used as a format for algorithmic DSP based artwork - the kind of stuff that requires real time interaction and input. So much of this is made with obsolete proprietary hardware that will never exist again, but since puredata is open source and fully free software, it can easily be made to work on any new computer, so any interactive audio work that can be translated to puredata is effectively archived.
the puredata repertory project
posted by idiopath at 11:14 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
the puredata repertory project
posted by idiopath at 11:14 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
On the one hand, you can use a standard format to deliver digital art (a wav file, an mp4 file, a CD, a DVD) and not only will it remain accessible, people will happily make their own copies for free instead of buying them from you.
Those are standard formats today. There's no reason to believe any of them will be standard, let alone easily recoverable, fifty years from now, especially given how quickly tech evolves.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:25 AM on January 10, 2017 [3 favorites]
Those are standard formats today. There's no reason to believe any of them will be standard, let alone easily recoverable, fifty years from now, especially given how quickly tech evolves.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:25 AM on January 10, 2017 [3 favorites]
scroll scroll scroll … python: check … scroll scroll scroll … arduino: check. Yup, it's a modern interactive.
Apart from the poor ageing (electrolytic capacitors i am glowering at you) DOS PCs with parallel ports make pretty great stepper controllers. Just about every shop CNC assumes you have realtime access to a parallel port, which these days is getting harder and harder to guarantee.
Lovely story, too.
posted by scruss at 12:00 PM on January 10, 2017 [3 favorites]
Apart from the poor ageing (electrolytic capacitors i am glowering at you) DOS PCs with parallel ports make pretty great stepper controllers. Just about every shop CNC assumes you have realtime access to a parallel port, which these days is getting harder and harder to guarantee.
Lovely story, too.
posted by scruss at 12:00 PM on January 10, 2017 [3 favorites]
Organizations like archive.org do a great job preserving web pages. But will museums twenty years from now be able to run artworks in the form of iPhone apps?
I was surprised to discover the other day that archive.org is hosting (older) MAME romsets. Which makes sense, they're archiving something that could conceivably be lost to time. There's already discussion out there about emulating iOS, only 10 years into the life of the product, which is heartening. But yeah, as you said, it's becoming increasingly hard to emulate stuff from a certain vintage. Too recent for MESS, too old for physical hardware.
Those are standard formats today. There's no reason to believe any of them will be standard, let alone easily recoverable, fifty years from now, especially given how quickly tech evolves.
I'm not terribly worried about major multi-exabyte installations of data formats - Photoshop still opens image formats that have long since died out. It's all the tiny little stuff that's at risk, the images that were drawn on the Xerox Alto, the Andy Warhol work that could be rotting away on a forgotten floppy disk, etc. I worry about the low (perceived) archival value of online media and how easy it is for it to get lost in the shuffle. And even with recovery and archival programs, finding a particular artist's material in a sea of data is going to be a challenge.
posted by Kyol at 12:01 PM on January 10, 2017 [2 favorites]
I was surprised to discover the other day that archive.org is hosting (older) MAME romsets. Which makes sense, they're archiving something that could conceivably be lost to time. There's already discussion out there about emulating iOS, only 10 years into the life of the product, which is heartening. But yeah, as you said, it's becoming increasingly hard to emulate stuff from a certain vintage. Too recent for MESS, too old for physical hardware.
Those are standard formats today. There's no reason to believe any of them will be standard, let alone easily recoverable, fifty years from now, especially given how quickly tech evolves.
I'm not terribly worried about major multi-exabyte installations of data formats - Photoshop still opens image formats that have long since died out. It's all the tiny little stuff that's at risk, the images that were drawn on the Xerox Alto, the Andy Warhol work that could be rotting away on a forgotten floppy disk, etc. I worry about the low (perceived) archival value of online media and how easy it is for it to get lost in the shuffle. And even with recovery and archival programs, finding a particular artist's material in a sea of data is going to be a challenge.
posted by Kyol at 12:01 PM on January 10, 2017 [2 favorites]
Just a note for those late lunch browsers -- the first link includes blurry genitalia, which counts as NSFW in my workplace.
posted by sparklemotion at 12:03 PM on January 10, 2017
posted by sparklemotion at 12:03 PM on January 10, 2017
Sometimes I wonder about our obsession with capturing and preserving art. Maybe it's okay if some of it is ephemeral.
And then sometimes I don't feel that way at all.
posted by clawsoon at 12:04 PM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
And then sometimes I don't feel that way at all.
posted by clawsoon at 12:04 PM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
you can use a standard format to deliver digital art (a wav file, an mp4 file, a CD, a DVD) and not only will it remain accessible,
Ob-XKCD.
FWIW, the official version of my dissertation is stored on Microfilm in an underground bunker, because the right types of plastic will survive an apocalypse.
