About us
Stay in touch
Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random discussion, the second in a series on digital curation with the most significant digital curators of the last 30 years. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the Editor-in-Chief of Le Random, and today I'm incredibly fortunate to be joined by Regina Harsanyi and Jon Ippolito, two of the most prominent voices in new media curation but in particular its preservation, which is what I'll be picking their brains about today. Regina Harsanyi is the Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Museum of the Moving Image and an independent advisor on preventive conservation for variable media arts. Harsanyi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University and a self-proclaimed cheerleader for time-based media. Jon Ippolito is a new media artist, professor, writer and former curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He is also a professor of new media at the University of Maine, where he founded the Graduate Digital Curation Program, as well as a self-described variable media evangelist. So we have the cheerleader and evangelist for time-based media with us today and two of the most respected figures in digital media arts preservation. It's very much a privilege to speak to them and I can't wait. So let's get started.
We're here talking about digital preservation, and the first question is just about how collectors think about preservation and whether, in your opinions, they think about it enough and how you would suggest they go about, from a broader perspective, approaching it.
Regina Harsanyi: I guess I'll come right out of the gate and say, maybe controversially, that at least in its current state, time-based media conservation, preservation is an anticapitalist process. Collectors, depending on the type of collector. Of course, there are collectors with genuine love of media arts, but there are also collectors, even great collectors, that do think about their finances on top of that and the value of that work in a financial way. And so I think the last thing on their mind is often how to care for these objects because it is a money pit. There's a term called total cost of ownership or cost of care. And that essentially means that, okay, so maybe you paid $5,000 for a work, but that's not actually the cost of the work. The cost of the work is how much it will cost over the lifespan of that collection to take care of it. And so I don't think that most collectors are thinking about this at all. And I also don't necessarily fully blame them for it because they're not taught to think like that. There's plenty more to say, probably, on topic, but I'll stop there too if Jon wants to chime in.
Jon Ippolito: Yeah, 100 percent. So the analogy I always give is you pick up a cat at the rescue shelter, and you drop 50 bucks on the cat, and you think you're done. And then you go to the vet and you pay $2,000 in vaccine bills. So you basically have to remember that variable media works, by which I mean new media as well as performances and installations and other pieces that are ephemeral and need to be recreated each time, have a debt to the future that you're going to have to pay. And that's part of the value of the work. In fact, I once had an intern at the Guggenheim ask me, "How much is this work worth?" And they were thinking of something that you wouldn't imagine could easily be sold, at least back in the '90s, so something like a website or an ephemeral performance. And I thought about it, and I thought, that's a dumb question. And then I thought, no, that's a really good question because it's not just the price that you pay or that's commissioned. It's all the money that would be spent on that work into the future ad infinitum. If you added up all the costs someone was willing to pay, that would be a better value of the work than whatever the selling price was.
Regina Harsanyi: I also just wanted to add to that that this isn't just a collector issue. This is an industry issue when it comes to just digital assets in general. There was an example recently about the music industry. When they moved over to having archival files for the original recordings, they backed them up on external hard drives. But then, okay, great, you did that work, but then they weren't switching them out every three to five years. We still are losing archival music now just because a hard drive wasn't spinning up. Because, again, even at the industry level, they're not thinking about that total cost. It's just like, oh, they just think, magically this external hard drive lives forever.
“I guess I'll come right out of the gate and say, maybe controversially, that at least in its current state, time-based media conservation, preservation is an anticapitalist process.” — Regina Harsanyi 2:15
Jon Ippolito: Yeah. So a good example of that from the more commercial side, again, is MySpace, which was the going concern for people who were essentially bands and musicians who wanted to post their own music. And they thought because it's in the cloud, therefore it's somehow preserved. And then they did a server migration in, what was it? I think it was 2012. And they lost 50 million songs. Basically all of the songs for a decade, starting in 2003, were just poof, disappeared in a single stroke of the key.
I'm realizing more and more as I get older, and of course I'm a teacher now, that the job of a conservator is equal parts technician and educator. You've got to tell collectors, and that means people in the industry, museums, private collectors, what it means to recreate these works, what responsibility you're going to have when you adopt this pet. The benefit is that you keep alive the most interesting work, at least I think so, of the last century. But it also means that you've got this additional burden that you didn't expect if you're used to just hanging a painting on a wall in a storeroom.
Regina Harsanyi: And something I really wrestle with on this front is that at the industry level, collector level, sometimes artist as well, there isn't this future-oriented thinking about care. There's this very present-oriented thinking, I think, in most individuals. We have to get people interested in why archiving and preservation and conservation matters. These same people, I think, these collectors, often talk about legacy or generational wealth, et cetera. They'll talk about that, but then they won't actually think about how these assets will exist into the future. Maybe we'll get into it in a little bit, but part of that, I think, has to do with marketing and miseducation.
Jon Ippolito: I'll just also add on to that. The changing technological landscape has really forced us to address these issues. It used to be, back when I started in this game, that there were only a couple of collectors who were interested in ephemeral works, like the Panza Collection, where they would draw things on walls like Sol LeWitt or they would create ephemeral performances that we could consider actually collecting. I could count the number of collectors interested in that on a single hand. But then the rise of blockchain-based art in the form of NFTs, and now artificial intelligence-based art, has really raised the ante and increased the number of people who are interested, perhaps, in accessing work but now have to also be educated about what preservation means for those systems. Largely because in much of the work that I think Regina and I are interested in, it's not just an image that you download. That is not the artwork itself. The work is more dynamic and active. And so when you think about the ways that people have been conditioned by NFTs and by DALL-E and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion to think, well, I just got a picture, and that isn't the artwork, that's an added burden of education that we have to figure out how to convey.
Regina Harsanyi: Panza is such an interesting example as well. To give a little bit more context on that, the collector Panza didn't necessarily respect the artist's intent in terms of preservation, display of work. And so this is the tale to tell to current digital art collectors. And so when conservators are approaching that collection that entered the Guggenheim, it gets a little confusing because Panza would make changes to the artist's work throughout the lifespan of that collection before it entered the institution. I see this happening on some level with a lot of these collectors who are buying digital art, where they think that they can dictate how the work is shown, is preserved. And so on another front of education, it's teaching more collectors about what the artwork is, how to preserve it in an ethical way. And you can learn a lot from Panza on that front. It's late in the sense for those works. Also having collectors understand, in a way, the hierarchy as a curator as well. I see myself as a vessel for showing artists' work, and same as a conservator, instead of being a producer or a director of the artist's work. I wish collectors would flip where they see themselves in dominance with an artist when they collect work, when they work with the artist, even when they do commissions.
Jon Ippolito: Yeah. Fun fact, my first job out of art school was at the Guggenheim, and they gave me the task of working with Donald Judd, one of the most irascible artists of the 20th century, to reconcile him with what Panza had donated to the Guggenheim. And so these are essentially works where there was a whole correspondence back and forth between Count Panza and Judd about whether Panza was respecting his wishes. So that was a tough job for someone right out of art school. My colleague got Dan Flavin, who was thrilled with Panza and loved what he did. So it varied artist by artist. But the Guggenheim's Panza initiative really tried to take that on. And we're still wrestling with some of these issues now. But as much as we might look back at that period and say, "Oh, that was the Wild West. Artists were doing crazy things. And thank God we've all figured that out," I really don't think we've figured it out. I think those are lessons that we continue to apply to today's technological landscape and the artists who work in it.
Peter Bauman: You've both been talking about how it's the collector's responsibility. If they own an artist's work, it's their responsibility to play a role in preserving it. But maybe collectors don't understand why that's important. And maybe we could just talk a little bit more about why exactly it is so important to consider preservation.
