Re-collection by Richard Rinehart

Re-collection by Richard Rinehart

The first book on the philosophy and aesthetics of digital preservation examines the challenge posed by new media to our long-term social memory.

How will our increasingly digital civilization persist beyond our lifetimes? Audio and videotapes demagnetize; CDs delaminate; Internet art links to websites that no longer exist; Amiga software doesn't run on iMacs. In Re-collection, Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito argue that the vulnerability of new media art illustrates a larger crisis for social memory. They describe a variable media approach to rescuing new media, distributed across producers and consumers who can choose appropriate strategies for each endangered work.

New media art poses novel preservation and conservation dilemmas. Given the ephemerality of their mediums, software art, installation art, and interactive games may be heading to obsolescence and oblivion.
Rinehart and Ippolito, both museum professionals, examine the preservation of new media art from both practical and theoretical perspectives, offering concrete examples that range from Nam June Paik to Danger Mouse. They investigate three threats to twenty-first-century creativity: technology, because much new media art depends on rapidly changing software or hardware; institutions, which may rely on preservation methods developed for older mediums; and law, which complicates access with intellectual property constraints such as copyright and licensing. Technology, institutions, and law, however, can be enlisted as allies rather than enemies of ephemeral artifacts and their preservation. The variable media approach that Rinehart and Ippolito propose asks to what extent works to be preserved might be medium-independent, translatable into new mediums when their original formats are obsolete.

Ippolito, Jon: - Jon Ippolito is a former Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim Museum, where he curated the first museum exhibition of virtual reality and founded the Variable Media Network for preserving digital culture.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262546683
ISBN 10	026254668X
Title	Re-collection
Author	Richard Rinehart
Series	Leonardo
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2022-11-01
Number of pages	312
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.