Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
"Preserving the Immaterial": A Conference on Variable Media
March 31, 2001

Session on Interactive and Duplicable Artworks

REVIEW OF QUESTIONNAIRE: INTERACTIVE AND DUPLICABLE BEHAVIORS

IPPOLITO: Hello, and welcome to the final session of the Preserving the Immaterial conference on variable media. As those of you who've been through last night and today's sessions know, each of these sessions is devoted to a behavior or two that characterizes an artwork that's likely not to survive, according to the traditional methods of preservation. I say "or two," because in addition to the first two workshops or sessions on reproducible media and performative media, this is sort of a double header here at the end, on interactive and duplicable artworks. That is, artworks that can be interacted with, and artworks whose media can be duplicated, in the sense of automatically cloned with no loss of quality from one copy to another.

And we're very fortunate to have a number of artists and artists' representatives, as well as an assembled team of multitalented experts to help us plumb the preservation questions of this kind of work.

But first, I'm gonna run you through the questionnaire that I've showed as a kind of running backdrop to this conference, in which I'm attempting to stimulate artists to investigate ways to capture their intent, so that as the work in an ephemeral format expires, it can be translated into new formats, including formats that don't even exist yet.

What you're looking at here is, again, the variable media questionnaire that we've been working on in prototype form, eventually to launch on the Guggenheim Web site. And you see again the two sort of bifurcated questions. "In its original version, this artwork could be..." and "In later recreations, this artwork could be..."

As you know, we're thinking not in terms of media here, because the descriptions of artwork according to media are only as lasting as those media are lasting, and also because the kinds of behaviors that we've come up with can be applied mutually. That is, for something that has multiple aspects, we can apply preservation techniques of each aspect.

So one of those aspects is artwork that can be duplicated, meaning things like an industrial fabrication that's constructed according to a blueprint, or perhaps one that is purchased according to certain instructions, or gathered according to certain instructions. In any case, the point being that if you gather it in one location or another, they're equivalent. A question like the color of the material, authorized fabricators or vendors, electronic equipment and hardware, and so on.

We're also looking at artworks that are interactive, meaning that there is some form of input from the user or the viewer, whether it's physically manipulated or whether it is via sound, text, menu, CU-SeeMe, all these different various ways to interact with a work. What kind of replenishment rate is there, if the work is meant to be replenished? So the viewer can interact with it. What do they interact with? Is it indeed the work, or is it other viewers, or performers?

What kind of interface? Is it a mouse and keyboard? Is it a touchscreen, microphone, video camera, physical manipulation of the work? And again, as usual, each of these categories is susceptible to varying, and we try to let the artist decide how much it can vary.

Finally, in addition to the specific ways of capturing the information about the current state of the work, we look at the assumption that the work will have to change in its recreated version. How can it change? What are the strategies for preserving it, on a scale of least to most change? Again, the least change would be something like stored. Well, actually, maybe what I'll do is to let these questions go until we get into the case studies themselves. With the background of this instrument for capturing intent in the back of our minds, let's look at some of the case studies.

INTRODUCTION OF PARTICIPANTS

So I'll introduce the case studies and the people who will be talking about them. The two- the last two of the eight that we've looked at today-are the work Untitled (Public Opinion), from 1991, a candy spill by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and this work - actually a work in progress, soon to debut on the Guggenheim's Web site-Mark Napier's Net Flag, 2001, a Web site, Web-based project.

And we're lucky to have representatives of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, as well as the artist Mark Napier here. Mark Napier just to my left: anyone who's familiar with online art knows his name. Best known for projects like the Shredder, which took Web pages and reassembled them in different forms, so that Disney.com no longer looked like Disney intended, he is also an artist featured in such shows as 010101, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and BitStreams and Data Dynamics at the Whitney Museum of American Art, both on right now. And we'll be talking to him particularly about his work that we commissioned at the Guggenheim.

Also here to help us understand the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, an artist who worked in various media, but who is now deceased, are Nancy Spector, the Curator of Contemporary Art here at the Guggenheim, who has done many projects here, including a important retrospective and book on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and is now working on an upcoming Matthew Barney retrospective as well as Andrea Rosen, gallerist and executor of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres estate and a long-time friend and colleague of the artist.

Then in the discussant table, we have a particularly action-packed group over here, including - let's see - starting from the left, Alain Depocas, who is head of the Centre for Research and Documentation at the Daniel Langlois Foundation. And he's headed that center, actually, since September of 1999. It's a very important documentary collection covering the history, works, and practices in electronic and digital arts, including archives of work by the Vasulkas and E.A.T., Billy Kl¸ver's Experiments in Art and Technology. I know him from his work on preserving Web sites in archival versions, and interestingly, recently ran across a paper of his entitled Digital Preservation: Recording the Recoding, which looked like a typo, but I think was actually a very clever title, and a concept we'll get into soon.

Next to him, Richard Rinehart, who is currently the Digital Media Director the UC Berkeley Art Museum, and also faculty in the art department there. He's also a founding member and architect of Conceptual and Intermedia Arts Online, or CIAO, a very important organization devoted to trying to catalogue works that fit between the cracks, or will fall between the cracks if no one does something about them, and an organization that the Guggenheim's very interested in partnering with in terms of variable media. He's also an artist, whose work has been featured at New Langdon Arts.

Speaking of partnering with the Guggenheim on this Variable Media Initiative, we have Jennifer Crowe, a curator of online art known for her project Protocol Prone; also a consultant now for the ArtBase project at Rhizome.org, an online and new media community for artists, which has initiated a program that we'll talk about, where there is essentially a digital archive of online projects called the ArtBase. And we've worked together to come up with some standards for capturing the information necessary to preserve those works. She's now a producer at Egg Online for Channel 13.

Next to her is Benjamin Weil, who has been active in online art for quite a long time, after a previous life as a curator of physical exhibitions, including his having co-founded the first and foremost site for online art, ada'web; then with stints as the director of the New Media Centre at the ICA in London; and now Curator of Media Arts at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and curator of the Web portion of 010101.

Next to him, Steve Dietz, Director of New Media Initiatives at the Walker Art Center, who's been involved in numerous online ventures, including the important early exhibition, Beyond Interface; the archiving of ada 'web at the Walker's digital study collection; and most recently, has got a traveling show going around called Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace, which has opened at the San Francisco Art Institute already, in February of this year.

And finally, Jeff Rothenberg, an independent computer scientist, who is renowned throughout the world as the champion of emulation as a strategy for digital preservation. He's been active at Rand. A widely cited article he wrote in Scientific American on the subject in 1995 is often quoted. He has recently completed a Rand project for the Dutch National Archives, the Ministry of the Interior, to recommend a long term strategy for preserving their digital assets.

Ok, so that blew about half the time for the session, just mentioning everyone's credentials. But we're gonna jump in and talk first about Felix Gonzalez-Torres' candy spill, Untitled (Public Opinion).

CASE STUDY: FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES

So what you see here is a view of the piece installed at the Guggenheim on the ramps upstairs. I think what I'm going to do, perhaps, is to ask my colleague Nancy Spector to describe the conditions under which this piece was acquired by the Guggenheim; and then maybein the midst of a dialogue that she has with Andrea Rosen about the artist's intent for this work, I'll sort of jump in with some issues regarding its vulnerability to obsolescence. But first, a little background on the artist, and this piece in particular.

NANCY SPECTOR: This piece came into the collection, actually, in 1991, when Felix made it. I believe we had a grant from the Bessie Adler Foundation, and selected the work and presented it to the trustees, et cetera, without really at that time thinking through the implications of storage and replenishment and refabrication to anywhere near the extent that we're doing now. In 1995, the Guggenheim presented a survey of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' work that filled half of the museum. And at that time, we installed this work for the first time, along with a number of his other replenishable works.

Just a little background on the artist. His practice was an incredibly generous one. He invented these forms of candy spills and paper stacks that to some extent emulated Minimalist sculpture, but were entirely mutable, in that they are replenishable. Viewers are invited to take pieces of candy from the candy spills or sheets of paper from the paper stacks. The sheets of paper are often photographic works or text based pieces. And the owner of the work is responsible for replenishing it during the run of an exhibition.