Regina Harsanyi: I mean, it's a big question. It's like, again, if you're someone who's going around saying you care about generational wealth or you care about the legacy of a work, you gush over an artist and you say you're supporting a true steward or patron of an artist, which so many of these collectors are saying, then you have to put in the work. You have to put in the funds and the time and care about things like having documentation and a manual and archival files so that all of that is true. You have collectors talk about donating things in the future to institutions, et cetera. None of that's possible unless the work is taken care of. It can't just sit. This goes into a lot of other fundamental misunderstandings of born-digital art, that it's just less vulnerable than work on paper, canvas or any tangible instantiation. But it's not true. It's more vulnerable. And so I think we're going to keep repeating that it's a miseducation.
Jon Ippolito: Yeah. And I would just say that to me, the audience, again, for these works has changed from a small group of collectors like the Kramlichs to a larger group of society, largely, I think, because of technological literacy. These people have grown up playing video games. They know that you click on things on the web and things happen. And so they're willing to accept that works might have an interactive or participatory or changing generative nature. Again, particularly with their experience with generative AI, they can see that there are systems at play that can be responsive and adaptive to their needs. That's part of our zeitgeist. That's what these works mean for us, a part of what they mean. So in the act of understanding how to preserve them, they're also appreciating that element of those works, the fact that they do need to adapt to future circumstances. And that's both their Achilles heel, but it's also the reason we're interested in them.
For a historical example, Allan Kaprow, often considered the inventor of happenings, which is the performances of the '50s and '60s, had a piece where it was essentially refrigerator magnets, where you have those words that you can combine to make sentences. Only these were like cards of paper. And a collector bought it, and people would come to the house and rearrange the words on the wall. And then when Kaprow died, a museum was interested in collecting this work, and the collector said, "Well, we want it to stay in whatever position it was when it was last at our house," which is the opposite of what Kaprow was interested in, right? So he was all about participation and opening up the artwork. So it became an open work rather than a closed form. So here was a case where it was a very curious decision by a collector to mandate something that obviously, to my mind, reflected a real ignorance of what the artist was all about. Whenever we're in an opportunity working with someone to say, "Hey, you're going to have to take this into account," it's also an opportunity to say, "This is what makes the work interesting." Okay, you can download a JPEG of something that was supposed to be mutable on a chain, or you can fix in time in some amber an installation that was supposed to have a performative element. But in doing so, you're draining the meaning of the work. You're draining what made it exciting and interesting and why this person is in history books and why they had retrospective exhibitions.
Regina Harsanyi: But say that it's an artist who wants it preserved in amber. That doesn't even work from a conservation perspective with these types of files. I'll give two examples. There's something called a disk image, where essentially you are able to record all of the data that makes up the computer itself so that you can reinstate it. But you can't reinstate it unless you have the correct hardware that matches and can actually run that disk image. We actually have all these incredible material concerns around that. The same thing is true for emulation. Emulation as a service, it's wonderful. It's a really great tool for time-based media conservation, but it needs to be able to run in a hardware environment that can handle that emulation. Just being able to produce it isn't enough. There are all these other factors that are going to constantly change. This is actually maybe a little bit of an aside, but it's a current issue in the conservation field because there aren't enough people that are being trained as technicians on the material front to do something like reconstruct the hardware or create the hardware elements that are necessary for the software elements, even if the software is, quote, unquote, preserved in amber.
Jon Ippolito: So as an example, I'm a huge fan of emulation, did a show on emulation at the Guggenheim, believe that it's the best tool that we have as digital conservators for preserving the future. But it has its limits, as Regina suggests. So a very simple example: the first work of net art that I saw that appeared in the New York Times was a piece by Joseph Squier, an artist who's forgotten now, but he was an early creator of a website that got noticed. In 1994, it was called The Place. It was basically a series of enigmatic pictures, and you clicked through and saw the story. You can still go look at that piece now because it's in the Walker's study collection. At the time, we all had 640 by 800 monitors, and there was this big image and then a couple of links at the bottom. And now if you go there, because we all have 8K monitors, it's a tiny postage stamp in the middle of the screen. This image is fixed in its resolution. You're not going to be able to blow it up the way you could a vector-based image or a Flash-based image. You're stuck with this little postage stamp, even if you emulate perfectly the Netscape 1 browser that people looked at it in. So then you have to ask other questions like, well, should we somehow interpret and expand the image? Should we only view it on a computer that is the size of the original resolution, some old Apple computer from the '80s? How do we figure out the best way to translate that so that it's accessible to future viewers?
And as Regina knows, I've been working for some time on the idea that we can create questions that then you can ask the artist, particularly museums can ask or private collectors can ask at the time of acquisition, that help navigate these possible future choices. The variable media questionnaire is one example, but I'm delighted to see that so many museums and collecting organizations have adopted these acquisition questionnaires and surveys of artists. I also think we need to be asking people outside of the artist. And one of the reasons is what Regina mentioned, that artists aren't always as aware as conservators of how their work might be liable to fragility in the future.
Regina Harsanyi: Yeah, I wanted to add to that that I work with this all the time in terms of browser window sizes. Right now, in the last show I curated, for Auriea Harvey, entropy8.com, which was her website from '95, '96 to 1999, it has a very esoteric browser size that she wanted. It's thin and long. It's not typically what you would think of, a 600 by 800 window. It's cute that throughout the site, if you full-screen it in any way, it reminds you that it's supposed to be this wide at the top on certain pages. But it's fun to go through the exhibition and see people sitting down, and the first thing they do is full-screen it. Actually, when Auriea was in town and we were giving a tour, somebody did that and she stopped them, and she went on a rant about why it was meant to be this very specific size because she was thinking of it as a sculptural object.
Then I worked with an artist who sadly passed, dear Roman Verostko, and it was exactly what Jon's talking about. It was supposed to be this smaller window. We did dictate in the documentation, if you're to buy this website, because it was for sale, that it has to be shown like this. We installed it for an installation before there was an auction of the work, and I installed it on a Mac with it in this smaller window and made the desktop background black. And some people asked, "Is this minimized? Is something wrong?" It's like, no, it's exactly how it's meant to be shown. In both cases, the artists were alive at the time, when I got to talk to them about what their intent was for these pieces. We did an interview. I always think it's so important to involve the artist. And I agree with Jon that you should be asking multiple parties their assistance, sometimes even asking viewers what are their feelings about the work, curators, et cetera. It's really important. But artist's primary source is most important to me. That's an actual term. I believe it was coined by Glenn Wharton, who was the first time-based media conservator at MoMA. Artist's primary source: we need to take advantage of that in their lifetimes to ask them what their intent is so that we can document it. We've lost so many individuals over time that we never got the chance to ask those questions.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I was speaking recently to Samia Halaby about her Amiga 1000 work. It was so important that it was displayed on an Amiga, the actual hardware. She considered the actual hardware the art. I was surprised that more recently it's been displayed on bigger and different screens like billboards. And it really surprised me that that happened. I do think she was consulted and that those were her wishes. But it was certainly a surprise that an artist would say the hardware is so important, it has to be the art.
Regina Harsanyi: There's a difference between somebody going, "Oh, I've consulted with the artist, we can do this," and actually respecting the artist's intent. Many times, when a large institution or a big project and the artist is getting paid and all these things that are very exciting happen, the artist feels like they can't say no. They don't know that they're empowered to push back on what they want because they're afraid of losing the acquisition, the exhibition, the partnership. And so I spend a lot of time educating artists on feeling empowered to push back because it's their artwork. It's really important that if they don't feel comfortable, they really think about the intent as to why they created the piece, that it's not going to get shown on a billboard. Maybe in this case, it did have this type of mutability. I don't know. I didn't talk with her. But also we do see this all the time, this case of the artist made compromises that they didn't necessarily have to make.
