If you work in a medium that is heavily, if not entirely,
software dependent you will find it arduous and expensive to archive your work,
if a retrievable archive is possible.
Much of the work I did in the 1980’s is irretrievable either because of
physical problems such as a faulty JAZ drive (a special Iomega disc format for
large files like digital video that was notoriously twitchy), or the operating
system, hardware, and software, are non-existent (got a copy of DigiPaint on
Amiga DOS?).
Of course, my photochemical film negatives for the last forty years are still
available to me. Much of my video work from the 80's and 90's is still available to me since it was
done on Hi-8 and ¾ SP formats that most post houses still keep around, although
I've transferred little of it and the tapes are certainly physically
deteriorating. A decade ago I paid to transfer some of my work to DAT format. Now the DAT is pretty useless so I’ll
have to go back for more transfers to some hard drive that I can continue to move the data to current
configurations.
And after I’m gone?
Who will pay to keep all that data on line somewhere? Most likely, no one. And I don’t have that much digital
work in terms of file size. Early files were small. Some of my friends have been
working in digital photography for decades and have massive amounts of data.
The only saving grace is that what seems like massive
amounts of data now, twenty years from now will appear quaint, and thus the
cost of archiving could be minimal.
However, there would still be the need for some sort of software to open
the files. So I could continue to
make updated archives of my DigiPaint files, but how would anyone ever open
them? Digital artwork is
transient.
And that transience is a real problem not just for historians of the future: if you’re work cannot
be archived, stored, and easily retrieved, it cannot be commodified. And if it cannot be commodified, you
cannot earn a living doing it because no gallery in its right mind would buy work
that 5 years later no one can view. Or think in terms of film making: if I make 5 films and do well with them, twenty years from now I can sell that catalog. If I make 5 VR experiences, in twenty years no one will be interested in looking at them, much less paying for them.
VR art being done now will be uninteresting in 48 months and
only of historical interest in two decades, if anyone will even be able to
experience it. And will they want
to? Keep in mind the experience
will be “poor in quality”, similar to current VR users experiences of 1990’s
Quicktime VR (if they have the correct version of Quicktime on a Mac OS that
will run the older version). So
who will want that experience? I
suppose a few works will be maintained by art museums, but even those institutions
come and go. Pottery, mosaics,
paintings, these have lasted thousands of years. Digital, mmm . . . about a decade, maybe two on certain
platforms.
So do you quit working in digital and take up pottery? No (unless you want to). Do the art you do and be active in
saving and archiving. Besides, if
you got into art to make money, well . . . good luck with that.