The piece may exist in more examples than one. For instance, while it was at the Guggenheim in the exhibition, it could also be very easily shown at another museum, another gallery, if we were to loan the work.

So many questions come up about storing it, refabricating it, particularly because the artist is no longer with us. This piece is made of an ideal weight of 700 pounds of cellophane wrapped licorice candy. It's called Untitled - and in parenthesis - (Public Opinion). Andrea and I will speak a little bit about the meaning of the work, if there is, in fact, a meaning or meanings, because the artist, as we have recently discussed, told everybody different- (Laughs) different explanations as to the content of the work. But his art in general is highly metaphoric; and while operating on this very formal level, also had incredible personal and political meaning.

My understanding of this is that the licorice specifically had to be shaped like a missile, because the piece was made during the Gulf War crisis, and Felix was reacting to- Oh, we have... I don't know if I'll pass it around, but... (Laughter) We have a sample. This was during the height of patriotism in the country, and Felix made a number of works that responded sort of pejoratively to the kind of hype going on. I think another one was a piece called Welcome Back Heroes, that was Bazooka bubblegum, with the kind of militaristic references to the bazooka gun and then a kind of Americana link to the comic strips included in the candy.

But now that Felix isn't with us and these pieces are reinstalled, the questions come up about the obsolescence of the candy; for instance, if in fact the initial candy that Felix selected is no longer produced, what do we do with this? And just to give you an example, we recently installed this piece at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and they made the candy there in Spain, and decided to instead of making black licorice, made a kind of brown candy, because they were concerned about viewers' mouths turning black. So this was their interpretation of the work. And on the spot, I had to make some bizarre curatorial decision (Laughter) whether brown candy would somehow convey the artist's intent.

Right now Andrea is in the process of redoing the certificates that actually accompany these works. Since they don't come into collections as physical form, we didn't go out and buy the candy when we purchased the work, we purchased the right of ownership. And in these certificates, the contemporary versions of the certificates, trying to capture the various open ended scenarios around recreating these works, in terms of the artist's desire that meaning is never secured in any one way, and that the owner has the responsibility to interpret how the work is conceived each time it's refabricated.

So Andrea, maybe you could just being to speak about how the initial certificates were (Rosen: Sure) done, and then what you've been doing in the meantime.

ANDREA ROSEN: Well, it's been really compelling to listen to Nancy. We were recently speaking and this issue came up about the difference between right and responsibility. And what is an owner's right and what is an owner's responsibility? And one thing that we were talking about was that in fact, is it the owner's responsibility to reproduce the work, or is it simply their right to?

And that was a very big question for Felix, and at the very root. And why work Felix's work is so significant in this whole discussion is that unlike many artists who are in a position who have had to readdress the notion of permanency in their work or readdress the future of how the work will transform itself, Felix's work intrinsically is about those questions and about what is permanency.

And at its root, that was one of the sort of very important conceptual content issues within Felix's work: our obsession with permanency, our obsession for concretizing work, which is what's so interesting about this whole initiative. Is it possible for us to move away from that obsession of storing and preserving in the monument? And Felix was absolutely conscious of these things.

And for him, he realized that the only thing that was potentially permanent was this possibility of change. And that on one hand, like any mortal human being, he was obviously very interested in generating his ideas, and his sense of meaning. On the other hand, he struggled with this idea between the inclusion of his meaning and the freedom for that meaning to change - not only the meaning, but the form, as well.

And at the root of his work was this idea of what becomes intrinsic in the work, and what is not intrinsic in the work?

One of the rules is that institutions, when they're installing the works, must allow viewers to take elements from the works that can be taken; they must allow viewers to walk through the beaded curtains, that an imperative part of it. And part of the responsibility of installing the work is to figure out how that's possible. This initiative could not have existed maybe even five years ago. It's shocking, that people could not necessarily think about these issues of the changing responsibility of the institution.

And yet museums on occasion would ask him was it ok if people didn't take parts of the work, sheets of paper, candies - at the opening, because they were afraid that the works would be eliminated before the show even began. And Felix was very strict about these rules, and yet he would say, "Yes, it's ok." And I as his sort of, you know, friend, confidante, representative, would say, "Well, why did you give in? This is so important to you; this is the intrinsic nature of the work."

And he would say, "Oh, it's ok, people have rules, and you have to." And it was partially true. I mean, you have to bend to the rules of the structure that exists. And yet, I don't know if you can say it's the real answer; maybe two or three years later, he confessed that it was very painful for him to physically see the works being taken, even though intrinsic to the work.

So the excuse to not let people take them was really great for him. He was like, "Yeah. (Laughter) It's the only time I'm gonna see it is at the opening, and if I don't have to see them take it, it's gonna be better." So there's this malleability of his personal intent, how do you create a certificate that's supposed to be about defining the work, and yet this very open ended document?

When Felix first made the stacked pieces, people could not fathom that it was a unique object if people could take the individual sheets. And certainly, they couldn't fathom that it was a unique object if it could exist in more than one place at a time. And what was it that made it unique? The original certificates - the certificates have been an ongoing process, not just now - the certificates literally said that the work could not exist in more than one place at a time, even though in Felix's intent, it was always an integral part of the work that they could, because it didn't threaten its uniqueness. 'Cause the uniqueness is defined by ownership.

So it's really amazing to see, through Felix's work that not only physical manifestation of the work will be different in the future, but even our conceptual abilities will be different in the future. That's one of the incredibly inspiring things about Felix's work.

But then there were intrinsic physical qualities about Felix's work. He had this gift of transforming the absolutely clichÈ into the incredibly beautiful and meaningful. So how do you also judge those issues? How do you delineate how one makes those choices, how one chooses what is the right replacement candy?

When you're talking about an ideal state, this idea of what is original is actually imperative. And it was important to Felix, too, that that was recorded. So the certificates always start with this original installation. For instance, Nancy mentioned for that Untitled (Public Opinion) the ideal weight is 700 pounds.

That was in this case, the original weight. But in some of the candy pieces, the ideal weight is really based on a specific meaning. Often, they're related to the proximity of a human body, the weight of two average men combined. In this piece, it happened to be what it took him to make the piece. And what's particularly compelling, as well, is that the original installation was not a pile, although the majority of his candy pieces are; and it was actually a rectangle. This pile has become this almost authoritative image now; and yet the original was something quite different.

I constantly come up against institutions who are borrowing the work who think that it's their job to install the work as Felix did. And it's this constantly interesting battle, and in the end, real kind of revelation for everyone, that an intrinsic part of the work is their choice.

There might be an ideal paper, for instance. But in fact, when Felix went to the printer to make those pieces, he didn't go and choose between hundreds of sheets of paper. He said, "I want a matte paper that's, you know, sort of standard lithography" - he was very interested in standards - "of a standard lithographic size." And the works, the ideal sizes often, and the ideal paper type, which are specified in the certificate, were in fact probably somewhat arbitrary, even though they were based on aesthetics.

And Felix never saw the works before they were actually installed in exhibitions, which is a kind of amazing thing. It's not to say that he wasn't very specific about them. But it's always that line about what was intrinsic aesthetic choice, versus intrinsic to the meaning of the work? So it was actually very compelling when Nancy, the other day, spoke about the shape of the rods. And it was a recollection that did come back to me that, yes, the shape of the rods was specifically important to Felix. But it's also this idea about how information gets lost, what Nancy was saying about how the stories changed all the time. And I think Felix purposely changed the stories all the time, because he wanted there to be this deviation in the possibility of meaning. And it was a way of him giving up that, as well.

There are three pieces, for instance, called Untitled (March 5th). I think I know what March 5th is. I may not. (Laughter) And if I don't, probably, there might be a few people out there who also know what March 5th is. But the meaning changes as well, as time changes. So again, the certificates are about- without becoming, you know, didactic posthumously, how do you create this document that is both open and specific?

IPPOLITO: This is a situation we have seen museums put in over the course of this entire day of sessions looking at case studies. But in this case, it's part of the artist's intent to call upon museums and other heritage/legacy organizations to examine the ways that they make decisions, and what they decide cultural heritage to be.