Jon Ippolito: Yeah, and I'll just add that if there is no public document where you've done an interview with an artist and you have that documented in video, in written form, in the variable media questionnaire, which is a public site, then you don't have a will and testament that people can refer to and say, this is what the artist wanted, right? So you don't have to use the questionnaire. I mean, it's got Nam June Paik and Cory Arcangel, whatever. But there are artists who've done this themselves. Casey Reas and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, people you've had on your program already, they've decided to share with other artists their thinking about how to preserve works. So any way that we can to put that out there. Sometimes I hear people say things like, you're really pushing artists to not just let their work be by asking them to think through these issues and imagine all these scenarios and consider emulation and reinterpretation and migration. And my response is that, well, if you as an artist don't say, this is the way I want my work, or these are the ways in which I want my work to be preserved, someone else is making that decision for you.
The best example that I can think of is Dan Flavin, the minimalist artist, also from the Panza Collection, whose work was made of light. When the Guggenheim reopened in 1991 or so, there was an exhibition of Flavin's work that took up the whole rotunda. And we went back and forth about what the wall labels should say. And he said, "I don't want them to say bulbs. I don't want them to say fixtures. I want them to say light. My work is light. It is not about the fixture." He died. What happened? His estate went back and started to custom-wire special ballasts into the fixtures so that those could be bought and sold. So I think he's rolling over in his grave. Why? Because he didn't have the testament that Regina is referring to that we could look up publicly and say, I don't think that's what the artist intended.
Regina Harsanyi: However, I don't know if Flavin knew that a lot of these particular bulbs were going to become obsolete in the way they have. And he was so particular about color, like how the light, the exact temperature. And so conservators do have to think pretty heavily and work with very specific groups in remote areas, still going back to the technician idea, of actually making the hardware components of these to the specifications that allow for the exact temperature to be what's displayed. I mean, I think I always... Going to see Flavins is really crazy for conservators and curators because we're always thinking about, is this being displayed properly? Is this the actual light as Flavin intended? I'm always very skeptical. I don't know if...
Jon Ippolito: That was the case during his lifetime, right? So if we lent a Flavin to a museum in Germany as the Guggenheim in New York, we wouldn't send them a bunch of fragile bulbs. We'd tell them, buy the bulbs that fit this standard in Germany, that fit the appropriate voltage and other conditions. So that expectation was already there, and it was just at that point a practical decision. I think that where I get really stuck is this idea that Flavin was deliberately interested in off-the-shelf, easy-to-access material. When those no longer become easy to access, then the kinds of custom creations you're describing, Regina, I don't have a problem with those. A conservator in Germany literally just wrapped a normal white bulb with the gel that was the color of the red bulbs that were the initial problem. But it's more like when a collector gets so fixated on the material, the atoms, as opposed to the experience, that they lose the experience in the process. So I had always worried that a collector would basically say... Someone would come over to your house and you'd see a bunch of inert bulbs in the corner that aren't even lit up and say, "Oh, there's my Flavin." And lo and behold, someone told me an anecdote later of visiting a collector's home where they did literally that. And to me, that's an absolute travesty that no artist should allow to happen if they can avoid it.
Regina Harsanyi: We don't really see this as much with born-digital art collectors, though, if they display the works at all and don't just keep them offline forever. And then they're often displaying them in ways that are not considering artists' intents at all, like with black bars in the wrong aspect ratio and all these other issues, or trying to confine it to a square when it's not supposed to be. And this is a whole other layer of display technology that's owned by these collectors, or even gallerists that are not helping as the facilitators between the artist and the collector on why having specific display technology matters for showing the work. It's not just like, "Here, I hand you a file and you can display it however you want." And that goes to also Jon's point earlier that artists don't often consider all the forms of display on their own. And I often feel like I break that cycle by asking artists if they're okay with it being displayed upside down. And then suddenly they really care and they know exactly how they want the work displayed. Because often they'll be like, "It's okay, even if it's on a phone or if it's projected to the size of the moon." But then I'll be like, "But upside down?" And they're like, "Oh, wait a second. No."
Jon Ippolito: That's a great idea. At the Guggenheim, we had an interview with Nam June Paik for variable media purposes before his retrospective, and the term he came away with was maximum decontrol. He was like, "Oh, wow, you could do anything." And then we went and got a bunch of pictures of a famous work of his called TV Garden, which is TV sets with plants all around. And we showed them to his entire studio crew, and they were like, "Oh, God, that's horrible. No, never do the São Paulo one. There were way too few plants. It looked awful." So when you actually show the pictures or when you ask them if the work can be upside down, you might find that they have predilections that they don't think about conceptually.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think those are really great messages for artists to think about these issues and for them to consider. I'm wondering about the collector perspective and especially from museums. Can you talk about how collectors can learn from museums and how museums approach preservation, especially from your own experience? What are some of the things that collectors can take away from how museums approach digital preservation?
Regina Harsanyi: I'll start in a very cynical way, and then Jon will probably have a lot to say too. But museums still have a lot to learn, like a lot to learn. And again, mentioning that I'm both a curator and a conservator, it's been a very interesting position to be in, being part of acquisition committee meetings. And a lot of the time, when work enters an institution, of course, it's for the historical precedence of the work and this desire to exhibit it and all these things that are outside of the technical needs and specifications. However, I've learned that often curators choose to acquire work for what ends up being emotional reasoning. It's not necessarily logical reasoning. And therefore there is a lot of work that enters collections, time-based media artwork, that has technical problematics that don't get considered in the total cost of ownership at the institutional level still.
And then what happens is, if you don't involve the conservators in that acquisition process early on... There's a term actually called pre-acquisition. There's a pre-acquisition report. Not all museums do pre-acquisition reports, including the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim does not do pre-acquisition, but we do, because I'm holding both roles, where it's like, okay, if I want this work to enter a collection, I should go to the artist studio, review the work, do some of the quality assessments before we decide to actually write the acquisition proposal. That's not happening in other institutions regularly at all. So what happens is the curator will be like, "We got this new work, conservators. Figure it out." And then the conservators are like, "Oh, my God. My budget can't handle even ingesting this into the system and making this something that's presentable." It almost gets shelved.
And then also there's such a backlog. Even institutions that have the privilege of having multiple time-based media conservators, which is incredibly rare... Less than five, I feel like, have even a full-time time-based media conservator. They are just a singular person or just a small team. So there's always this backlog of work that is at risk. The Whitney is another good example. I think you had Joshua Davis on for one of your podcasts, and maybe they even mentioned that there's a work at the Whitney that's Flash-based that at the time wasn't fixed. And this idea that institutions, their job is to exhibit work and educate on work. However, they're not there to constantly conserve everything all the time. It has to have a reason for being conserved, which is a ticking time bomb to me and causes sleepless nights, just the idea of this.
Going back a little bit and being a little less cynical... And there's way more to be cynical about. I've barely touched the surface of how institutions are not doing... I'll say one other thing. I think it's important for everyone listening to understand that institutions... Like, time-based media conservators all know each other. There's not many of us in the world. However, on an institutional level, the standards are not the same across institutions. Think about institutions as individuals that have particular missions and egos. And so therefore they have different metadata, like ways of approaching metadata, ways of approaching their technical questionnaires. And so they don't always speak the same language, even though they're slightly all on the same page. And this also causes huge problematics, not just when there's loans but in general, just in terms of standardization. On one front, what can collectors learn? Collectors can learn what not to do, almost, from institutions in a sense. On the positive side, starting with Jon, who could speak more to this, there's the variable media initiative and the variable media questionnaire at the Guggenheim in 1996. '98?
