AIC's 46th Annual Meeting

The rapid evolution of modern digital technologies has made tremendous impact on human culture, and has fundamentally changed our ways of life and perceiving the world. Advanced sciences and technologies have been more than ever innovated so that preserving the cultural heritage of digital technology has become a trend for museums worldwide. In Taiwan, new media art works starting to gain population from 2006. Up to now, all domestic representative museums do preserve new media art works. Among them, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art (NTMoFA) collects the largest amount of collections. The work regarding acquiring, cataloging, preserving, conserving and restoring of the collections is the key function that a museum maintains the originality and authenticity of its collections. However, new media art works constantly challenge the past concept of minimal intervention when maintaining and restoring art works to their original forms which more emphasizes on the physical maintenance and restoration. The challenge is due to re-producibility property, form of multiple presentations, cooperative exchange, and fast technology evolving form of modern society, as a result of numerical representation of new media arts. This research’s main objective is to understand the actual impact made and its associated reasons when Taiwan public art museums are executing the affair of preserving, conserving and restoring the new media art works. By reviewing the related literature, we first investigate the characteristics of new media art, how it has been developed in our country, principles of preserving and restoring the art collections, and its necessary professional museum expertise and ethnics. Next, we will further study the discussion in the related domestic literature on the subjects of new media art works’ preservation and re-exhibition. Furthermore, we summarize the obtained experience from both inside and outside our country, and the associated challenge and opportunity in preserving new media art works. Finally, we specifically investigate the new media art collections of NTMoFA as a case study. This research adopts the method of semi-structured in-depth interviewing. The professionals to be interviewed include those who are practitioners in preserving and repairing art works. We particularly take three NTMoFA's new media art collections as the main subjects for the interview, and reconstruct on-site real scene of preservation and restoration. Lastly, from both aspects of new media's cultural and computer layer, we analyze the transformation of meaning in the museum’s reservation and conservation principles, followed by summarizing the research and proposing conclusion. We suggest that based on current administrative system, it is necessary to build up new methodology and strategy for conserving new media art works in full scale.Hopefully, this research can provide a useful reference and different vision to related practitioners of art museums and other interdisciplinary people who are interested in conservation of new media art works.