Vanina Hofman (d-future member), Daniel López Gómez and Pau Alsina (d-future member) presented the paper “Infrastructures of preservation: continuity and maintenance for Media Arts” at the conference 4S/EASST Barcelona 2016 [Art & technology by Other Means. Exploring collectives, spaces and futures].

In this papers the authors suggest that the different ways in which media artworks are preserved is closely related to the way in which they are projected into the future. Thus, preservation in media arts is pretty much more than “maintain or restore or repair the artwork”, it also implies to take care of its possible futures: to imagine the scenarios where this artworks might operate again. And this, distends the present, thickening it with a myriad of demanding attachments, in Puig de la Bellacasa’s terms.

What is preserve in media arts is a “possibility” for the artwork to be executed in a particular way, to reborn in a  different configuration, to be shown, to work, to affect. This implies a series of practices of caring in the present that diverge one from the other. The work of art and its properties and the stability of its behaviour (or functioning) is not the object of media arts preservation, but the different path or “possibilities” to re-appearance in the future, to be developed in other contexts, to reborn in other artworks ot to get diluted in a bigger picture of our time.

The maintenance tasks in media arts preservation are a work of caring about possibilities and the variable futurs of an artwork.

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Image: Natural History of Enigma (2003-2008), Eduardo Kac