{"id":4306,"title":"Preserving the Rhizome ArtBase","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/node/4306","version":"2577f2837d14c4184d4ec16bafc3e192139cf7a1fbf58504dced449506f1039e","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.3927782+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Richard Rinehart"}],"authorKeys":["Richard Rinehart"],"subjects":["Preservation Texts","Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Rhizome","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Rhizome","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"2002","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"New York, NY","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1812","url":null},{"label":"Original publication","value":"Rhizome","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Preserving the Rhizome ArtBase.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/node/4306.","publication":"Richard Rinehart. Preserving the Rhizome ArtBase. Rhizome. 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Richard Rinehart. September 2002. Discussion of preservation strategies for new media and net art. \u003C\u003E With thanks to Rhizome for permission to reproduce. Preserving the Rhizome ArtBase Richard Rinehart 2 Table of Contents Preserving the Rhizome ArtBase................................................................................... 1 Introduction....................................................................................................................... 3 Emulation as a Preservation Strategy .......................................................................... 4 Recommendations ........................................................................................................... 5 Tools................................................................................................................................ 11 Collection Policy ............................................................................................................. 12 Obtain and Store Copies of Software ......................................................................... 12 Storage Migration Strategy........................................................................................... 13 Conclusion on Emulation .............................................................................................. 14 3 Introduction Rhizome.org is an online platform for the global new media art community. Its programs and activities support the creation, presentation, discussion and preservation of new media art: a broad and flexible set of creative practices employing or responding to new technologies, including software, databases, network protocols, hardware, robotics, and multimedia tools. These practices take many forms, from web sites to performances and installations. New media art is often interdisciplinary, blurring the boundaries between established disciplines and involving artists and others in collaborative processes. Because new media technologies are themselves changing and converging at a rapid pace, the field is constantly in flux. The ArtBase is Rhizome\u0027s online archive of new media art2. Initially conceived and developed as an archive of net art projects exclusively, the scope of the ArtBase has since been expanded to include other forms of new media art, such as software, games, and web-based documentation of installation and performance works. The ArtBase includes works of historical significance that are submitted by the artists themselves, or by the owners of commissioned artworks, through an online submission process. The term ArtBase here refers to both the tools and system used to document the artworks as well as the artworks themselves. This paper outlines the key steps Rhizome should consider taking toward preserving the works of art included in the Rhizome ArtBase, and indicates measures Rhizome may take in the near future to test the strategy of emulation in particular. It outlines a general method for preserving new media art. Although it discusses some of Rhizome\u2019s current policies, it also includes steps, which may be impractical for Rhizome to take at this stage. Overall, this paper defines a research agenda for a long-term new media art preservation project to be undertaken by the arts and cultural community in the future, with the ultimate goal of developing solutions for the preservation of new media art. It is thus both a working paper for Rhizome and a map of Rhizome\u2019s contribution to the larger effort to preserve artworks in digital and other variable media. This effort builds on Rhizome\u2019s existing systems for the submission, storage and display of artworks and their accompanying metadata (descriptive and technical information about the artworks). A key part of this system, the ArtBase Artist Questionnaire, gathers information necessary for guiding future preservation measures, including documentation, migration, emulation and reinterpretation. This questionnaire was developed in conjunction with the Guggenheim Museum\u2019s Variable Media Initiative3. The testbed project proposed in this paper is a further step in the community-wide effort to develop a working strategy for preserving new media art, and dovetails with concurrent initiatives within the 4 community, such as Archiving the Avant-Garde4, one of the first practical test cases preparing to use the strategy of emulation for preservation. Computer emulation has been proposed by Jeff Rothenberg in several papers to the digital libraries community as a strategy for preserving digital documents5, and has also been suggested as a partial preservation strategy for new media art6. Emulation as a Preservation Strategy One of the central problems facing preservationists in the future will be how to run old, obsolete software and documents on new systems. As a strategy for addressing this problem, emulation is especially suited to works of digital media art. Hardware emulation involves writing a new piece of software for a future computer that causes that computer to mimic, or emulate, all of the hardware behavior of an earlier computer. For instance, if one wanted to run a piece of software from 1999 (say a work from the ArtBase) on a computer in 2050, then one would write a piece of software called an \u201Cemulator\u201D which would cause that 2050-era computer to appear to all software as if it were a computer from 1999. Once this emulation software was in place, one could run the original software from 1999, including the operating