One of the examples I think of is a work that I knew from working with Nancy on her retrospective of the artist, Untitled (Throat), which one of his father's handkerchiefs, of which there turned out to be a fairly plentiful supply. But on this handkerchief was displayed one of the few candy pieces that I know of where you can't take the candies-a small portion of cough drops. And the original cough drops were Luden's honey lemon cough drops, with a blue and yellow opaque wrapper.

When it came to reinstall or preserve the work, the option of storage was a pretty questionable one. If you remember from my questionnaire, there're four different strategies for preservation I lay out, storage being the default museum model of put it in a crate, mothball it, store it on disk, whatever; then progressing to emulation, which is making it look the same by different means; migration, merely bringing it up to date; and finally, reinterpretation, taking a lot of liberty in recreating what it could possibly mean.

We inadvertently tried at the Guggenheim to store this work that you see, Untitled (Public Opinion). I say inadvertently, because I think we just ordered so much for a particular session. You know, you never know how much viewers are gonna take, right? So you usually order a certain amount, then you realize you're running out and you have to order another- I think it was 2,000 pounds, because although it's not a specially made candy, it's usually part of a Halloween party mix, along with candy corns, and they have to make a special batch that they sort out. And you have to buy at least 2,000 pounds.

So you end up with boxes and boxes left over that were piled outside my and Nancy's office for months. And, you know, storing candy is one way to prevent it from going obsolete, but it's a pretty questionable way. It goes stale, it attracts bugs - especially if you're storing it in a warehouse. It's very expensive, and the bugs like to take a nibble out of the Kandinsky along with the candy, so that's not a great strategy.

Moving down the ladder of possible strategies, when the work was loaned to a Los Angeles institution and they exhibited it, they were in a conundrum, because the candy makers had changed the look of their candy. And this happens very often in the world of candy. You want new packaging, you want a big sign that says, "New, special flavor," whatever. It attracts you to something new, even though the candy inside may be the same or different.

They chose to emulate, in the generalized sense of making it look the same from different means, that candy spill. They added, in a combination, some yellow candies and some blue candies to make, in effect, a yellow and blue candy spill - even though, of course, the candies were totally different flavors and types. That was their solution to the problem of the obsolescence of the original yellow and blue wrapping.

When Nancy toured the Felix show abroad, we ran into exactly the same problem, but decided on a different solution. Went to the drug store, bought the latest Luden's honey lemon candy, same type, but they ended up looking completely different. They have a clear cellophane wrapping with white lettering on it - a totally different look from the original. Yet, in some ways, this option of migration - that is, just choosing the up-to-date standard - seemed to connect to a story I had heard about the relevance of this work for Felix, which was that his father had died of throat cancer, and this was the only type of candy that helped him feel any better.

So we posited some, you know, potential allegiance to the brand of Luden's honey lemons that went beyond the physical look of the piece. Was that right? I'm not sure. Beyond that, you might have explored an even more radical strategy of reinterpretation, where you might put inhalers or patches or Claritin or some new drug that didn't exist in Felix's time, that was nevertheless somehow the functional equivalent of what cough drops were in 1991.

So I think for me, what Felix's work does is not to say one of the strategies is the best, but to force the museums who've decided to preserve this work into this awkward position of having to determine what the meaning is in a way that just hanging a painting on a white wall doesn't.

ROSEN: And what their role is, too.

SPECTOR: What's so paradoxical, in a way, or problematic with his work in particular is that form and content were so perfectly married in his work, that to try to sort through those questions, it's very complicated. If you're replacing something because it looks the same, then the meaning might shift or vice versa. You know, inhalers might be the perfect drug, because it helps with decongestion, et cetera, whatever the purpose of the candies were; but because it looks so utterly different, then it really represents a situation that would be a kind of gross misinterpretation of the look of his work.

Because of course he's not here, this becomes the real responsibility and dilemma for the curator of the museum that stores the work: is how do you begin to separate the formal from content?

ROSEN: Felix had this incredibly subversive side, as well as being, you know, extraordinarily generous and deeply meaningful. He was interested in infiltrating the structure; and he spoke about that all the time. And how do you infiltrate the museum structure, and really make them question what their role is? Or what the role of an owner is, for instance. I mean, he was also really interested in the owner as collector.

So often collectors, like museums, are really interested in the objectification of his work, where it becomes frozen in time or at a moment. And Felix really wanted people to be more involved in that, even in terms of their rights to choose whether it was still relevant, which is a point that Jon brought up about cultural relevance.

And one thing that Felix was so amazing about was he was actually willing to risk whether the work continued to be culturally relevant. He would talk about how if no one thinks that this piece is relevant anymore, it's not some huge piece of lead that's sitting in your storage space. It's about at any one time, taking the risk, will it continue to be culturally relevant?

And then there's the other side, about what is the role of the museum? Is it the role of the museum to preserve? Or is it about exposing and interpreting meaning? Once curators accept this latter role, they're always really inspired - to get museums to realize that it is their right to make those kinds of choices.

It was funny, we came back from this workshop with Jon and Nancy and I got a phone call from actually the institution that owns that throat piece and who's installing it, and who haven't installed it before. And they were asking these questions, and I gave them this very, you know, open-ended kind of generous Felix spiel about their choice and everything that happened before. And they were like, "Well, do we order American candies?" It's so hard for them to fathom - that at one point, I can give, or Nancy can give, all this information about the meaning and these stories; but in the end, it's really whoever owns it's right and responsibility to make those determinations.

And strangely enough, in terms of the role of the work, it's also their right and responsibility, once you lend the work. Let's say the Guggenheim owns that work. It does say on their certificate that when you lend that work, you lend the right for someone else to make that decision, as well. The other thing that's really important about this is that Felix wanted it to be easy. He wanted, as well as the difficult part - meaning that people had to choose - he wanted it to be very easy for the works to exist. When Felix first had works in institutions, there were these long drawn out registrar request processes: You wanna borrow a piece from the Museum of Modern Art, you have to, you know, request it eight months in advance. And all of a sudden Felix's work came into the museum and they realized it didn't need this lengthy process, because they didn't have to choose whether this institution was more worthy than that one because the work can exist in more than one place at a time.

And all of a sudden, you could borrow a Felix piece in three weeks from the museum. And that was something that he really wanted, too, that you cut out all of the unnecessary parts of what made that choice, and to concentrate on the meaning. Even if a candy still exists, does it mean that an institution in, you know, Sweden has to import it from the United States? Within his lifetime, he would've said no.

SPECTOR: We borrowed a piece from the Museum of Modern Art called Untitled (Placebo), which is a silver spill of candy. And again, it was for a museum in Spain, and we didn't import the candy; they had it manufactured there. And for whatever reason, the candies were much, much smaller, and a completely different flavor; but it turned out that Felix said that he liked them better than the ones he originally chose.

But just, of course, listening to our conversation and what we talked about in the workshop - and I think that this comes up again and again with different artists - is that my memory still is that he nevertheless made a decision of liking something better. And it's an open-ended question, once we know about the artist's choice, and that he made choices over and over again, because these pieces during his lifetime were installed more than once, in many cases, how does that impact on what we choose today? Does it matter?

Yes, it's our responsibility and our right to decide that this can maybe be a circle now because, you know, missiles have changed; or, you know, this would reflect biological warfare, for instance. I'm not sure, maybe that's where the inhalers come in. (Laughter) But each case study is different. And what we'll end up doing with a work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, I think, will take a lot of discussion. We were talking about retrieval of all the different memories, and seeing if there's any kind of common denominator, or the decision, I think, by each institution to move away from that.

But for anyone who worked directly with him, I think it's incredibly difficult to forget that he did make very specific aesthetic choices, and that they were as meaningful to him as the open-endedness.

IPPOLITO: There's a different set of problems dealing with an artist who's deceased of course. Nancy's proposed a sort of gathering of the minds of the people who knew Felix to try to represent some of these opinions and perspectives and anecdotes.

CASE STUDY: MARK NAPIER

IPPOLITO: We'll now move on to a case of an artist who's very much alive - at least he was last time I checked, (Laughter) although he's been in so many shows lately it wouldn't be surprising if he expired here at the table. But we've got another hour; if you can last, that would be great. Mark Napier, a work called Net Flag. And again, although it is a work in process, Mark's done a lot of work with us already on imagining its variable media aspects, which is an exceptional opportunity, working with someone who not only is still alive, not only has just made a work, but is in the process of making it.

