Variable Media Standards

Guggenheim Variable Media Initiative

"The Variable Media approach integrates the analysis of materials with the definition of an artwork independently from its medium, allowing the work to be translated once its current medium becomes obsolete. By identifying the work’s behaviors (contained, installed, performed, reproduced, etc.) and strategies (storage, emulation, migration, and reinterpretation), artists, conservators, and curators can advance the preservation of new-media art. The idea to describe a work of art, not only as a list of components and materials, but by the way it behaves, is crucial to the Variable Media methodology."

INCCA

http://www.incca.org

Independent Media Arts Preservation Cataloging Project

IMAP Cataloging Project

The IMAP Cataloging Project seeks to establish a compatible information system for independent media collections across broad geographic regions, among a wide range of arts organizations, artists, and performers. Originally designed for independent artists, producers, and small organizations without a trained cataloging staff, the IMAP Cataloging Template is just as useful for archivists, librarians, and museum specialists.

The long-term goal of the Cataloging Project is to make significant media-based collections available to a broad user base, including artists, arts groups, curators, scholars, educators, and students. IMAP believes that the Cataloging Project will lay the foundation for a union catalog of independent media, eventually allowing a user to search for a work by title or artist across numerous individual catalogs through a single interface.

Further, IMAP is committed to fostering a prominent position for the records of its member organizations in Moving Images Collections (MIC) the joint project of the Library of Congress and the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) that will aggregate the records of a large number of media collections. The goal of the MIC portal is to provide a window to the world's moving-image collections for educators, researchers, exhibitors, and the general public that also allows preservationists to collaborate and thus avoid costly duplication of effort. By placing records of alternative media organizations within the context of much larger, more mainstream collections, we hope to increase interest in and access to a wider variety of media for a much larger audience.

The Kitchen http://www.thekitchen.org/
Electronic Arts Intermix http://www.eai.org/
Video Data Bank http://www.vdb.org/
Anthology Film Archives http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/
Long Beach Museum of Art http://www.lbma.org/

Inside Installations

Matters in Media Art

Media Art Notation System

As one of the first frameworks for investigating and documenting strategies for preserving ephemeral works, the variable media paradigm has helped inspire related initiatives, such as the V2 organization's Unstable Media project and Exit Art's recent documentation initiative. The organizers of Forging the Future realized early on how critical it is for these initiatives to be able to talk to each other, and that establishing a metadata lingua franca would enable one database's variable media information to be imported from or exported to another. As a result, Forging the Future member Richard Rinehart drew up an XML standard that's contained in the Media Art Notation System (MANS). This is designed to facilitate interchange between the three Forging the Future tools as well as the related products of third party researchers.

METS

http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/
"The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library."

PREMIS

http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/

The PREMIS data dictionary defines preservation metadata that:

Supports the viability, renderability, understandability, authenticity, and identity of digital objects in a preservation context;
Represents the information most preservation repositories need to know to preserve digital materials over the long-term;
Emphasizes “implementable metadata”: rigorously defined, supported by guidelines for creation, management, and use, and oriented toward automated workflows; and
Embodies technical neutrality: no assumptions made about preservation technologies, strategies, metadata storage and management, etc.

Rhizome

http://www.rhizome.org
"Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. Through open platforms for exchange and collaboration, our website serves to encourage and expand the communities around these practices."

V2's Metadata Issues for Capturing Unstable Media

http://www.v2.nl/files/2003/articles/1_3_metadata.pdf/view

Deliverables on metadata issues for Capturing Unstable Media. Includes metadata for interaction, thesauri, distributed authorship, software and hardware interdependencies.

Variable Media Network

Variable Media Network Initiative - Forging the Future

Forging the Future

Building on the work of the Variable Media Network, Forging the Future refines and distributes free and open-source products that boost access and aid in preservation. Our aim is to help creators, conservators, and curators understand the possible futures that can be imagined for a cultural artifact, and choose the best among them on a case-by-case basis.

Tools include:

The Franklin Furnace Database (FFDB) is designed to facilitate the cataloging of variable media artwork by arts organizations. It is a modular suite of relational databases that are structured around a central event database hub. The central event can be any type of variable media artwork. Certain essential fields, based on Dublin Core standards and mostly duplicated in MANS, are contained in the central event database. When records are present in the central database, the user can choose to attach any or all of ten other independent databases that are designed to enhance the description of a particular artwork record.

The Digital Assets Management Database (DAMD) was developed by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as an organizational system for information stored digitally. It is used here to manage metadata that is created in conjunction with the other tools. DAMD records information about the digital object, the digitization process, file type, size, and other technical details. It does not record information about the original artwork or event. Instead, it links the digital object to the FFDB or the VMQ.

The Variable Media Questionnaire If the FFDB and DAMD apply to past and present versions of a work, the Variable Media Questionnaire (VMQ) focuses on future versions of a work.

This questionnaire is unlike any protocol hitherto proposed for cataloguing or preserving artworks. It requires creators to define their work according to behaviors of functional components rather than in medium-dependent terms like film or Java.

The variable media paradigm also asks creators to choose the most appropriate strategy for dealing with the inevitable slippage that results from translating to new mediums: storage (mothballing a PC), emulation (playing Pong on your laptop), migration (putting Super-8 on DVD), or reinterpretation (Hamlet in a chat room).

You can find the Variable Media Questionnaire at http://www.VariableMediaQuestionnaire.net.

Virtueel Platform

Archiving the Digital
Archive 2020

ZKM, Karlsruhe Germany

Digital Art Works, The Challenges of Conservation