Challenges for a Ubiquitous Museum: Presenting and Preserving New Media

Christiane Paul is Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Whitney Artport is an archive of net art which will naturally pose some questions for the future. In the back-end of the system all the versions of Flash, CGI scripts and PHP scripts are documented.

The characteristics of the digital medium pose numerous challenges to the traditional art world, ranging from presentation to collection and preservation. For the longest time, museums, galleries and the art world and art market in general have been mostly "object-oriented" and have configured their framework and infrastructure to accommodate the presentation and preservation of the static art object. The characteristics of so-called new media art have introduced a shift from the object to process: as an inherently time-based, dynamic, interactive, collaborative, customizable and variable art form, digital art resists "objectification" and has changed traditional notions of the "art object." (...)

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