And Mark, I'm gonna sort of hand over the keyboard here, so that you can give us a quick demo of what the work will look like, and then we talk about some of the preservation aspects after.

MARK NAPIER: Ok, first of all, this is not the final piece. I'm probably gonna say that about ten times. This is a demo that's a little bit rough still, and doesn't show all the features. The main purpose of it is to demonstrate the interface and the thinking behind the piece.

Net Flag asks the question: What would a flag for the Internet look like? We think of the Internet as a territory. We describe it using words like space, and we talk about navigating or browsing or going to sites, as if they are physical spaces. And certainly, the countries that are behind a lot of the sites, or countries that are behind some of the infrastructure of the Internet, want to impose control over the Internet, and also want to impose some of their laws on the Internet. There is often the question of how are laws distributed across this now murky territory that's been created by this common shared global infrastructure.

So Net Flag starts with the premise that we're going to attempt to, or that we want to create a flag to define this new territory, and then asks the question what should that look like? And the answer that I give is that it's a piece of software. It's a soft flag, not a hard flag. And B, that it's an editor, that this is a tool, in effect, that anybody can participate in. Any citizen of this space, this new territory, can participate in defining the flag for that territory by just going to a Website.

And this is, again, demo version, an example of the front page of that Website. Here we're seeing a case where somebody has come to the Net Flag. What they're looking at is the current incarnation of the flag. On the left-hand side you see a list of dates. Each one of these represents one change that's been made to the flag in recent history. And I'm going to just scan back. It's a little choppy because the demo is in JavaScript, so it's not ideal. The intention is for the piece to be done in Java.

So what we're looking now is at a flag that's several iterations back, which means that from the most recent, which we saw when we first came in, to perhaps a day or so -you know, five or six changes-before, the flag has changed its appearance. And you need to just imagine that this list on the left could go back down to the beginning of the flag, which, over a period of several years, could go on to be hundreds, thousands of entries.

There's really only one option, besides viewing and browsing the flag, that people have at this point, which is to change the flag. So what they do is they go into an editor. The editor gives them a series of images, on the left, of all the flags of the current nations of the world, which already creates a question of whose flags go in here. I'm finding more and more gray as I research this, between what is, for instance, the flag of Vietnam.

So at this point, people can browse and pick a flag, they see some information about the flag, about the meaning of the language, the visual language. In this case, this is the Irish flag, and we're dealing with three bands. The green and the orange represent the different warring factions of Ireland, and the white represents the hope for peace between them. So we can pick a bar and pick ok, that adds it into the flag. I can continue with that process, browsing through the different flags.

They can also go in and look up the symbolic meaning of different parts of the flags. For instance, as I mentioned before, hope is the symbolic meaning of the white bar of Ireland.

So there's a number of different ways that they can get at the different flag elements. Let's say I'm an Irish patriot and I want to take over the flag; and then I can throw in a Japanese flag. If I want a little bit of USA, go in and take a piece out of that. Each time I can think along the lines of what is the meaning behind these different elements. So I could create a fanciful flag or take a literal flag and impose it onto the existing flag.

Another aspect of the flag may be to play it out and just watch the changes, watch how people have affected it over time by adding in different components to the flag... up to the present.

IPPOLITO: So there are actually two different ways that someone could interact with this, at least in the discussions we've had. One is to craft their own personal flag, say, and possibly save it as a single image: These are the attributes that are important to me, justice and peace and bloodshed, you know, and combine them into this idiosyncratic personal flag and save it on my Web site, or print it out and put it on my wall.

But then there is also this collaborative nature. If you could speak a little bit about the technology behind this; how does this represent the sort of collective will of all these people of different territories and ideologies? How does this literally work so that all these people come together to make a flag?

NAPIER: That's always a good question, how does it work? I'm not exactly sure how it will work. When I say "work," I'm referring to the usage of the software; that when I create it, I have one intention. I have certain thoughts about how the software would be used. But when people actually get in and start using it, I find usually it's a whole different ball game. People think very differently about the piece than I did. I'm not really sure whether or not this may be offensive to some people; if they may look at it as threatening, especially if they do see the flag of their nation mingled with a flag of a nation that their nation has been at war with.

And for me personally, growing up in a relatively peaceful couple of years, I haven't had to actually face direct confrontation with countries trying to destroy mine. So I'm creating a possibility here that people may use the piece in a very different way than I'm thinking. But that is part of the nature of the piece, in that again, using the word soft, software as opposed to a hardware flag, this piece is mutable from the beginning. Its intention is that it will be altered by the users.

Every change that's made to the flag over the history of the project is recorded in a database on the central server, which means that we have a number of different ways of looking at the final piece. Actually, there really is no such thing as final; as long as people are adding and contributing to it, it goes on and on. But also we can look at the history of the flag and look for trends or look for statistics to attempt to draw conclusions - probably not so much in a very useful way statistically, but perhaps in an interesting way aesthetically and culturally.

There's also the possibility that as you're working on the flag somebody else is working on it at exactly the same time, which could mean that when you're done and you say, "Ok, these are my changes and add them in," an instant later, somebody has already made a change to yours, and you're faced with ownership of that. The thing I just created has already been stepped on by somebody else. Or do I view that as a contribution, they made an improvement to it? So there's a possibility of a conversation that can go on within this software structure, because it's on the Web and because it exists on a network.

IPPOLITO: What I'd like to do now is continue with our interview, in going through some of the questions that I've posed to you about the vulnerabilities of the piece. It's made from something that's mass produced. It's not candy; in this case it is browsers, plug-ins and computers. It's also critical that this work exist over a network. And yet the Internet itself will probably change over time. And the entire question of what it means to collect a work, since this is going into the Guggenheim permanent collection, as opposed to a sort of digital study collection, the first time in my knowledge that a museum is going out on that particular limb. [Editor's note: The closest comparisons have been acquisitions by the Berkeley Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.]

What is it thus inviting the museum to take the responsibility for? Given that this work is meant to be viewed, 24/7 over an Internet connection available around the globe. As well as issues of the changing face of geopolitics, of different flags. But as we go through those questions, just because I know you have thought about them in this process of making the work, I'd like to invite our respondents - who've been really, really patient - they're not known as a particularly quiet or docile group - to jump in when they feel like it; or they can sort of wait 'til the end and then we'll let the hounds loose.

RINEHART: Since you gave permission. (Ippolito: Uh-oh) Just as we get into this, I feel like I need to jump in with a comment, because Jennifer has been taking about fifteen pages of notes, (Laughter) so I need to get in before she starts to. (Laughter) Seriously, it's been brought up now several times in your conversation, this idea of collection and duplicability. So there's the variability in the media, which has a whole set of problems, and then there's the ability of digital media to be duplicated without loss. And so for museums that are now beginning to accession these things, of which now there are a few in the United States that I know of, into their permanent collections, we have an opportunity to engage a preservation strategy which we have never had before, even with film and video and photography.

And that is a preservation strategy which is commonly used in the world of information technology in relation to digital information, and that is data redundancy. So museums are used to collecting these unique one-of-a-kinds, even if it's a contractual agreement of exclusivity. But as a preservation strategy for digital information, including digital art, a really good strategy is back it up, create multiple copies of the digital information, and then distribute those geographically. So as a preservation strategy for digital art like Net Flag, perhaps, you know, maybe museums should consider toning down our competitive edge with each other and deciding that, you know, maybe fifteen museums could simultaneously collect the same work. As a preservation strategy, that's very strong.

But it brings up two important problems for museums and artists, and that is first of all, there is this competitive edge of museums; we pride ourselves on our unique collections. So how would we as museums address this? How would we brand ourselves, if not on our unique collections?
Secondly, for the artist, it poses the problem of economic models. If you can't write up that contract promising you'll make no more copies of the video, and thus charge 80,000 dollars for a videotape, and you're selling it to fifteen museums, what's the new economic model? So my question for the whole group, is: Is data redundancy even a viable strategy for digital art? And if so, how do you answer those questions?

