[Image: Mirage by Annette Weintraub, 2001] Hello, everyone, Trebor has kindly asked me to start a topic on the list. I am interested in asking some questions about the longevity or ’shelf life’ of new media art, as it affects individual studio practice, curation and archiving- particularly from the pov of the practitioner. The question of shelf life as it applies to the currency of ideas or movements or the historical record is tangential, but could play some role in the discussion.

First, let me introduce myself: I am an artist who began her career as a painter, and began working with digitally manipulated images in the late 80s; I started making web-based projects and video in the early 90s while continuing to make still images. I’m interested in the visual language of architecture and how the built environment and the intrusion of media in public space shape our psychological sense of place, and ultimately our behavior and perception. I’m currently working on a series of still images based on 3D models that are hybrid representations of constructed urban space. I’m also working on a web project that reinterprets a series of texts on urbanism through changes of visual presentation. I am a professor at The City College of New York where I founded and teach in the BFA of Electronic Design and Multimedia, although I’m now taking a short turn as Department Chair.

I started thinking about shelf life some time ago when It became evident that if I was going to preserve some of my earlier web-based work, I would have to go back and ‘update’ it. I did this, but not without some small resentment, because I prefer spending time making new work as opposed to reworking the past, and also not without some uneasiness that at some future date I might have to do this all over again. (of course, one response might have been to leave things alone). I began to look at my video and print work with a different eye-it had an agreeable stability, the work was ‘finished,’ fixed in time, and aside from possible conservation issues had an independent existence in the world.

Art is not always about object-making, and perhaps for web-based work, non-objectification is an essential attribute which comes with a different expectation of the work’s lifespan or perpetuation. That may be true of other kinds of new media practice as well. However I increasingly am getting the sense that many new media artists have a kind of retrofit fatigue that has little parallel in other kinds of artistic practice. There seems to be an odd paradox of ‘long gestation, short lifespan’ that seems very particular to new media. Frequently, in conversations with students or peers, I’ve struggled to describe work created in a technological climate that no longer exists, or tried to give context to work that was created when some particular web mechanism spawned a run of very interesting projects that no longer work because the underlying browser technologies have changed. Not only is the work literally unavailable, but the creative climate in which it was created sometimes seems increasingly remote, even after just a few years.

Ephemerality in art is nothing new, but perhaps this is a different kind of transience than that of other modes of art that exist momentarily and then reside in memory or photo documentation-performance, conceptual art, body art, and site-specific work come to mind. The Kinetic Art of the 60s was more purely sculptural; although perhaps it can be better categorized just as sculpture that came with built-in, future mechanical problems. While performance or conceptual art can be spontaneous, gestural, open-ended and casual, that’s often not the case of new media production. Many new media artists work on large-scale projects that involve a period of research into new technologies, prototyping, collaborations with others from other disciplines or other practices for which a long period of development is often the norm.

Mythically, art objects have been imagined [or hoped] to have a kind of eternal life. Barring physical destruction, but acknowledging cultural difference, contextual change, and continuous reinterpretation, the [traditional] art object has a kind of inner stability/integrity that defies time. This is often irrespective of judgments of quality or fashion, but something that resides in the object itself, an indissoluble lamination of medium and idea. The Tamayo painting that recently was found in the trash went through cycles of loss and discovery, but it remained recognizable as a painting, and even buried in trash was ‘available’ to be rediscovered.

What do we claim for new media art? Do works expire when the technologies that are their raison d’être have become commonplace and are rendered invisible by change? Is there a quality of reduced shelf life in new media, in which technologies experimented with and then abandoned or surpassed go the way of Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project? And if so, what does that mean for individual studio practice in this area?

I’m most curious to hear from those of you who have orphaned interactive projects, web pieces that break in the current browsers and garages full of boxed-up installations that run on equipment that’s no longer produced.

Best,
Annette Weintraub

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