Jon Ippolito: No, that was '98. But '96 was...
Regina Harsanyi: '98, very impressive. Time-based media conservation becomes a thing in '96, but the idea of these questionnaires really becomes a thing in 1998. That's incredibly helpful, to think about the mutability of work and the fact that there's obsolescence and how to take care of this. So yes, that's a big part of these acquisitions. But I'll also say, again being cynical, that just because a work has entered an institution doesn't mean that technical questionnaire is happening right away, because of backlog. So sorry, everybody. I feel so bad just not being positive about this. Yeah, that's the reality. Okay, one other thing is that a lot of these learnings have historically been wrapped up in institutions and in academia, and a lot of it isn't being shared directly with artists, galleries and collectors. There is gatekeeping. And so I've spent basically my entire career fighting against that.
Jon Ippolito: All right. I said to myself, I'm going to disagree with Regina about something during this podcast because I agree with her on 90 percent of everything. I think podcasts are more interesting when there's disagreement. It's really hard for me to take the pro-museum stance here, but I'll try. I think that I echo the problems you mentioned, particularly this non-interoperability of different museum standards. Like, oh, I use this metadata to catalog a video piece. I use this different metadata. That was the purpose of the variable media questionnaire, to put everything in one place so that we'd have a common standard. I've tried different initiatives around that front, haven't succeeded too well. But I think it's largely to do with the I'm-going-to-make-my-own attitude that a lot of museums have, especially the museums on the frontier who are doing this collecting and accessing works. They often feel like their staff, their technical staff, is going to invent it themselves, which is fine in principle. But if there's nothing in common with other systems, then there's no way to look up, for example, how ZKM or LACMA or the Guggenheim all treated a Nam June Paik installation.
But I will say that one of the things that I think collectors can learn from museums is that sometimes I think of the conservator as the angel of the conscience on the shoulder of the curator saying, "Hey, hold on, we don't have all this stuff. You should really check to make sure that the artist has specified what we need to recreate this work in the future." But in a way, that sometimes very egotistical drive of the curator to like, let's get this work, and let's exhibit it, and let's put it out there, and let me get credit for it. That has a positive side in a way, which is that it makes you exhibit the work. While there are some museums that just hoard stuff, and they put things in storerooms, and they don't have enough time or space in their collection to put it out there, I think there are cases, plenty, where you want to show off your new acquisitions and you go to put them on the wall or on a pedestal or on the floor and they don't work. And you're like, oh, crap. Private collectors have less space in their rooms or their houses, usually, to show things. But if they get in the practice of putting out recent works that they've collected, they're much more likely to encounter those conservation problems. Ideally, they would have done the pre-acquisition questionnaire, but they're more likely to encounter them while they're still in contact with the artist, and they still have a little leverage in terms of like, "Hey, this won't turn on."
We did a show at the Guggenheim based on a whole bunch of essentially video-based works, multi-channel videos. I wasn't in charge of it, but my understanding is that when they went to exhibit it, they opened up all the crates and there were no source materials. There were no DVDs on which the source video was displayed. Why? Because at the time, conservators were checking objects. Oh, it's got a box, it's got a speaker, it's got a plant that goes next to it. They didn't think about that it runs on some digital data you need in order to drive the whole installation. You're not going to find out those problems if you don't exhibit it. The old adage of painting conservators is the best place to store a painting is on your wall in your living room because you can see it and it's safe and no one's going to bump into it and you won't forget it. That's also true of digital works. The best way to conserve them is to put them out on display.
Regina Harsanyi: One other thing I wanted to add: it's not that institutions haven't tried to standardize among each other. The Getty, for a long time, tried to standardize controlled vocabularies and, at some level, metadata. There was another project that tried to bring three museums together to have shared standardizations, and they all ultimately failed. I think it does come down to institutional ego.
Jon Ippolito: I love that term, institutional ego. I will also say that there is a danger in the reverse. I'm also part of the digital preservation community as it relates to libraries and archives, these collections. They have different mandates and different needs. They're typically dealing with hundreds of thousands of objects. Those objects are much more regularized. Even if it's like a video game collection at Stanford, they're still all... They're all on CD and they all are playable in this way and so forth. But they tend to get together in these big industry groups and spend years hammering out some standard that's super abstract and expects all these institutions to fall in line. So for example, OAIS, the Open Archival Information Standard, is the first thing you learn in any digital curation class anywhere. And in my opinion, it's absolutely useless. It just has never been built. It's this abstract formulation. It has some useful ideas like, oh, what's the community that's relevant to this artifact or whatever? But it depends on all these people doing technical things which they haven't done. So as much as I would criticize museums for not getting together and agreeing on things, they're also, again, exhibiting things. They have to put stuff on the walls because they depend on ticket sales to get people in the door and fund their institutions. So the fact that every time there's an exhibition of a work, and I know Regina knows this really well, you're just struggling to capture all of the information required to make these things work... That's actually trial by fire, but it is a really necessary stage of any acquisition process, I think.
Regina Harsanyi: Okay. If collectors really want to understand anything from institutions, it's something called an archival information package or a submission information package. Collectors can learn that they should be going to an artist before they acquire a work or right after they acquire a work and make a checklist, essentially, of everything they need for preservation purposes. Are there archival files? We have something called mezzanine files, the working files, maybe even the working files' environments, like if they were using Photoshop, what version, all that stuff. Having a technical questionnaire and supplemental information, like anything that's going to help them understand that preservation process, all the documentation that goes into that. You need it for everything that you collect. You really do, even if it's just a still PNG. So I'll give it that.
Peter Bauman: A lot of the people that are probably listening to this collect work at least partially, if not primarily, on the blockchain. And I was talking to a media artist the other day, actually, about this upcoming talk about preservation. And they were surprised because they just assumed that blockchain was a storage mechanism and that it was a robust storage solution. Why would we even need to be having this conversation? I'm wondering... I can see, Regina, your face changing. I'm wondering, is that accurate, to think of the blockchain as a robust storage solution, and why or why not?
Regina Harsanyi: No, it is not. Sigh. Where to start? I mean, it's a whole rant in itself. Blockchains, even Ethereum, which wasn't just created to transact the currency. It was also created so that you could build decentralized applications on top of it, communicate through things like Web3.js, et cetera, which is mostly off-chain anyway, but there's this idea of an application layer. Still, it wasn't designed with the idea of being a storage device. We have to think about node operators to really understand this and not just the technical affordances of these chains in themselves. If you actually want to participate in the concept of decentralization with blockchains, you're going to want to become a node operator. You're going to want to... I'm going to keep using Ethereum as an example. You're going to want to use Go to compile and download Ethereum as a way to uphold that chain, to be a node in that system. Full node, archival node, et cetera, whatever. That requires, again... I think my theme for this talk is hardware. Please never think about born-digital anything separate from the fact that there is an incredibly tangible material component. I'm setting up this apparatus in my house and all this hardware that has to run this Ethereum node. And this Ethereum node as a validator also carries the memory of that chain. And in carrying the memory of that chain, it's going to be multiple terabytes. And it's growing all the time because there are how many transactions per second on Ethereum? So I'm managing up to 10 terabytes. I don't know what we're up to now. Maybe we're even past that. It's always growing every time I do these talks. And that is a lot for an individual to...