SPECTOR: It just sounds like special editions, multiples. A similar model that photographers and video artists have been using. I don't know if it could be exactly an analogue, but...

IPPOLITO: With artworks that can be duplicated because of their medium, you don't need to go to the artist to get a sub-master from a video, as in the case of reproducible media. You can just, say, drag and drop it onto your own computer. But that's basically the same, I think, as the candies. And that's one of the reasons we're interested here in kind of breaking the mold by looking at artworks that superficially look different, but really have underlying behaviors that are the same.

There's nothing to stop an artist or an institution, even without the permission of the artist, from ordering 2,000 pounds of black rod licorice from Peerless Candies. And I think then the question becomes: What did the artist intend by envisioning that each work would have a unique owner? It could've been a purely financial concern, that they needed to pay the rent and this was one way to do it. But in some cases, it can be something that's more determined by the work itself.

Although Mark's project, for example, depends on duplicable technologies, the artwork itself is probably not. I'm going to jump to a totally different part of my series of questions for him, which is the aspect of simultaneous exhibitions. Your project, as you mentioned, is not a free floating piece of code that can just sort of be exchanged or passed via e-mail. It looks at a database in order to look at the traces of the previous participants. So in a sense, it is tied to a particular server. And I think the issue of making a copy, ever- either for preservation or for the purposes of a loan, is an interesting question here.

In the case of Felix's work, there's pretty much no question that you wouldn't try to recreate the kind of disappearance of the candy in one venue based on the disappearance in another; they're just independent. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case in digital media.

BENJAMIN WEIL: There's an issue of location here, which is completely irrelevant to the net. I mean, in terms of the experience of the candy pieces, it could be reproduced extensively, because it needs to be experienced locally. When it comes to the net, it can be experienced locally from anywhere. So I don't see how you can compare the two.

To reproduce the candy piece for another venue makes a lot of sense, because I mean, if it's installed in Bilbao, for instance, it's experienced by a whole set of people who might not be able to have access to it if it was installed in New York; whereas in the case of Mark's piece, wherever you are, you can have access to it. So the idea of, like, centralizing it does not affect the access issue - at least from the current state of the Internet.

IPPOLITO: That's potentially true; but it also depends on how Mark envisions the openness of his piece to different venues. If he intends it to be one flag, always the same, then it could be that, well, any institution that loaned it would just make a link to, say, the Guggenheim site; and that's sort of the easiest and most perhaps natural way to work it.

JEFF ROTHENBERG: Jon, I think we're conflating two things here, centralization versus localization. And in the physical world, you care about where things are locally because of access. In cyberspace, that's irrelevant. But there is a functional notion of centralization, which is what you're getting at, which is if it's important that there only be one flag because people are able to work on it and make changes to each other's changes, then that has a logical centralization function to it. It really still doesn't matter how many physical copies of it there are, as long as they're all synchronized and they all work together.

In the case of a cyberspace thing, the location is fundamentally irrelevant. What's relevant is whether you functionally care about there being one, versus being multiple independent, functionally independent copies.

WEIL: I would even add that the experience of eating into a candy piece is replicatable locally; it's still the same thing. So the fact that it's produced and distributed in different places at the same time does not affect the uniqueness, so to speak, of the experience.

ROSEN: But it also has to do with meaning. And I would have to say that probably one of the things that represents our generation of artists the most is an intentionality of medium. Intrinsic to Felix's choice about making the piece unique were these questions about uniqueness- And if it was multiple, it would undermine it, in the same way that for Mark's piece, uniqueness is a purposeful one; it needs to be one flag. And it also brings up all of these fascinating questions about location and its multiplicity.

Some of the artists that I work with really think if a medium is conducive to multiples, it's not against the integrity of the work, in fact it's purposeful. What is the meaning of making a unique video piece, when in fact it's a potentially a multiple object? And I think that artists are becoming very responsible to the idea of where does meaning intertwine with the possibilities of the material?

JENNIFER CROWE: I just wanted to give an example of something that we have at Rhizome. There's an artist named Mouchette, and she has a site, and she gave us a copy for our archive. And in the process of taking in her work to our archive, she realized that: Oh, I have these forms that have to be filled out by the user. So she has a copy of the site on her server, and we have a copy on our server, and people are coming to it from different points, and entering data at different times. And she had been taking that data, collecting it for her own purposes - which are not known to us at this point. But- (Laughs) She raised a red flag and said, "Hey look, I've got two different versions going on, what can I do?"

So the solution for us was say, "Ok, write another CGI script to throw in there." And in our version, when people come into the site in the archive and type in my name is so-and-so, or whatever, it automatically gets thrown back to her for her use. So we solved that problem through storage and redundancy, but also providing a patch so the data loop can remain complete, which is a pretty important function to this piece, and for her work in general.

WEIL: But then we get to the whole notion of original. I mean, I thought I would never catch myself saying something like that, but- (Laughter) In the case of Mark's work, I think the notion of historical progression, of something that is accumulative means that basically if you were to sort of have two versions of it, unless the CGI script would send to one place, it would change the way the piece can be perceived. And that's why it needs to be in one place, right?

CROWE: Right. I mean, but that's a specific case, and Mouchette is also another specific case. The idea is that there's a variety of ways that this kind of work can appear, and there are a lot of different solutions for providing storage and redundancy. Getting the piece to work later down the road is a different question.

ROTHENBERG: There is a rich technology of distributed databases with replication that addresses these issues, and there are lots of ways of working them out. That's not to say that all of the problems are solved, but once you put something into an interactive space where there are multiple users, you have to accept a certain inevitability of race conditions, as Mark mentioned, where somebody may be in the middle of working on something, and someone else finishes a second later or a second earlier, and one of them loses their work in that process. And that's just inherent in the idea of having a distributed work. So while some of these issues can be worked by technology, some of them are fundamental.

STEVE DIETZ: And I think some of them are also definitional. Jon, you made some real, you know, as you said, very large claims for variable media in relation to the notion of the museum. And it seems to me, why stop at the boundary of the museum? Once you introduce the idea of an open-ended archive especially since museums don't have the collections that in fact exist at Rhizome or at Thingist or at any number of other institutions. It's technically feasible, so what is the reason to not have an open archive where infrastructure is shared across institutions? Why are we maintaining institutional boundaries. I'm sure there are some good reasons, from ownership to responsibility, to go back to Andrea's phrase.

But I wanna raise another issue in terms of Mark's work, which has to do with this responsiveness, or the open-endedness of people having their input into the project. He's automatically archiving it, but that's not always possible. And so what gets archived in an open-ended project? And to bring up something from earlier today, with Global Groove, if I'm not mistaken, you know, that was originally a broadcast project, and then it got converted into a tape, and then it got used in an installation. And what's interesting to me is that we're at a point in time where it sorta seems natural to make an edited tape of the broadcast; but it doesn't seem natural at this point - and maybe never will, but I think it's an open question - to make an edited tape of an open system network project as an example of that project that's valid and has meaning for posterity.

CROWE: You mean like a snapshot of the piece as it's going over time.

DIETZ: I think that's what the Global Groove piece is.

IPPOLITO: That's what we saw in the second session, of the QuickTime video of the Palace chat room, a snapshot, you know, screen recording. I think there's a hundred issues that just got raised. I'd like to zero in on one of them, just to bring things back around to Mark. Do you want this to be a single piece? Can it be loaned? Could it diverge into different versions? I should preface by saying these are questions that are applicable to the medium; I think that there's a whole spectrum, and I'll lay it out quickly, again, according to my little thumbnail sketch of the four possible preservation strategies.

To store the work would be- again, storing in the metaphoric sense - to prevent simultaneous exhibitions. There is one copy, and that's what exists, and everyone accesses that one; and that's something possible with the Internet.

To emulate the work might be to take advantage of the fact that the Internet access isn't completely equally distributed; different sites get different readership, if you will. And if we were to loan Net Flag to say, ZKM in Germany, there might be a different selection of flag components that were offered, because perhaps more German people go to that site, or perhaps a different kind of person goes to a German Web site like that.

