There are many different preservation practices where the control over the changes of the artworks is quite lax, because maintaining each piece of art is not the main aim but rather the goal is to keep something like the artistic atmosphere of a period. That is the case of the Harddisk museum, a project by Solimán López (Burgos, 1981), which is exactly that: a museum living in a portable hard disk which is actualized in each Soliman`s performance or live session. You don’t go to the museum. The museum travels around presenting and collecting digital artworks in each stop.

The project has been in more than five countries. The content can also be navigated through a “Reality File Cabin” developed by Solimán and VRANVIC at ESAT School.

In Solimán’s words the disk is an object designed for those that will come, designed in order to keep something of our creative production in digital arts. However, curiously, once artists record the file in the disk, they are asked to destroy all other copies (i.e. it is a museum of unique digital files). Which is something quite strange of this project, or that might appears contradictory with its digital nature and the aim of preserving such files.

The Harddisk is the object of preservation is the disk itself as a collective piece of art compose for all the files that stores. It is a museum and a piece of art at the same time. Its uniqueness tries to generate a myth around it… and facilitate its preservation in this way. At least, this is Soliman´s intention at a first step.

 “One of the more intense moments of the live performaces of Harddiskmuseum is listening the amplifed sound of the heart of the disk when it revolve showing digital artworks” (Solimán López, skype conversation, 2016)

Harddisk Museum brings another perspective of what has to be preserved and in which terms needs to be preserved. Gustavo Romano (2009) asks in his ‘ten open questions about electronic art conservation’:  Should we preserve individuals or ecosystems?

Of course this is some kind of a dichotomic question, but its importance that the safeguard of individuals is just one approach to preservation. But, Solimán, for instance, defends a collective future for the art: a convergence of the artworks in their process of transmission.

To Watch a Soliman`s performance on the content of the harddiskmuseum is something pretty much close to the idea of experimenting with the heritage or directly “performing the archive”.