No node operator wants to be managing multiple terabytes of data and constantly need to update that software. That's the whole other part of this. We talk about blockchains being immutable, but they are constantly soft forking. They're constantly updating. It's software. It's software that has to be compiled and is brittle on some level. It is, and people don't like to hear that. And most people listening don't even run nodes, or they run nodes through a third party, like Infura, who's still doing that, who still has warehouses of servers that are managing all of these terabytes, redundant terabytes of data. So just talking about that, the node operators don't even want to be managing all this data. It's not simple. It's energy-intensive, even though it's not the same environmental issues. It's just like, you have to upkeep, you have to have some developer skills there.
The smart contracts themselves are only a certain amount of kilobytes, a small amount. An email holds more kilobytes, and is very limited when you add an attachment, than what you really should be including on chain. And so most of these works that are applied to the blockchain or are registered to a blockchain aren't even on chain, or have primarily off-chain components, or there's a mix of both. It's not acting as a good storage device. It's not a preservation tool. And again, it's not even immutable. It is constantly changing. There's this initiative, the purge stage... The merge, the purge, et cetera. Like that, that Vitalik initiated partially because node operators don't want to be handling all this data. This idea in the future that transaction data after it's a year old will be purged from the chain to help lessen the load for the node operators, that's going to affect certain artworks and how they run, even if they have mostly on-chain components. To just summarize this, blockchains are software. They're software that has to compile. They're software that has to run on a hardware apparatus, as we currently understand it, which is also going to shift and change. The chains themselves were not built to hold massive amounts of storage. That wasn't the point of them. Most of this is off chain. I'm always shocked at how many individuals, including collectors, still don't understand this because I talk about it so much.
“Please never think about born-digital anything separate from the fact that there is an incredibly tangible material component.” — Regina Harsanyi 38:57
Jon Ippolito: The only thing I might add is the misunderstanding about copyright, which for most examples is something that, again, is a huge misconception of collectors.
Regina Harsanyi: I'll say a little bit about it because... Okay, so I also consult for collectors. I can't say who. There's one particular collector I work with who is the only collector probably in the world doing pre-acquisition reports now and actually cares about what they collect and, if they can, thinking about total cost of ownership. I'm so happy that they exist. They're a beacon for other collectors. I know they're capable. I do these technical interviews with artists that they've already collected. We just did one yesterday. On my questionnaire, I always ask the artist if it's okay if the collector wants to donate the work to a museum. This isn't a question that we would ever have to ask a collector who has purchased a painting or a sculpture, or even a born-digital artwork that has nothing to do with the blockchain. Why we have to ask these artists for works that have NFTs related to them is that from, I guess, a legal perspective, the collector technically only owns the token, only has ownership of the token. I don't know how much this has changed and increased since the last time I've thought about it, but for now, we just want to make sure that we have it in writing, and we have legal agreements for these collectors, archival information packages for these artists, that state that the collector has the rights to display the work, to donate the work, et cetera.
Jon Ippolito: Yeah, and that might sound weird, but remember that people sell the rights to stars or the Brooklyn Bridge or things like that, the bragging rights. NFTs have been given various metaphors, but bragging rights is one of the better ones when it comes to copyright, because just because I've got a star with my name on it doesn't mean I own the star and all the planets and inhabitants there. You have to remember that because these works are typically off-chain. There are some counterexamples. The Bored Apes, for example, I believe, conveyed copyright to the owners of the NFTs. But in almost every case, you do not own that. Again, I haven't looked at the most recent contracts of some of these marketplaces, but you own the right to display a thumbnail, essentially, of the media associated with the NFT.
I would also just say that as much as I like to rag on the blockchain as a preservation medium, because of its cheerleaders touting it that way, every time you have a new technology come along that makes something possible that we all get excited about and even seems to increase access, it often ends up being a vulnerability in the long run. That's maybe just the double-edged-sword nature of these technologies. For example, when the internet came along, suddenly we could all access a website and we could view the artist's work from anywhere in the world and we could see the code. It was right there with view source. How could that ever disappear? Well, we know now that because of changing browser standards, we have to do a lot of backflips to get back at the experience of the original. And in the case of blockchain, that's going to be another vulnerability, in my opinion, in the long run. Sometimes because of the specific software that was used that Regina mentioned, not just the chain itself but dependencies offline and JavaScript and so forth. But also the chain itself could die if there aren't enough node operators and interest diminishes.
Regina and I did a presentation at a conference last year, I guess it was, talking about different strategies for storing, migrating or emulating a chain that broke. And even there, there's questions. So again, emulation is a wonderful tool. I think it's probably the best option for blockchain-based work as well as artificial intelligence-based work, but you have options. It's not obvious what you should do. Should a chain die, should you reset it and run the chain in an emulated environment? Should you fork it? And at whatever point it seems like it's going to die, you keep that one going, but you create a new fork that carries on from where that left off? Or do you continue it and ignore the history and start a new chain from zero? Those are all different choices. Maybe one artist is going to make one choice and another artist is going to make another choice. How are we going to deal with the fact that multiple artists on the same chain have different choices for how they want their work to persevere? These are really thorny questions.
Regina Harsanyi: Just to add to the complications of a new technology coming along, it doesn't necessarily solve every preservation question. I've created four categories for works as they enter institutions that involve blockchain technology. The first tier is true for 90% of artworks, where the artist had registered the work to a blockchain for financial reasons, just to make collectors happy, so that there was this NFT attached to it, that it could be sold with cryptocurrency. Although you could sell a work with cryptocurrency without registering it to a blockchain. That just rarely happens because of the way these things socially work. In those cases, if a museum is interested in that work and the artist approves of such, you don't collect the NFT component at all. You just collect the born-digital assets that are 100% off-chain because they're otherwise not related.
Then there's the second type, which is artists that have completely off-chain work that was registered to a blockchain for conceptual purposes. And so it goes a little bit beyond just the financialization of it. Even though there's no relationship between the exhibition of the work and the chain, the artist still thinks it's an essential component. And so in that case, the museum still has to consider the NFT. Then there's partially on-chain works, which is now we're in the 10% category. It's like 9% of that 10%. It's works that have off-chain components but also on-chain. And there's a behavioral aspect of the work that's essential. So then the museum has to think about that. And then there's the fully on-chain, which doesn't exist, by the way, but I'm leaving that category there just in case, for work that is, say, all ASCII and in the smart contract and doesn't require a specific shape. I say it doesn't really, really exist because, using Autoglyphs as an example, Autoglyphs do not display as intended all the time just by viewing them in a smart contract. It does require some understanding of the particular shape and putting it into a viewer, and the viewer doesn't even show it correctly depending on the browser you're in, et cetera. Often Autoglyphs are upheld as, "Oh, it's fully on chain." But no, it's really hard to find an example that really fits in that category.
Yeah, so institutions should understand, in most cases, they may not have to collect the NFT at all or worry about the blockchain components. But I always laugh to myself that the future is nonprofits, archives and museums being the ones with their hard-forked works, like managing a dead chain so that the works that do involve behavioral components that necessitate the blockchain can still run, and that those institutions are going to be applying for, like, NEA grants and Mellon grants to upkeep that. And again, I know that collectors don't like to hear that, but that's the reality as we see the hardware apparatus has changed, as quantum computing as a personal computing system is on the precipice, and emerging technologies that we haven't even considered yet.
Peter Bauman: I'd like to talk maybe a bit more about copyright, or at least how you would advise collectors to approach copyright. Is it something that they need to think about for every piece? Or how exactly would you advise them to even just think about it?