(I defended in 2010. And the Microfilm was manually scanned from a printed version of the pdf of my thesis. Because image degredation FTW.)
posted by steady-state strawberry at 12:23 PM on January 10, 2017 [3 favorites]
Ob-XKCD.
FWIW, the official version of my dissertation is stored on Microfilm in an underground bunker, because the right types of plastic will survive an apocalypse.
(I defended in 2010. And the Microfilm was manually scanned from a printed version of the pdf of my thesis. Because image degredation FTW.)
posted by steady-state strawberry at 12:23 PM on January 10, 2017 [3 favorites]
I finally figured out my next profession. I've complained that the length and breadth of my career means I get stuck working on a lot of legacy code but THIS, being an archivist programmer/digital conservationist for an art museum - this is the stuff dreams are made of.
posted by annathea at 3:23 PM on January 10, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by annathea at 3:23 PM on January 10, 2017 [3 favorites]
> Organizations like archive.org do a great job preserving web pages.
Decreasingly so.
App-based website development models, encompassing single-page websites and MVC-based front-end frameworks, require tightly-coupled front-end-back-end relationships. When archive.org scrapes, for example, an Angular-built site, it only collects the pages rendered as it requests them by crawling the links in the page. Any content accessed through a hashslash-style URL path will escape capture if the scraper isn't specifically conformed to navigate it appropriately. And the archive has to subsequently rewrite both the archived URLs and the embedded links in the content so that its snapshot can be navigable through generic page requests, because there's no longer an intact UI framework (it'd been partially overwritten by its own rendering) and there's no API server to handle the XHR. This has bitten me in the ass recently, and the archive problem is only going to get worse as the threshold of effort drops for building sites this way.
posted by ardgedee at 3:51 PM on January 10, 2017 [7 favorites]
Decreasingly so.
App-based website development models, encompassing single-page websites and MVC-based front-end frameworks, require tightly-coupled front-end-back-end relationships. When archive.org scrapes, for example, an Angular-built site, it only collects the pages rendered as it requests them by crawling the links in the page. Any content accessed through a hashslash-style URL path will escape capture if the scraper isn't specifically conformed to navigate it appropriately. And the archive has to subsequently rewrite both the archived URLs and the embedded links in the content so that its snapshot can be navigable through generic page requests, because there's no longer an intact UI framework (it'd been partially overwritten by its own rendering) and there's no API server to handle the XHR. This has bitten me in the ass recently, and the archive problem is only going to get worse as the threshold of effort drops for building sites this way.
posted by ardgedee at 3:51 PM on January 10, 2017 [7 favorites]
I get a moment of disappointment whenever I'm in the internet section of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and get to the thing on hamsterdance, since it's just a screenshot with a blurb next to it.
I'm periodically tempted to build and donate a dedicated hamsterdance appliance so people can get the full effect.
posted by ckape at 8:16 PM on January 10, 2017 [5 favorites]
I'm periodically tempted to build and donate a dedicated hamsterdance appliance so people can get the full effect.
posted by ckape at 8:16 PM on January 10, 2017 [5 favorites]
I met a guy who acquired a very complicated automatic machine for making light bulbs. He had planned to develop some kind of special bulb. But what he ends up doing with it is producing small runs of custom recreations of obsolete bulbs matching those use in artworks, like Joseph Cornell boxes.
posted by StickyCarpet at 6:13 AM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by StickyCarpet at 6:13 AM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
Those are standard formats today. There's no reason to believe any of them will be standard, let alone easily recoverable, fifty years from now, especially given how quickly tech evolves.
Media formats (e.g. CD or DVD) are problematic because they require specialized hardware to access them, and over time the hardware breaks, gets lost, or becomes impossible to connect to modern computers.
Data formats (e.g. gif or mp3), OTOH, can live forever, because they rely on nothing but software. Maintaining the software is generally something a skilled hobbyist can do, and one person's work can be shared with the whole world.
Some data formats (e.g. the native formats of MS Office or Photoshop) are less suitable for archival purposes, because the software needed to use them is proprietary, but even then, the situation is not too dire. Popular proprietary formats are inevitably reverse-engineered and re-implemented in open-source software.
posted by shponglespore at 2:15 PM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
Media formats (e.g. CD or DVD) are problematic because they require specialized hardware to access them, and over time the hardware breaks, gets lost, or becomes impossible to connect to modern computers.
Data formats (e.g. gif or mp3), OTOH, can live forever, because they rely on nothing but software. Maintaining the software is generally something a skilled hobbyist can do, and one person's work can be shared with the whole world.
Some data formats (e.g. the native formats of MS Office or Photoshop) are less suitable for archival purposes, because the software needed to use them is proprietary, but even then, the situation is not too dire. Popular proprietary formats are inevitably reverse-engineered and re-implemented in open-source software.
posted by shponglespore at 2:15 PM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
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