In that case, it might be interesting to document the difference in the project itself. I'm putting ideas in Mark's head, but it really could be applied to any artist as an option. One way to do that would be to say: Well, ok, we're gonna lend it; what do we do about all the flags that people in the New York venue added? To emulate it, to me, in this larger sense of emulation as recreating the look of the original, would be to clean the slate, to start with a blank rectangle and let people start adding flags from zero. Because that would pretty much recapitulate the experience of the first person who looked at the New York version. So essentially, there would be two clones; but those clones would look completely different.

Another strategy, migrating, which again is to bring up to date the work, might be: Ok, we're gonna clone the project over to ZKM; we're going to keep all of the changes and additions to the flag made in New York up to the point of the loan, so it inherits all of the flag that's been created to date, but then allow the two clones to diverge, so they are, in a sense, unfaithful to each other after the initial New York set. The New Yorkers continue to add a new set of New York flags, and the Germans add a different set, added on to the original New York flags.

And the final, again, strategy, reinterpretation, is sort of coming full circle, using a data loop like Mouchette's example to create two clones and then force an integrity between them, so that they remain faithful; so the New York flag gets the German components, just as the German one gets the New York ones, and you have this odd beast that essentially changes simultaneously in different venues, yet gives you the redundancy that you want in terms of preserving data against an individual server going down.

So I don't see these as necessarily one better than the other. And I think it's up to the artist to decide which works.

NAPIER: Did- (Laughs) did you need me to say anything on that? (Laughter)

IPPOLITO: So which one do you decide?

NAPIER: Well, for starters, there's all kinds of ways you can play. And that's why I like this kind of work; that's what I love about the Web, that there's nothing final. It's very hard to say what is final, what's the right way, or what's the only way.

The way I think of the piece right now is that there's one. And not that there has to be. And certainly in terms of hardware, in terms of databases and synchronizing of databases, who knows what's going on in the technology? We don't really need to know. As Jeff said, it's a logical issue. If you create the illusion through software that there's only one of these things, then as far as people are concerned, there is only one of them on the Internet.

For me, the interesting thing about that is that it creates sort of a parody on what flags try to be, which is, you know, a flag tries to fly over one territory and tries to unify one people, when in fact the tendency is for people to diverge or to tear flags down or change them or negate them. So to me, it's interesting to have one location, it's interesting for it to have one address. And that's something that we talked about earlier, in terms of having that in the contract. It says: This is on the Web; it's accessible to people easily, through a bookmark; and it's not gonna move around or be taken down or put on mothballs. It's essentially a public piece; it's meant to be visible as long as technically practical.

So that does, in a sense, give it a location, gives it a place where people can go via a certain text address. But in a sense, for the viewer, that's a real place; that's where they go to see the flag for the Internet.

Now, that doesn't mean that I'm completely opposed to people playing the piece differently. Like, I think it might be interesting to see what happens if you put this in Germany, and give them a blank slate and let them run with it. As long as it's understood that that's now another iteration of the piece- It's a different performance, in effect. The piece has a performative nature. The original Net Flag has one timeline to it that could go on for years. If you wanna diverge from that and create a sort of a subculture, it needs to be understood that that's another iteration of the project, that has its own performance, that has its own history and its own timeline.

So I tend to leave things fairly open. I like the idea of playing and using the piece, and I like seeing what they come up with as long as I have mine - (Laughs) which is the original, the one that I started with.

IPPOLITO: Well, speaking of that, how about the sort of geopolitical variability of the piece, the fact that flags aren't these, you know, sort of universal platonic symbols, but change. Nations are born and die and change their flags. Have you thought at all about emulating the original by the time this work might need to be reprogrammed, making sure that it has all the same flags as the original selection, versus say, migrating the original, where you choose a different selection of flags, or delete the obsolete ones, or add the new relevant ones?

NAPIER: The way I answer that is I think about at what point is the work alive, versus at what point are we replicating something that's passed? And for me, for the work to be alive means that the flags that are in it are up to date. Which implies... the last of the categories-

IPPOLITO: Reinterpretation, yeah.

NAPIER: Reinterpretation. Which implies that at some point the piece would have to be regenerated. And working on the assumption that we have some record of the piece, either a functioning interface or a video of a functioning interface, perhaps a video showing a timeline of people responding to the piece, you have enough information to give to a programmer of the future to say, "We wanna replicate this piece now in the existing technology - whatever the Web has become or whatever language is appropriate for developing software in the future. And we wanna update it with the current flags of the current countries."

To me, it's not particularly hard to define how that would happen. In plain English, to say, you know, any time there's a new flag, you add a new flag and you label it as now, you know, USA circa 2001, versus USA circa 2050. And some of it's defined in the piece itself, you can look at it; and other aspects of it could be defined in writing.

ROTHENBERG: I like the distinction that Mark just made between the piece being alive versus trying to replicate an original or historical version of the piece. And we talked on Wednesday at a Variable Media workshop about the fact that certainly, for something to be alive in whatever the future idiom is, I think Mark is right, it has to either migrate or be reinterpreted in that future idiom. And in a case like the Net Flag, where the functional description and the interface description for the piece are relatively simple, and the concept is very clear, I think it is possible to write an English description that would allow someone in the future to recreate or reinterpret the piece.

But there are two cases where that might not be sufficient. One is in the case where you wanted to replicate the original, or recreate the experience of the original as it existed in the year 2001. And another case, which is maybe a more complicated case, is where the functionality of the artifact is more complicated than is easily captured in an English description. And that may not be true in the case of Net Flag, but I'm sure Mark, as a programmer, will admit that there are lots of cases where software defies simple description.

And those are cases where we really don't yet know how to write a good mathematical or English description of what a program does sufficiently to allow someone in the future to recreate it. So there are cases where either you're interested in recreating the original as it originally appeared and executed, or where you're interested in capturing the original functionality in the future, but you can't describe that functionality simply. In both of those cases, I think we get to the case where you need to be able to run original software. And that's not what you're saying - you would prefer the living form of the work, and I understand and respect that in this case. But I think there are gonna be cases where we need to be able to do that.

RINEHART: Well, if I can follow up on that, I also thought about the same point after Wednesday, and I thought about your specific work, and why would we wanna go back to the original? Because of course, the nice thing about the storage of these original objects and these unique things is they carry not only the artist's intent into the future, but all of the stuff external to that, all of the accidents of history or the circumstances of that time are also carried. The stuff that the artist might not care about or write down on a questionnaire are carried forward.

And so I was thinking about your project in the future. For instance, you know, some historian may be interested in, you know, early net art engaging politics, in which case any manifestation would be great. But another researcher might come to the museum and want to research the use in early net art of Java programming, and then they wanna look at the code and see how Java was used by early artists - maybe they're doing their paper on that - in which case, you know, several layers of reinterpretation would not allow that. So we're kind of sacrificing something that we traditionally have with our museum objects for this new paradigm.

We're not sacrificing it, actually, because I think Jon suggested a strategy, and that is to sort of have parallel tracks, if I understood you right on Wednesday.

IPPOLITO: Well, we might get in a little bit now to supplemental strategies, in addition to the English version. I mean, this is remarkable. Here we have this guy who is, you know, an online artist, known for programming his own work - not the case with every online artist - who has made his reputation essentially as a programmer; yet he is essentially discarding the programming of his work as the art- jettisoning that as integral to the art, and saying, "I think I can sum up my work in an English paragraph or series of paragraphs."

We've seen what some of the Felix certificates have ended up looking like after Andrea and her crew has gotten done with revising them, but in some kind of English draft. And essentially entrusting some "programmer" of the future to recreate that. Now, what I think you respondents are rightly pointing out is that there is a danger in doing that - not so much the danger of losing the artist's intent, but losing attributes of the original that might be valuable for future generations.

And I know that one of the common strategies we've thought of as a way to keep the original sort of programming alive is simply to kind of migrate it, to make it: Ok, it was Netscape 3 compatible, now we'll make Netscape 4 compatible, now we'll make it Netscape 6 compatible; and we'll just keep doing this in the future.

Jeff, if you would go into what you see as the disadvantages of that technique, and how something like emulation, in the strict sense of emulation, could actually provide that snapshot of that original moment, so valuable for history.