Regina Harsanyi: Most institutions don't have copyright to artworks that they acquire. Usually the copyright does stay with the artist. I think there's a difference, though, between licensing of copyright for a collector, an institution, and just having no say in copyright at all. For example, I think it's important... Maybe this is controversial. There's a lawyer that I really respect on this topic who hates all copyright. It's nice if, say, a museum or a collector acquires a piece and they still have to pay the artist if they want to publish an image of the work in a book. I just like ways to help continue to compensate the studio and the artist. Or it's great for estates too. Estates really need that funding to uphold an artist's legacy. Having just licensing, or not having the copyright, so that that estate can still continue to be paid for image licensing, is important. However, what collectors need is clear legal documentation that they can publicly display the artwork if they claim to have ownership over the object, which, again, is not an issue with painting or sculpture, these tangible works that are not involved with the blockchain. So the ability to display publicly is something that collectors should be asking artists for, the ability to donate to a museum, like I said. None of that is guaranteed just off purchasing an NFT, like the token component of that.
Jon Ippolito: Yeah, I would just add to that that, as Regina says, traditionally museums in the US have not gotten copyright when they acquire a painting or sculpture, but they do get a non-exclusive right to show it. We talk about copyright as though it's one thing. It's a bundle of different rights. One of the rights is, for example, the ability to have an object in your collection that you decide where it goes, and whether it's in storage, or whether it's on the wall, or whether it's on loan. Obviously, that's a right that every museum would probably argue for an object in its collection. But then there's the rights to the image, which is different. As Regina mentioned, museums typically do not own the rights to the image exclusively, but they can ask for a non-exclusive right to reproduce the image. So that's very common. For example, if you want to put an exhibition catalog together of your collection, you don't want to have to go to the 10,000 artists in your collection and ask each of them for the rights each time. However, there are other countries in which that is the case. For example, in Canada, to display a painting, the museum has to get confirmation from the artist or their estate and typically pay them a fee. So it varies by nation. That said, in the case of NFTs, as I mentioned, as I understand it, at least as of a year ago or so, copyright was not typically conveyed, even the rights to do more than display a thumbnail. So if you want to do more than that, as Regina says, you should definitely have that conversation.
Regina Harsanyi: I wanted to make a statement as well on this point about my own institution. Our institution does tend to ask for the non-exclusive licensing to these images. Of course, all institutions want full rights to being able to display and store the work. However, I tell artists all the time that if an institution is saying, "Congratulations, we want to do an exhibition with you and display a work," even if it's in a group show scenario, that's not enough. In the US, and in my institution, we absolutely always compensate the artist and pay them an artist fee to display their work. So maybe it's not a hard and fast rule in the US, but just because you have the rights to work, if that artist is still living, I believe they deserve a fee.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, this is all, I think, very helpful. And then one thing that we probably have to cover is just some basic strategies for the degens, strategies for preserving blockchain-based work. And ideally, we could also talk about strategies for preserving AI-based work, as that seems to be becoming more important. Maybe first about blockchain-based work.
Regina Harsanyi: Yeah. I mean, as I said earlier, it's about, especially if the artist is living... You bought the work, good for you. Now you need to talk to the artist about getting what would make up an archival information package or an AIP. You do not have everything. What you probably purchased was a compressed file through a platform, and that compressed file is also not necessarily what the artist intended to even show on the web as an exhibition copy. It's likely that they were almost forced into compressing their files under 100 megabytes because that platform didn't feel like paying the server fees necessary that would allow for more than caching the simple compressed file. So you might have nothing. So you better go back to the artist and ask them what their intent was, even for the exhibition copy or the web copy of the work, and get that proper file at the right size. It's going to be larger too. Be prepared, collectors, that AIPs... Say you're collecting a video, where it could be in the three-digit gigabyte number, and you've got to be prepared to store that and everything.
And then thinking about that mutability... Please, if you are a collector who loves, say, generative art, we're talking about, like, Le Random, you need to care about mutability, not immutability, and appreciate the evolving of that piece. And just as a note, like, oh, now do you want to ask the artist for the source code or all of their working files? As I said earlier, some artists will say, "No, that's okay." Maybe you want to have an agreement with them that says that you only get access to that in a certain circumstance, if there's an interventive conservation need. So just don't also expect all artists to yield to everything that you think you need in your archival information package. Listen to them first. Again, please flip the hierarchy a little bit. You are a vessel for the artist's legacy.
Jon Ippolito: So maybe I'll take on the AI challenge, since I don't claim to have expertise over it, but I'm nowhere near Regina's level of understanding in preserving the blockchain. Artists and conservators have just started to think about this. And obviously, as happened with the blockchain when it first came out, generative AI is moving extremely quickly, and it's hard to even know what we'd be preserving in 10 years based on how fast the currents are moving now. That said, I think there's a lot of misunderstandings about large language models, that these language models are somehow constantly adapting to what's around them and to us, and every time we type a prompt into ChatGPT, it's learning from our prompt. That's not the case. So what's happening is these foundational models are trained. It takes a lot of effort to build them, and then they're released periodically. So every time there is a new release, that incorporates as much data as these companies like OpenAI and Microsoft and Google can pull from us, and that data does make it into the new model, but the models themselves are discrete. They're like, oh, this is OpenAI Turbo 3.5, whatever. So that is actually a boon for preservation, because in theory it means you could just emulate the environment on which the model originally ran, and it would be a static piece of software, like a CD-ROM or something.
And the funny thing here is that I think people use a lot of metaphors for AI. Especially the AI boosters are like, this is a superintelligence, this is like a child that's growing, this is an enthusiastic intern, all these animistic metaphors for what these things are. I think a really much better metaphor is a compression algorithm. Regina mentioned that you're likely to get a zipped file when you acquire a blockchain-based NFT. Well, in essence, ChatGPT is a big zip of the internet. It takes 300 billion tokens from the Common Crawl and all these other websites that have been scraped, and it reduces them to about 150 million weights, I think GPT-3 has, which is a huge shrinkage, many orders of magnitude smaller. In theory, it is able to reproduce the knowledge embodied in the internet by taking the prompt, like, what is the capital of France? If there's a lot of data nearby, you're going to get a reasonable answer. If there isn't, you're going to get a nonsense answer. So it's not a perfect system. It's a lossy compression format. But if we think of these things as essentially zip files, then it's just a single file that you essentially run. And if you can run it in the right environment, you can recreate the results. Now, again, artists are always pushing the envelope, so they're going to tweak these systems after the fact. They're going to take a car and put aftermarket parts on it. For example, with Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst's project for the Whitney, it uses, I think, Stable Diffusion under the hood, but it's got this LoRA or fine-tuning that they did on it so that when you type fluffy bunny into the interface, it doesn't give you a fluffy bunny. It gives you Holly Herndon as a fluffy bunny. So it's tweaked in that way.
Regina Harsanyi: Unless you break it, which I've done a bunch.
Jon Ippolito: Did you break it?
“I think a really much better metaphor is a compression algorithm. Regina mentioned that you're likely to get a zipped file when you acquire a blockchain-based NFT. Well, in essence, ChatGPT is a big zip of the internet.” — Jon Ippolito 58:04
Regina Harsanyi: Yeah, I don't want to give away my secrets, but if you type certain words into the prompt in this Whitney piece, you can break it, and it won't show up as the aesthetic that you expect, or that's expected by Holly.
