Towards Preserving Digital Culture: An interview with Morgan Stricot
Towards Preserving Digital Culture series is a contribution to the Software Heritage initiative, supported by INRIA and UNESCO. The primary objective of this series is to underscore the pivotal role of software heritage preservation in mitigating the loss of digital cultural heritage. Through these interviews, we present diverse perspectives to foster discussions on challenges related to technological progress, obsolescence, legal limitations, and preservation complexities, contributing to addressing current field needs.
Hello Morgan! Thanks for being part of this project! Let’s start with the basics, could you tell us more about yourself?
Hello, yes, absolutely! I’m Morgan Stricot, Media and Digital Art Conservator at ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Germany. I am taking care, with my colleagues, of the digital art collection and especially the software-based art collection. It is a fairly new discipline because it took time for museums and institutions to understand that digital art is in fact much more fragile than paintings and sculptures. As for my background, I studied at the Ecole d’Art d’Avignon, where I spent two years on conservation sites in Belgium and Italy, restoring wall paintings. In my third year, however, I chose an optional course in digital art history and computer science. Later, I joined the Still Water Lab research team at the University of Maine in the “New Media” department, then the ZKM. I was familiar with technology, but I didn’t know what artists were doing with that and all the questions raised by their conservation. I have always been very concerned about what we left to future generations and when I heard about digital media, I was deeply afraid about what will remain if nobody acts to preserve them. So it was really like a call, I need to preserve this art and advocate for it.
What are the main benefits of software preservation?
Software-based artworks involve software and hardware to be visible/hearable, playable or interactive. And to understand what it means to preserve software-based artworks, you need to understand what software and hardware we are talking about. Most of the time hardware is a computer with different input-output card for sound or video, to connect different devices like camera, microphone, sensors, joystick, player, monitor, projector, but also custom I/O interfaces.The computer hosts the software, which can be decomposed in 3 categories: the operating system (Windows 10, macOS etc.), the application support (everything making the interface between the connected hardware and the operating system) and the application itself, where the instructions of the software-based artwork lives. It can be developed directly by the artist, or he or she can use a proprietary development environment (MAX MSP, Director, Premiere, Unity, etc.). The preservation of all these software components is paramount for the perpetuation of the artworks that relies on them but also their historicity and related knowledge.
ZKM is not a computer museum. Communication, computer and industrial museums were created to fill the gap as the industry was not preoccupied with preserving its knowledge and use. They ended up with dead machines under showcases: a plastic heritage. Because artists used the machines of their time to make discourses and fulfill particular purposes, the art museum, which collected their artworks (hardware and software), became by accident the only place where concrete forms of past media can be seen and experienced in action. The machines perform what they were meant for (and even more than that sometimes).
What are the challenges and/or obstacles?
The first challenge is the materiality of software. The conservation of software-based artworks is often based on an immaterialist conception of software. From experience, we can now say that the greatest challenge in the conservation of software-based art is its materiality. While preserving these artworks, we are facing dysfunction and hardware failures due to normal aging of the components and also planned obsolescence. With time, a lack of spare parts or simply a lack of knowledge forces us to change the hardware, which implies a whole other set of software-related challenges: hardware-software interdependency, lack of source code, software, driver or installer, lack of software documentation and support, license issues and the loss of skills and knowledge.
What would be your advice on collectively moving forward on software preservation?
The Internet Archive has been of great help since I started working in this field. Thanks to their dedication and the collaboration of other archives, we could find for example a niche library for Apple II with its user manual, a driver for a special graphic card or an old version of a 3D software for Amiga. But many software is still held hostage on the shelves of national archives and technical museums. Most of it has been digitized but cannot be made available because of copyright, licenses, etc. This heritage should be made accessible and released as public domain at least once their commercializing company is no longer supporting the software. The longer we wait, the less accessible the hardware and knowledge needed to use these software becomes.
Could you recommend us with a blog, article or publication that you particularly appreciated?
Margit Rosen, “Obsoleszenz und Ewigkeit. Zum drohenden Verlust des digitalen künstlerischen Erbes”, In: Elisabeth Ehrensperger, Jeannette Behringer, Michael Decker, et al, (Ed.), Gestreamt, gelikt, flüchtig — schöne neue Kulturwelt?, 2024 (forthcoming publication).
Thank you, Morgan, for your participation in this interview series!