ROTHENBERG: Let me give the 30 or 45 second version of my rant against migration as a possible strategy - although there are places where it's appropriate. In a case like this, where you're talking about actually converting something from one version of software to a later version, the reasons for not doing that are several. One is that in general, it will not work. It won't preserve the functionality that you care about.

In general, it will not be possible to do it. Without expending a lot of effort, you won't get it to run in the future. And in general, you will wind up corrupting the work in the process of successively transforming it over time. So although there are cases where you do want to migrate something - for example, as Mark said, if you want to retain the functionality in a living future idiom, then you could think about migration or reinterpretation; they sort of blur into each other at that point, because what you're doing is trying to recreate the work in some later programming idiom or programming environment.

But if what you care about is recreating or being able to recapture the original functionality- take a very simple case: If in the future, people are used to all sorts of visual effects that were not available in the version that Mark originally wrote, and yet you migrate the work into some later version, where those future effects are available, then someone will no longer be able to understand or recreate what the constraints were on the original users of the system.

For example, if somebody did create a Net Flag circa 2002 and published it in some relatively static form, someone looking at it in 50 years, who's used to all sorts of new effects that weren't possible in 2002 might say: Well, why didn't they do all of these other things? And if you've lost the fact that the original functionality didn't allow those capabilities, then you can't answer those questions. You might infer that people didn't choose those effects because they didn't want to, rather than that they didn't choose them because they weren't possible.

That's my rant. The solution that I've been suggesting is what we in computer science call emulation, which is that in general, the only good complete specification of the behavior of the program is the program itself. Now, there may be cases like Mark's, where you can write an English and/or mathematic specification that captures what you care about about the functional behavior; but if you really want all of the attributes of software to specified, the only decent specification of software is the program itself.

And that suggests that in order to capture or save or preserve that functionality, you have to be able to run that software in the future. The problem with that, of course, is that software only runs on hardware, and hardware becomes obsolete. And so how do you run hundred year old programs on future computers? And the answer to that is a very simple computer science technique that's been around for 30 years, which is called emulation, which is specifically writing a program that makes, in this case, a future computer behave just like an obsolete computer.

I like to say that emulation makes one computer impersonate another computer. So for the moment that it's running the emulator program, it pretends to be that other computer. It can therefore run any of the original software that that computer ran. So this would allow you, in the year 2050 to run Mark's original version of Net Flag, even if you also wanted to have a live version of it in the year 2050 using a completely different reinterpreted implementation that had very different attributes. But you as a museum might choose to have both of those capabilities and be able to preserve the original in its original executable form.

CROWE: But emulation isn't gonna solve all the problems in the case of most of online art. And in this case in particular, you have the aspect of participation of viewers and a constantly changing artwork over a network over a long period of time. And to emulate the platform or the chip or the lowest common denominator to make the software actually run really can't save the nuances of the performative aspects of the work.

And this is why net art is so interesting to me is because it encapsulates all these different aspects of performance, on top of being very visual, interactive, or whatever. It's infinitely complicated. And the only real way to preserve, or rather conserve a work is to have a variety of approaches, including perhaps doing what Steve suggested, is to do some kind of time based documentation of what's actually going on top of connecting whatever's left of the work in the emulated form back to text written about the work at the time.

Just basically pulling out all the stops and doing whatever you can to make that work visible in some way. And also being comfortable with the fact that perhaps in the future, you may not be able to see the piece exactly as it was, and that's ok; but we can do many things to be able to have an impression of what it may have been like.

NAPIER: From my point of view, I don't see any of these as really mutually exclusive. That, you know, you have reasons to wanna emulate, to reproduce the original experience; but then for the performative nature of the work, for the living work to be relevant to people in that time, then you wanna have it updated, recreated in some way, so that it is relevant. And of course, leaving open the possibility that if flags ever do become obsolete, then the work is completely dead. (Laughs) There's really no reason for people to look at it, other than to go back to the original form.

CROWE: So for example, say JavaScript is obsolete for some reason, you can't use it, Java is dead; Say we're living in a Flash world, which we almost are anyway, if you wanted to recreate Net Flag in Flash, would that be something that is acceptable to you?

NAPIER: It really depends on Flash at that time. And at the moment, I would say no. But it depends on what Flash evolves into. My assumption is that Java will be gone in- in a decade or two. And-

ROTHENBERG: And so will Flash. (Laughter)

NAPIER: So will Flash. I hope Flash a little sooner. (Laughter) I think with Java, I've picked something that's gonna have a little more lasting power. Not to say it's permanent, but that it has enough critical mass in the software community that I'd be willing to bet that ten years from now, and perhaps even twenty, you could find people that know Java; and know it well enough to translate those algorithms into a newer language.

CROWE: That being said, I'm curious as to your original perception of the longevity of your work - this piece, and also the Digital Landfill, and also the Shredder, if you wanna talk about that briefly. I'm just curious as to your impressions when you originally created the piece. And Digital Landfill is particularly interesting to me, because it has an automatic archival function.

NAPIER: The piece Jennifer is referring to is called Digital Landfill, and the idea was that the Web needed a garbage dump. And it was frustrating because there's no place to dump the things you wanna get rid of. In the process, it's asking this question of what do we value, and how do you get rid of the digital stuff that we're producing at an incredible rate? Or even do you wanna ever get rid of any of it?

So Digital Landfill is very simple; you just could cut and paste text into a form, and it would add that text into layers upon layers upon layers of HTML, of text, images, whatever it was you threw in there. All of these got layered up, one on top of the other. The problem I had with the piece was just that I needed a place to store all this text that was coming in. So I created a folder structure on my server, and automated it so it would automatically throw things into the right folder for the right month. So month by month it accumulated.

This was in June of '98 that I made the piece. And I, in my farsighted vision, looked ahead and said, "Well, I think that, you know, January 2000 is about the longest something like this could possibly be interesting to people," so I made enough folders up to January 2000, and forgot completely about the piece. And then started getting e-mails from people saying, you know, "I put something into this piece, and it's not showing up."
And I went and found that here it is, we're now January 2000, and there's no way for people to store their stuff in Digital Landfill. So for me, first, surprising to see that the piece was of interest to people; that the Web did not change as radically as I thought it would, or as rapidly as I thought it would. And then realizing that people had an interest in keeping this thing going. So now I've extended it out to, I think, 2010 and we'll, you know, (Laughs) we'll see if I remember then to extend it further, if it's still going.

But another piece, the Shredder, relies on other Web pages to work. It appears to be a simple browser. You type in a URL; it goes out, grabs that page and shreds it on the screen. So it's all about materiality or immateriality of the virtual world, but really doesn't function off the Web. There's no other way to view the piece, without having those other Web pages present. So when we talk about archiving the Shredder, we also have to talk about archiving Web pages for it to shred. One of the possibilities for that was that it would shred other artwork in the archive, which raises a question (Laughter) for the other artists involved, if they like that idea or not.

I think they shouldn't be given a choice, 'cause they're not given a choice now. Somebody wants to shred their work on the Web now, they're gonna shred it; that's not something the artist can prevent.

It's been, in my own thinking, a cultural shift as an artist, going from exploring a new medium and not even considering the medium would be around in five years in the form it was then; and now looking and realizing that in fact it is, and I need to maintain these works; otherwise, I have a Web site full of broken pieces.

WEIL: Can I just ask you a little bit about the issue of cultural relevance here? I think in the case of the Shredder, it's even more relevant than in the case of Net Flag, but... The function of the Shredder is quite specific to a moment, and it's about this whole idea of how we approach the net, how we view the Web pages and so on.

In another public talk that you gave not so long ago, you referred back to the whole idea the Shredder doesn't shred Flash. And this whole issue started developing: what happens when the Shredder, which functions only with HTML pages, is made obsolete by the fact that nothing available online is coded in HTML? And you sort of hinted to the idea of a Shredder 2.0 or something like that.

So I was sort of wondering about that. But also in general, I wanted to sort of open up the conversation to the what happens when a work that is primarily informed by interactivity doesn't function because of the shift in cultural relevance.

It's like all of a sudden, you know, nobody is interesting in shredding the work. I mean documenting the evolving nature of the environment in which you operate.