Jon Ippolito: Those edge cases, those cases in which the large language model fails, are very important. They're very important for researchers. They're important for history. Artists have always been the ones to misuse technology to find its secret underbelly. And Regina, you're following in that footstep by messing with Artport. But my point is that in addition to the foundation model, you'd have to glom on what other aspects relate to the artist's work. And again, the problem is always peripherals, right? So if you think about it, like Regina said, there is no such thing as a really truly on-chain work that's all on-chain, that has no external dependencies, because you have to look at it. Maybe some Rhea Myers work you could say, well, that's a conceptual piece. It just changes something on the chain and we never have to see it. But even there, there's usually a website that you can see that documents the results of your change. That transaction is visible. And in almost all generative AI, even the most groundbreaking artists like Eryk Salvaggio, who's pushing the idea of noise in generative AI, there's still something you see. And anytime there's something visible or audible or perceivable, there's going to be a peripheral. There's going to be a display, there's going to be a resolution. There's going to be a surface that it appears on. And that means variable media. I think emulation is probably the most promising strategy right now because basically it's a mathematical series of matrices with weights in them. That's a software file. But you're always going to have to figure out, how am I going to see this thing? And that's going to get into issues of artistic intent and bring in all the other questions that Regina mentioned this whole time.
Regina Harsanyi: Also, we're talking about something like machine learning algorithms, et cetera. It's important to note that most time-based media conservators are working institutionally, and so they have so much on their plate around just dealing with the acquisitions that are coming down to them, and unfortunately don't tend to have time to constantly keep up with the research needed for understanding the technical implications of emerging technologies. So just as institutions are often 10 years behind, so are the conservators. Still, one of the most exciting topics for most time-based media conservators is cathode-ray tubes and CRT monitors and keeping up a Paik, which is incredibly important and super at risk right now. However, even when I try to have conversations with colleagues about the risks of blockchain technology, and now with artists that are using machine learning algorithms, which, of course, I have to state, as we know, as you definitely know, Peter, is not new at all... This has been also happening since the '60s, and it's just grown. I mean, not that there haven't been extreme changes now with the algorithms we have in the last few years. The people who are meant to be experts are not up to date. The last thing I'll say on that front is that the reality is that time-based media conservators are generalists. We all have to be generalists because we're dealing with all the problematics of any emergent technology, any media-archeological technology. That is more knowledge than one individual can ever hold, or even a collection of individuals. We can help advise philosophically and conceptually, and definitely do a lot of interventive conservation practices per project. But the nature of our field is constantly keeping up with the next thing the military invents.
Jon Ippolito: Well put. I would also just mention as an aside that John Bell, who's been a collaborator with Regina and I on some blockchain-based experiments on preservation, is probably going to work with myself and Francesca Franco, who is a conservator based in Europe, and Christiane Paul, who's been on this program, the most important curator, after Regina, of course, of digital art today, on preserving AI-based artworks. So super initial stages, but we've started a conversation. I'm sure there's other groups elsewhere that are talking about it, but we'll see what strategies emerge from these conversations.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I can't wait to learn more about that. I'd love to talk to Christiane more as part of the series. And maybe we can properly wrap up with talking about how we can... And this is not really wrapping up, but talking about how we can break down preservation into component parts. And Jon, I know in your course at the University of Maine, you talk about storage, migration, emulation, reinterpretation. Can you maybe talk, as high level as you can, about some of those things and about how they apply to the time-based preservation motivation that we've talked about so far today?
Jon Ippolito: Sure. Let's take an example. It's easier with an example. So blockchain. A lot of you are interested in blockchain-based works. To store a chain would be essentially to run a node of the type that Regina mentioned, and she described the challenges of that. Clarify for me, Regina, there's a validator node and a mirror node, and those are not the same for Ethereum, right?
Regina Harsanyi: There's more than that. There's four different types of nodes. But I think in most cases, we're talking about running full nodes. So a full node would be validating, and that's where you get into the terabytes. And I know that ZKM tried to run a validator, and they ran into trouble just with bandwidth, even just like the processing back and forth. So there are issues with being... There are levels of storage, right?
Jon Ippolito: But if you just wanted to be a mirror node, in theory, you're just copying the current state of the chain and participating in essentially decentralized archiving. So that's something you could do that would fall under the category of storage, I would say. But still there, you've got a series of choices you have to make, depending on... For a chain that dies, say, are you just going to let your node expire? Well, what's the point? Are you going to freeze it? So you say, well, I'm just going to take a snapshot of the chain at that one moment. Again, that debilitates the transactional nature of some of the more creative uses of the chain. Are you going to try to sustain it by running your own validator, and you're the only node operator left in the universe that runs that particular chain? So even with something like storage, there are choices that have to be made. I don't think storage is a great option. There's an obsession with storage that the archivists and the librarians have that I think is really misplaced. They spend all this time doing fixity checks to make sure a file is really the same file when you transfer it from one hard drive to another. But they forget that all the software and hardware necessary to run that file don't come along with the process. And that's why you need those packages. Those are a good start that Regina mentioned. My analogy is fixity is like a seat belt. It helps to put it on, but you're sitting in a car with a volcano about to erupt next to you. You need to drive the car and get the hell out of there.
Regina Harsanyi: Also, the fixity checks... They usually use MD5 checksums institutionally, even though we've moved beyond that now, and they have their own security issues. So they're like 10 years behind.
Jon Ippolito: Yeah, it's a pain. So storage, again, seat belt. It's necessary. It's great. It's helpful. It's not the solution by itself. What else do we got? Well, we got migration. So migration for a chain would be to move from one chain to another chain. And that's tough. That's hard. Migration is always a challenge in any... I can't think of an example of where there's an easy migration. You always think like, oh, I just click and I go from macOS, I don't know, 10.6 to 10.7. And there's always some weird thing that doesn't work anymore, and you have to go back and manually recreate. The way I think of migrating a blockchain that's failing is to literally do a paper ballot, where you basically copy over somehow all of the data and put it in a new chain. I don't know, Regina, if you've got any other ideas, but that's the only one I could think of.
Regina Harsanyi: They did that when Ethereum moved from proof of work to proof of stake. It was years of manually copying over all the data. And you think about how nightmarish that is and how contrary it is to what we expect from these automated technologies, that we don't even need humans in the loop. Well, guess what? If you're going to migrate, you do. Emulation makes sense, though, because, again, if 90-plus percent of the work that's associated with blockchain technology is off-chain, and it's focused on third-party dependencies like Google Drive or Amazon, AWS, et cetera, there's also this lack of control over migration in many cases.
Jon Ippolito: Yeah. No, migration is a pain in the butt. The other thing about migration is that every time you do it, you have to start over. There's no economies of scale or learning. There's a very minimal amount you learn and benefit from previous migrations. If you switch from, oh, I used to use a BlackBerry, and then I switched to Android, and then I switched to iPhone... The switch from Android to iPhone wasn't made easier by your switch from BlackBerry to Android. It was a totally different process and a total... You had to start from scratch and do it all again.
The advantage of emulation, the third strategy, is that once you emulate a platform at the chip level, you can basically run anything that ran on that chip. So that's why emulators are popular with preservationists now. We didn't come up with hardly anything. I think I did a study: something like 85% of emulators came from games. Something like 10% came from academia and maybe 5% from preservationists. We're exploiting the fact... We're jumping on this train that other people made so they could play Super Mario and PlayStation games, whatever, on their PC. We're using that to play accounting software or old artist websites or whatever. That's a huge advantage emulation has. I mentioned before there are several options, forking and resetting and so forth, for emulating blockchain. But there again, it's the stuff that isn't in the emulated software that's the problem. All those off-chain assets that Regina referred to that are on IPFS or often Google Drive or somewhere, not to mention the display context where you would see it, like the monitor resolution.
