AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

The Transfer Data Trust project exemplifies the power of collaboration in addressing the critical challenge of preserving born-digital artworks. This innovative initiative brings together six time-based media conservators, two developers, five pioneering digital artists, and the founder of TRANSFER Gallery to create an open-source system architecture and toolkit for a webring of artist-owned repositories. Initially focused on a decade of digital art exhibitions from TRANSFER Gallery (2013-2023), the project aims to develop a scalable model that any artist, institution, or collective can adopt to establish private networks of redundant storage for the long-term preservation of digital cultural heritage.

The importance of this project lies in its novel approach to tackling persistent problems in digital art conservation: obsolescence and long-term sustainability through distributed storage. By involving artist studios directly in the preservation process and combining the knowledge of conservators, technologists, and curators, we're exploring how interdisciplinary collaborations and cooperative stewardship can reshape our approach to media art preservation in the 21st century. This project is particularly significant as it addresses the urgent need for innovative preservation strategies outside of museums. 

Our methodology, co-designed by this diverse team, combines conservation practices with innovative technology. The first year will include condition assessment and documentation of 15+ international art series, development of a redundant storage network across international artist studios, implementation of content-addressed versioned file storage, creation of detailed metadata schemas, and establishment of a time-banking system for pooling conservation expertise. The project's initial phase focuses on the works of five pioneering digital artists: Carla Gannis, Lorna Mills, Huntrezz Janos, Eva Papamargariti, and Rosa Menkman. Their diverse practices, ranging from glitch art to complex virtual environments, offer a rich testbed for our collaborative preservation strategies. Artists have been paired with many conservators involved in the Electronic Media Group at AIC including Sasha Arden (Guggenheim Museum), Eddy Colloton (previously Denver Art Museum and Hirshhorn Museum), Taylor Healy (The Art Institute of Chicago), Regina Harsanyi (Museum of the Moving Image), and Claudia Roeck (Haus der Elektronischen Künste).

Preliminary results from our prototype phase are promising. We have successfully set up a private network between network-attached storage drives in each artist studio and organized artist projects into artist information packages stored redundantly across the network. We've developed a standardized condition reporting template for born-digital artworks that is adaptable to various media types. A user-friendly interface for artists to manage their repositories has been created by Ryan Betts and Andrew Vivash, empowering them in the preservation process. Additionally, we've established partnerships with organizations like Gray Area Foundation and NYU Tandon School of Engineering, expanding our collaborative network. The project's significance has been recognized with funding from the Knight Foundation's Tech Expansion Fund, supporting our ongoing research and development.

Our findings suggest that this collaborative, distributed network approach can significantly extend the lifespan of digital artworks by reducing reliance on centralized storage and starting the documentation process much earlier in the lifecycle of these artworks. It empowers artists to participate actively in the long-term preservation of their work, facilitates more efficient sharing of conservation resources and expertise across institutions, and provides a scalable, open-source model for others to establish their own distributed repositories. Importantly, it has the potential to shift the artist's relationship to equity in their work, reminiscent of the historic Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement of the 1970s, but updated for the digital age.

This project contributes to the field of conservation by demonstrating how collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts can produce practical, scalable solutions for digital art preservation. By open-sourcing our methodologies and tools, we aim to benefit the broader artistic community and advance the field of time-based media art conservation. It challenges us to rethink traditional conservation roles and institutional boundaries.