Jessica Walthew and Ben Fino-Radin
Electronic Media Review, Volume Seven: 2021-2022
ABSTRACT
In 2014 Planetary, a music visualization app by Bloom Studios (created in 2012) was the first iOS application acquired by the Smithsonian. Its pathbreaking trajectory began at its acquisition, which was unusual in that it was led not by curators but by the museum’s Digital and Emerging Media department. The museum negotiated an innovative arrangement with the designers, who were already starkly aware of the longevity and preservation concerns embedded in their use of emergent technologies (the then-novel iOS/iPad platform). The designers agreed that it would be in the interest of preservation for the museum to not only acquire and document the project’s source code, but also to release the full source code on Github to encourage users anywhere to riff on or remix the code, or to volunteer to keep the app up to date as programming conventions changed. Knowing the designers could not agree to solve future obsolescence challenges, lead designer Tom Carden nonetheless offered to review changes to the code as they might arise. Nearly immediately, issues began to pop up: updates to Apple’s operating system meant that newer devices failed to run the app properly. Fast forward to 2016, when the now four-year-old app faced serious conservation issues: the operating system on which it ran was now 7 versions out of date, and some of its code was facing deprecation. The museum’s digital consultants Small Data Industries estimated it would require hundreds of hours of programming work to reengineer the outdated components, an investment the museum could not make. Things looked dire. It was not until the global pandemic in 2020 that a programmer in Sydney emailed out of the blue to say he had “remastered” Planetary and released a working version on the App store. This paper charts the story of Planetary’s revival or resurrection in its remastered form and describes how the museum’s conservation norms had to evolve to accommodate outside expertise. This work resulted in a decentering of the museum as locus of preservation, and a dissolution of the museum’s control over the work.
AUTHORS
Jessica Walthew
Conservator
Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
New York, NY, USA
Ben Fino-Radin
Founder and Lead Conservator
Small Data Industries
Brooklyn, NY, USA