The last one, reinterpretation, is the most powerful, but it gives the most artistic leeway, and many preservationists don't even consider it a form of preservation at all. It's essentially a re-performance that tries to capture the spirit of the work as opposed to a literal recreation of the original experience. It's interesting to ask what that might be for a blockchain-based work. We have many examples of performance reinterpretations where someone will set Hamlet in a chat room, or West Side Story as a reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet. But I'm not really sure what that would mean for blockchain, unless it was perhaps using a very different technology to achieve a similar validated idea. Maybe it's affixing a billboard to the Empire State Building where it indicates all the records that people have, and you can all see them and you can't touch them, so they're immutable but also transparent. I don't know. Regina, do you have any ideas about what reinterpretation would be like for a blockchain?
Regina Harsanyi: Yeah, I got it quite literally. There's works that continue to mint tokens over, say, a year span as part of a performance of the piece itself. And you could simulate that in whatever environment if they look the same on the front end. However, just because you can doesn't mean you should. It seems highly unethical, and that requires a lot of conversation with the artist. Again, this is why as close to the production period of the work, close to the time the work is deployed, that is when you should be having a conversation with the artist about what their wishes for the future of that work are. If you get that documented now, and the artist is okay with it simulating the idea of what may have been happening in the past for the piece, then that's okay. We also want to be then transparent... At least I would like to be transparent with the public about those differences. The simplest example is, for many years, when a 35-millimeter film was shown in galleries, but it was converted, was transcoded, to an H.264, like an MP4. For so long, even at the Guggenheim, it would just say 35-millimeter film, and I'd be like, no, I'm watching this on a projector. Obviously, on a digital projector, you clearly transcoded this. I'm watching this video. Now that practice has luckily changed. In the last decade, we do normally see on a wall text, film transferred to video, and as much detail as possible. We would need to do the same thing and have the same level of transparency, or even more transparency, about it not being exactly as intended on the back end. But again, I only feel comfortable with that if it's documented by the artist, if that's okay, and that's really clearly communicated and we're on the same page about that flexibility.
Jon Ippolito: I think that's absolutely true. I also just realized I remembered an example of a reinterpreted blockchain. It's actually, instead of going into the future, which is what most reinterpretation is, imagining what this would be like once the technology has died, this is actually going to the past, before blockchain existed. There was some precedent, that Regina may know of, of some researchers who posted classified ads in the New York Times and used it... There was some timestamp that they included, and that was their way of publishing in an immutable record this chain. You can look it up. I think it was in the 1990s or something like that. There's a really funny predecessor of blockchain that we can go back to if the solar flare or climate change wipes out all our current internet and blockchain abilities.
Peter Bauman: Wow. Yeah. It seems like one of the main takeaways is that collectors and artists, well, first of all, just need to be thinking about this and taking it more seriously, but also they need to be in greater dialog about this, or it's going to be an even larger challenge. And then I'm wondering if both of you just maybe very quickly could tell where people could learn more. So, Jon, you, of course, have that course, and so much of it is available online already. And I've been shilling that course. I've been telling a lot of people about it to check it out. So if you want to say anything about it. And then, Regina, could you also please tell people where they could possibly learn more about maybe more blockchain-based preservation? Thanks.
Jon Ippolito: I'll just mention that the digital curation or digital preservation course is part of a digital curation graduate certificate. You take four courses, they're all online, and you get this graduate thingy that should train you in the workflow associated with acquiring an object in the digital world. So whether it's born digital or you have to digitize it, you acquire it in your collection, you add metadata so it can be discovered, you put it online in a database and then you preserve it. And so you can find out more about that by searching for digital curation at the University of Maine. I will also say we have an amazing group of students from all over the place. They're not necessarily from the art world or even the museum world. We've got people, from the year before last, the head of patient relations at Walter Reed Medical Center. We have the Registrar of the US House of Representatives in Congress. We had a woman who's the curator of the US Naval Undersea Museum, where they've got, like, unexploded torpedoes and films from sea spies with cameras attached to their bodies. And it's a pretty interesting mix of students, so I always enjoy those conversations.
Regina Harsanyi: I'm working on a few related projects. One is the Transfer Data Trust that was co-founded by Kelani Nikole, who is the founder of Transfer Gallery, which is on its way to becoming a nonprofit. I'm working on a project right now with five artists where we're putting NAS drives, network-attached storage drives, in each of their studios, pairing them with a group of wonderful time-based media conservators. Each of them are helping to create AIPs for works that they're staking within this decentralized collective that right now is using Filecoin and IPFS, among other protocols, but isn't reliant on that. I really, really need to make it about the process, in this variable media initiative type way. The great thing about that project is not only are we helping these five artist studios out with preventive conservation processes, but there's a front end to it that we're working on so that others can access this information. It's a grant-funded project that we're in the midst of right now. We're going to make the entire project open source. So the infrastructure that we're building, hopefully within the next two years, will be something that others can clone and deploy for their own decentralized consortiums that are focused on preservation processes.
And then I'm part of a curriculum that was started by Gray Area in San Francisco called DWeb for Creators. Our first cohort, which was an eight-week course with 40 students, is up online. So I link that on the site as well. Anybody can access that, all the lectures that we did. I sometimes go into depth on preservation, but it's also education on the history of the decentralized web beyond blockchain. There's a lot of the decentralized web that has nothing to do with blockchain that I think would be helpful for others to understand. We're doing another cohort next year, and you're all welcome to sign up for that class, which, again, will include some preservation teachings. And I'm actually writing a syllabus and course right now to be taught at a university in 2026 on the topic of preventive conservation protocols for artists. It's specifically geared towards BFA and MFA students. I'm very excited about this and hope that in the future the idea of teaching preventive documentation to artists becomes a pedagogical standard. So I'll leave it there.
Jon Ippolito: Well, I wish I had a time machine to go back and be a student in Regina's classes. Do you take old curators?
Regina Harsanyi: Absolutely. Well, you would be a guest, and you're obviously a huge inspiration to all of the work that I'm doing, and for many of us time-based media conservators. So of course I talk about the variable media initiative constantly, to even my current students, and it's not even a preservation class.
Jon Ippolito: We promised we weren't going to compliment each other. I would have spent 10 minutes talking about you, Regina.
Regina Harsanyi: Yeah. I mean, Jon essentially, to the conservation field, at least in my mind, invented time-based media conservation. As I said, Rhizome started in '96, two years before the variable media initiative, and so did the Electronic Media Group out of the American Institute of Conservation, 1996. But the idea of the technical questionnaire and what's come out of that really started with Jon.
Jon Ippolito: It was a lot of really important people who have been there alongside me in the trenches. And it's great to see people like Regina really going far past us in figuring out not just theories on how to make these things work, but actually working directly with artists and creating new initiatives like the ones she just described. It makes me hopeful for the future.
Regina Harsanyi: But Jon is leading the work on the AI stuff right now. Like, all the publications coming out, I haven't even had a chance to wrap my head around all of them. So it's not like you're not busy doing the good work.
Peter Bauman: No, I mean, you're both incredible, and I need to be a student in both of those courses. And this has been incredibly rich and dense and also just went by very quickly. I've learned a lot. I think anybody listening also has. And so I really can't express enough of my gratitude. And just thank you both so much for your time. It was really valuable. Thank you.
Jon Ippolito: Thanks, Peter. Enjoyed it.
Regina Harsanyi: Thanks, Peter. Thanks so much.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. Thanks. Take care. And let's be in touch.
.jpg)