AIC's 46th Annual Meeting

In recent years, New Media Art has become one of the mainstreams Art trend in Taiwan. As museum starts to collect those artworks, how to preserve and conserve the New Media Artworks also becomes a challenge for those Contemporary Collecting Institutes. Comparing to the New Media Art preservation and conservation pioneers, such as U.S and some European countries, it seems Taiwan has started a little bit late. Due to the lack of experience, when National Museums in Taiwan face the challenge, there are rarely no in-field references to consult. This is a case study about the restoration of a New Media artwork, “Goang-ming Yuan, The Reason For Insomnia,1998 “, which its original software malfunction that trigger the interaction between the artwork and the audience is no longer capable to debug the software error. During the research, there are already some Contemporary and New Media Art conservation team from U.S and European countries chose Open Source Software as a tool to conserve these kinds of artworks. In this conservation project, museum members also decided to migrate the original Software to Open Source Software. After the migration, the works has return to its original function and able to exhibit again. This research focus on the New Media Art collection of National Museums in Taiwan, try to use Open Source Software as a technical method to conserve New Media Artworks, and evaluates its superiority and risk that may cause from the method.