New media art preservation

The conservation and restoration of new media art is the study and practice of techniques for sustaining new media art created using from materials such as digital, biological, performative, and other variable media.

Artists' increased use of multi-media, digital, and internet media since the 1960s has called into question the conventional strategies by which society preserves, cares for, and redisplays cultural artifacts created with or on ephemera media formats. While the most obvious vulnerability of new media art is rapid technological obsolescence, the study of its other aspects that defy traditional conservation—including hybrid, contextual, or 'live' qualities—has provoked investigation into new strategies for preserving conceptual art, performance, installation art, video art, and even to a limited extent painting and sculpture.

The catchall term sometimes applied to such genres, variable media, suggests that it is possible to recapture the experience of these works independently of the specific physical material and equipment used to display them in a given exhibition or performance. As the nature of multi-media artworks calls for the development of new standards, techniques, and metadata within preservation strategies, the idea that certain artworks incorporating an array of media elements could be variable opens up the possibility for experimental standards of preservation and reinterpretation.

Nevertheless, many new media preservationists work to integrate new preservation strategies with existing documentation techniques and metadata standards. This effort is made in order to remain compatible with previous frameworks and models on how to archive, store and maintain variable media objects in a standardized repository utilizing a systematized vocabulary, such as the Open Archival Information System model.

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