system, the application program and all the document files. The original software would run because it interfaces to the computer itself through the emulator which translates all the requests of the original software into contemporary terms for the computer hardware and vice versa. This is not the only way one might preserve a work of new media art (other possible strategies include re-creating the work from scratch in contemporary media based on instructions from the artist, documenting the work with more stable media, and migrating the work to a newer standard or platform), but emulation could comprise one key component in an overall strategy intended to serve multiple goals. To understand emulation, it is helpful to outline the layers of which current computer systems are comprised. These layers form a ladder climbing from the bottom hardware/machine level to the individual document/file and include: Document/file Application/program software Operating System (OS) Hardware Rothenberg makes a strong case for emulating only the bottom, hardware, layer, and then running the original OS, application and document within the hardware emulator. He argues that hardware is well documented on a technical level, and that this approach gives us the most leverage for the investment (for the work of writing just a few hardware emulators, we could run dozens of operating systems, thousands of applications, and millions of documents). 5 This strategy has potential advantages and disadvantages when applied to new media art. For instance, all current forms of emulation focus on the stand-alone computer and not the network per se. Many net artworks integrate the Internet into the work \u2013 for instance, calling in live data-streams from servers around the world. Emulation will never be able to emulate the entire Internet environment needed for some artworks, but there may be ways to mitigate this condition. One might be to record the specific types of network functionality the artwork relies on, so that this too may be emulated in the future. For instance, if a current work pings IP addresses on the Internet, but in the future both Ping and IP are obsolete protocols, then an IP-style number generator could take the place of real IP pinging in the future work. It is nonetheless likely that emulation will be able to preserve only some or most of the aspects of a work and that, in many cases, the emulated artwork will serve primarily as a snapshot or fragment to preserve some critical historical evidence in original form. Anyone involved in the preservation of art will recognize that well-preserved fragments can have great historical value. There are additional challenges to be overcome if emulation is to become a vital strategy for the preservation of new media art. For instance, will emulators be stand-alone applications or network-based application services? Will emulators be entirely server-based, or will they be able to divide functionality between server and client? These challenges are daunting, and raise significant artistic as well as technical issues, but the key fact is that they are surmountable, and the potential for preserving original new media art into the long-term is highly motivating. Recommendations Rhizome should take the following preparatory steps in anticipation of the future need for, and availability of, emulation software: 1. Decide which metadata to capture or create about the original work of new media art and about the original software needed to actualize that work in the future. 2. Make a tool for collecting and managing this metadata. 3. Draft internal collection policies, which accommodate and document Rhizome\u2019s archiving practices. 4. Obtain and store legal copies of software, such as operating systems, browsers and plug-ins, required to run ArtBase artworks. 5. Develop a strategy for preserving or migrating and storing the original software and original documents of the artwork needed for future emulations. 6. Participate in collaborations with other institutions involved in the preservation of new media art, especially those projects which may address additional issues not addressed here, such as intellectual property rights around commercial software and developing emulation software. 6 Metadata Metadata is \u0022data about data.\u0022 The term applies to records in the Rhizome ArtBase, as they contain information about data-based artworks. Rhizome will need to manage two types of metadata in the preservation process (some of this metadata is already captured and managed in the ArtBase). It is standard practice in the cultural heritage community to identify at least three types of metadata: descriptive (information which is used to search for, identify, and explain the artwork being described); administrative (information needed for the internal management of the artwork such as legal, storage, and non-public provenance information); and technical (information about the infrastructure and materials of an artwork necessary for preservation and handling). Rhizome should capture or create these three types of metadata, once for the artwork and again for the technology. 1. Metadata about the original artwork (artwork metadata). This includes: A. Descriptive metadata (creator, date, genre, etc) that is already stored in the ArtBase database and is used for discovery and display. B. Administrative metadata (who owns rights to reproduce work, what parameters have the artist and/or current repository imposed for future recreations of the work, what is the general structure of the work, where are the actual files stored, etc). C. Technical metadata (what technologies are used to run the work, what is the function of each, etc). 2. Metadata about the original software/technology needed to run the work (technology metadata): A. Descriptive metadata (creator of software, date and current version, type of software, etc). B. Administrative metadata (who owns right to run or modify code, what are the parameters of such rights such as time limitations, platform limitations, limitations on purpose, where actual application files are located, the general structure and what other software is required for running, etc). C. Technical metadata (what bottom-level code was used to create software; for example, Flash was written in C\u002B\u002B). It is recommended that these two categories of information--one about the artwork itself, the other about the technolog","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":35939,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}