Patricia Falcão, Klaus Rechert, Dragan Espenschied, and Tom Ensom
The Electronic Media Review, Volume Five: 2017-2018
Abstract
Emulation has evolved over the last few years to become a viable preservation strategy and is becoming more and more common, not only in archives but also in Museum practice. In order to better understand when and how to use it, as well as what processes and infrastructure must be in place, Tate collaborated with Klaus Rechert from Freiburg University to develop a workflow, and created a report describing a framework for the use of emulation for preservation of artworks. This was made possible by PERICLES, a European funded project which focuses on evaluating and representing the risks for long-term digital conservation of digital resources. As part of that collaboration we then tested that approach in a workshop with the participation of Dragan Espenschied of Rhizome on works from the Tate’s collection. Later the same process was applied to net art pieces in Rhizome’s collection.
As illustrations, we will use two examples from the Tate Collection, Sow Farm by John Gerrard (T14279), Subtitled Public by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (T12565), and The File Room by Antonio Muntadas from Rhizome’s collection. We were able to demonstrate that the proposed workflow is applicable to a very broad range of software-based artwork, from interactive installations to web-based projects. It provides a useful tool to reveal technical boundaries of software ensembles, and discover useful technical abstractions that work across different artifacts, which in turn help to define treatment approaches. Tate is now planning to implement this process across the other works in the Collection and any new acquisitions; Rhizome is applying this process to the body of its collection.