UMaine New Media Group ‘Still Water’ Wins $300,000 Research Grant
Contact: Jon Ippolito, 581-4477; George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO, Maine — Still Water, a research and development arm of the University of Maine New Media Department, has received a $300,000 research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the preservation of digital art in a world of changing technologies.
The grant, the largest NEH grant UMaine has ever received, according to the UMaine Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, will fund a two-year project called “Forging the Future: New Tools for Variable Media Preservation.” It assumes that the equipment and techniques that work today to preserve and store digital music, art, video or text documents may not work tomorrow because of the obsolescence of the media, according to Jon Ippolito, associate professor of new media and a co-founder with associate professor Joline Blais of Still Water new media research lab at UMaine.
Consider music stored on vinyl record albums or reel-to-reel tape recordings, movies stored on 8-millimeter film, and digital files stored on old floppy disks. Turntables, movie projectors and 8-track tape players are mainly collecting dust — if they have survived at all — and today’s computers no longer have floppy disk drives. CDs and DVDs are predicted to become obsolete within a few decades as technologies change. Advances like the conversion of analog signals to digital ones, a recent milestone for telephones and television, present yet another challenge to the preservation of constantly evolving data.
The issue becomes even more complex when considering the storage and preservation of photographs, gallery installations, and other art forms, says Ippolito, the former associate curator of media arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Through “Forging the Future,” Ippolito, with a consortium of authorities from five other institutions across the country, will explore new methods of preserving and storing digital and cultural art. They also will delve into a larger issue: What happens to art when its original medium becomes obsolete, and who decides?
“The tools produced by the Forging the Future consortium will go beyond the default storage paradigm to include the full range of preservation techniques explored by a related Still Water project, the Variable Media Network,” Ippolito says in a statement. “These include the powerful technique of emulation, a process by which a new computer can impersonate an older one.”
Ippolito has been studying the issue of digital file preservation for nearly a decade and says it is becoming a universal concern among those responsible for the preservation of art and culture.
Forging the Future “is the most recent initiative in a current of parallel efforts by the Variable Media Network,” he says. “If you think about bank data, government reporting or scientific data, that information can often be morphed from one medium to another, which helps solve the problem caused by the limited life span of any one preservation medium. Art, on the other hand, is the acid test, because it typically depends very much on the look and feel of its medium. If you can preserve art, then you can pretty much preserve anything.”
The NEH grant also will provide for a questionnaire for museum curators and artists about how artwork might be altered through new preservation techniques and which of those techniques is acceptable for a given work.
The grant is “a wonderful recognition” of the leadership role of Ippolito and his colleagues, says Owen Smith, director of the New Media Department.
“The nature and the size of this grant is just reinforcement of what we in new media already know — Jon, as well as our other faculty, are all world-class leading researchers in their respective areas of emphasis,” Smith says. “A grant of this nature and visibility is another highlight of the work of the faculty in the New Media Department in exploring the future possibilities and potentials of new media, information technology, art and culture.”
Founding members of the Variable Media Network include: the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, Calif.; Franklin Furnace, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, Montreal; Performance Art Festival + Archives, Cleveland; Rhizome.org, New York; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
The Variable Media Network (http://variablemedia.net) is coordinated by Ippolito, Alain Depocas, director of the Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D), the Daniel Langlois Foundation, and independent curator Caitlin Jones.
For background on the initiative or Still Water’s other projects, please visit http://newmedia.umaine.edu/stillwater/ or contact Jon Ippolito at jippolito@maine.edu.