Towards Preserving Digital Culture: An interview with Patricia Falcao
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 Patricia! Could you start with sharing more about yourself?
Hello! I am a time-based media art conservator and research the preservation of software-based art, first in my MA thesis on risk assessment for software-based art (Falcao 2010), at the University of the Arts in Bern. I am currently doing research for a PhD comparing preservation practices for software-based artworks between Artists, Conservators and Game Developers, in an AHRC funded Collaborative Doctorate between Tate and Goldsmiths University.
I am involved in the treatment of software-based artworks in Tate’s art collection, most recently the work Psalms, by Donald Rodney in collaboration with Profs. Guido Bugmann and Mike Phillips from the University of Plymouth. I-Dat, at the University of Plymouth, has some wonderful documentation of that work here.
What are the main benefits of software preservation?
In my field software is often the artwork, and in the Time-based Media Conservation team at Tate we work hard to preserve artworks made with software, so they can be enjoyed by future audiences. Just as you can see JMW Turner’s paintings 200 years later, we should be able to see artworks being made with software now in 200 years. The artworks in the Tate Collection are relevant to understand contemporary society, and the software used to create them is part of that.
We also need the obsolete software tools to care for any digital components of artworks, be them software or video or audio. Software is also essential to maintain access to these media. Finally, artist’s source code is an area of interest for conservation, with code analysis being comparable to a painting’s x-ray, so thinking of source code analysis as technical art history (Engel and Wharton 2015).
What are the challenges and/or obstacles?
The Tate has a small collection of c. 20 Software-based artworks (compared for instance with ZKM- Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany), the oldest from 1997. Within these artworks a variety of software is used, so it is difficult to have in-depth knowledge about these technologies in house. We rely on working with artists and their developers, who are experts in the technologies they use, or to find people with the right knowledge. As technologies become older this becomes more difficult. We create documentation of the technologies of production but the knowledge gained from the use of a software over decades is not documentable.
What would be your advice on collectively moving forward on software preservation?
I would like to see more engagement with industry, although I know that is not an easy task. It would be great to implement legislation that makes use and sharing of obsolete software simple and legal for institutions and users. Something like a British Library of Software.
Could you recommend us with a blog, article or publication that you particularly appreciated?
I have been reading and going back to two papers by Dragan Espenchied and Klaus Rechert that I highly recommend, ‘Fencing Apparently Infinite Objects’ and ‘Software Preservation after the Internet’. (Espenschied and Rechert 2023; 2018)
Conway, Jane. 1997. ‘PSALMS — ◯ ◯ ◯’. 12 October 1997.
Engel, Deena, and Glenn Wharton. 2015. ‘Source Code Analysis As Technical Art History’. Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 54 (2): 91–101.
Espenschied, Dragan, and Klaus Rechert. 2018. ‘Fencing Apparently Infinite Objects’. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES). Boston, Mass: IPRES.
Falcao, Patricia. 2010. ‘Developing a Risk Assessment Tool for the Conservation of Software- Based Artworks’.
Thank you, Patricia, for joining this series!
