AIC's 46th Annual Meeting

This joint paper proposes a new treatment method for the conservation of software-based art that was developed as part of the ongoing research collaboration between the Guggenheim Conservation Department and the Department of Computer Science at New York University. The new treatment technique, termed “code resituation” by the authors, is tailored to serve artworks where code intervention is necessary to restore the artwork’s functionality. Traditional code migration, as practiced by computer programmers, includes the deletion and replacement of non-functional, original code. Intended behaviors and discernable output of an artwork would be recreated by means of contemporary programming languages, aiming for the most elegant and efficient programming solutions currently available. This traditional migration approach, the authors argue, has the potential to strip an artwork of some or all traces of the artist’s hand. His or her choice of programming language, artistic expression as seen through nuances in the source code and algorithmic detail, code annotations and unrealized drafts can all be lost in code migration. Code resituation, instead, aims to preserve the original artist’s code while adding conservation code to reanimate the original to full functionality. With the development of this new treatment approach, the authors apply the conservation principle of minimal intervention to the conservation of software-based art. The new method of code resituation was successfully tested on three artworks from the Guggenheim collection, which were treated in the course of the Guggenheim’s initiative “Conserving Computer-based Art”.