Introduction

There is a contradiction at the heart of digital art making, regarding its temporal mediality and relationship with a mainstream visual arts practice that values permanence. Why do we wish to preserve something temporal and fleeting? Will the preservation of digital works contribute to a process of commodification that many media artists have sought to avoid by embracing the ephemeral nature of digital media? Are there reasons that would justify preserving digital works of art when, for some artists, redundancy is a key principle in their practice?

A cultural determinacy?

Art is generally valued according to a set of established criteria that include authenticity, originality, craft skill, uniqueness, rarity, provenance and state of preservation. Modernist artists, as early as Dada but more often since, have sought to question or overturn these criteria and establish alternative value systems, where mass production, appropriation, temporality, decay and transience are foregrounded. Established artists as diverse as Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Andy Warhol, Judy Chicago, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Joseph Beuys, Carolee Schneeman and Nam June Paik have, through various strategies of production, contextualization and mediation, proffered alternative models of artistic value.

Smithson's Spiral Jetty stands as an emblematic work in this regard –unownable, more or less impossible to preserve, being subject to the vagaries of its environment, produced employing heavy earth-moving equipment and regularly transformed through natural weathering and chemical processes – perhaps the only conventional criterion of value such a work sustains is its singularity and thus rarity value. Spiral Jetty stands as one of the iconic postwar American art works, a touchstone for generations of artists since, probably because it breaches so many of the established values we conventionally associate with art objects.

The digital arts share many characteristics with work like Smithson’s. The digital and media arts have their roots in 1970s post-modern culture – the first generation of media artists, including Robert Breer (recently deceased), Pauline Oliveros, Stan van der Beek, the Whitneys, Paik and many others, often members of Fluxus, emerged during the 1960s and were central to an artistic culture that would prove influential beyond its domain, feeding into conventional visual art practices as well as other disciplines, such as music, literature and performance, and facilitating the emergence of novel art forms. These artists focused on process and action, not craft and the final artefact.