NAPIER: Software development is my day job, up until recently. I give things version numbers to keep track of them. And I've realized that it isn't an ironic hint at software; it's actually been important for me to know which version of my artwork I'm thinking of or talking about, because they are different and they function differently.

So I've actually found that to be a useful aspect of the artwork. And in terms of a Shredder for Flash, it's an interesting question. A reinterpretation might be for somebody else to create a Shredder for Flash and call it a different version of this Shredder. You know, the question comes up: Do you really need me in that process? Is it possible that that could be somebody else reinterpreting the work and putting it out there as another edition of the original work?

Obviously, I'd like to know. But the intention of the piece is certainly performing a material action on the immaterial world. And as long as that's relevant, there is a kind of performative aspect to the work. It could be re-performed in a whole other format, with a whole other language, as long as people still have the distinction between the physical and virtual world, then that's still meaningful.

Like shredding VRML, for instance. You know, shredding a virtual world that graphically appears to be three dimensionally real in some ways, that may be much more interesting than shredding what appears to be a paper world of the Web.

Certainly when I made the Shredder, I had in mind that HTML was going to go away at some point; and again, I thought it was gonna go away very rapidly. So I thought that probably, the whole Web very well may be Flash in another year or two, and the piece will be irrelevant - or I will have to rewrite it to shred Flash. The whole process may still be happening, but just a lot slower than what I originally thought of.

CROWE: So what happens if the Guggenheim decides: Oh, we'll buy the Shredder. Ok, so then HTML dies, and then somebody wanted another version, say in Flash or whatever is technologically relevant at the time; does the Guggenheim have rights to that new version, since the new version was originally the old version before? And it presents a problem to collections, I think.

WEIL: Or is the Guggenheim supposed to be updating the work?

CROWE: Right. Or is it their responsibility?

NAPIER: There may be, you know, a contract that gives them the right to recreate the piece. Because at some point, if HTML goes away, and the appearance of the Web as we now know it goes away, then the Shredder is an antique. It really is no interest to people outside an interesting reference to that other time that's passed.

For the work to be living in a future time - for the work to be relevant to that time, it would have to perform the same kind of logical functioning on the virtual world of that time. Which could be something like Flash. So the legalities there could get dense. But at this point, all I'm really making is the distinction between the two ways of thinking of the piece; of preserving it as Shredder 2000 or 2001 versus Shredder 2050. They could be very different pieces in different software.

ROTHENBERG: I hadn't realized this before, but we're actually talking about two different kinds of software here. In the case of the certificates for candy spill, those are a kind of software. They're stated in English and they have some flexibility to them, but they are a program, if you will, for what you are to do to recreate this piece to make it alive in the future.

And in the case of your spec for Net Flag or for Shredder, which is an English description of the behavior, that also can be thought of as a piece of software, in the pseudocode or metalanguage sense. But there's also the other kind of software, which is the instance of that metaprogram which you provide as Shredder 1.0 or Net Flag 1.0 or whatever.

And so we have two different instances of programmable activity here. And the metalanguage issue is relatively simple. We know how to preserve text and mathematical notations. So if that's what we're talking about for certificates or for specifications of works like yours, we can preserve those fairly easily. We're pretty secure in the ability to preserve text. What somebody does reinterpreting that program in the future, well, we have to take our chances as to whether they fulfill the intent that was embodied in that spec.

But in the case of something where the actual artifact that's produced is also executable software, if we wanna be able to execute that software in the future, then we have a different problem. It's not the same as the problem of reinterpreting it. That had never quite occurred to me before, but we really have two levels of programmability going on.

RINEHART: Does that make the museum the hardware?

ROTHENBERG: The museum is hardware, yes. The person who interprets the specification (Laughter; Crowe: Right) or the certificate-

CROWE: That's the role of the curator.

ROTHENBERG: -the hardware that's running that program.

ROSEN: That's a question I have, actually. The Variable Media questionnaire is so brave and really heroic and fantastic, 'cause it forces artists to think- at least delineate which aspects are imperative to them. But what happens if an artist puts on the questionnaire that he only cares about that one kind of hardware, and the malleability is irrelevant to him; and yet there's a whole slew of historians - which, primarily, museums are - and who really want that- that other kind of hardware still, that is intrinsically irrelevant to the artist?

And are you, as historians, are you willing to do that? How much does the questionnaire even approach those questions. The artist as authority. But how deep does the questionnaire go in terms of interpreting what is their intention? And, you know, spoonfeeding them with the appropriate types of questions to say, you know, what is your intentionality, what are you preserving?

RINEHART: This is something I've been thinking about a lot. It actually goes back to what Jennifer said, and that is that there are sort of failures in every one method. Like emulation preserves, you know, a piece, but not the entire context of, you know, the Internet, today's date. So it almost seems like we need to employ all strategies at some level. The ratio may vary from work to work. But the reason we need to employ the parallel strategies is they serve different purposes. And in a way, they buffer and protect the artist and the museum.

Just let me give some examples. You might answer the questionnaire in two different ways on the question of locality and redundancy, because for purposes of exhibition, maybe on the Internet locality is irrelevant; but for purposes of preservation, it may be very important because it spreads the responsibility around. So for those two purposes you have two different answers.

And then the same for emulation. Emulation can preserve a lot of the historical accuracy of the thing, but it preserves a fragment of a piece of net art. Museums are used to fragments, right? We rip the altar pieces out of churches, and we don't care about the church, you know. (Laughter) We take the sculptures with the arms and the heads off, and you know, what's left is still historically accurate. So we have this historical fragment, which maybe serves the purposes of research rather well.

But then we also need to be able to reinterpret the work for purposes of, say exhibition. If we employ all these strategies at some level, that also gives us a little bit of proof, because let's take it from the museum's point of view; what if an artist - especially a conceptual artist - fills this questionnaire out as a piece of performance art, and they- (Laughter) they lie, you know, at every question? Well, then the museum has a couple of other backup strategies. (Laughter)

And the other thing too is, you know, what if migrating and keeping the thing alive just isn't viable and Mark is just too busy in the future to create Shredder 2.0, 3.0, 5.0, 6.0, and you'll be back on stage here when you're 80, you know, talking about Shredder 9.0 and how you didn't have time in your life to do anything else. So- (Laughter) You know what I'm saying, though?

NAPIER: Hopefully, it won't be me.

RINEHART: Yeah. But you know what I'm saying. So if we have several strategies, if any one fails, we kinda have the other three going, maybe?

IPPOLITO: Rick, you've mentioned this before. These different strategies lend themselves to different museums. Right now there's one Museum - you know, capital M. I can't help but quote you: "There are museums of art history, and there are museums of art." Sometimes they're one and the same, but a strategy like emulation or storage may befit a museum of art history; and a museum of art may be about something very different, may be about keeping the work alive via reinterpretation.

I do wanna very quickly touch on this point, 'cause it came up in the previous session too, about the concern that artists have no control, and you're handing this thing over to these institutional types and history and, you know, it's just gonna diverge from the artist's intent; and what is intent anyway? Well, interpretation is the only game in town. You're never going to avoid someone interpreting your work, even if it's simply the matter of re-presenting it, before even writing wall text about it.

There are well-worn grooves for the ultimate trajectory of works of art that your work is gonna drop into, unless you do something to define it. And when someone like Mark says, "I want someone to recreate the flags according to whatever the current set of national markers is," and signs a piece of paper that says that, it's kinda hard for a museum to ignore that.

Artists working in these ephemeral media and new media shouldn't just say: Well, it's the original experience that was revelatory. It may be the way that the work evolves over time that's revelatory. And that's something that's important for us to think about preserving.

WEIL: But this is an issue of form versus function- Because in certain cases, that's what happens. I was thinking earlier on about, you know, how Duchamp's gesture of bringing a urinal in the Armory show is now being represented in museums. And for anyone who does not have the historical information to read that piece properly, what does one understand? Basically, the exact opposite of what was meant to be in the first place.

And I think that this whole issue of display is really about: Are we trying to be accurate in terms of the function of the artwork and the process that it represents? Or are we trying to be obsessed with the object or the trace? In most of these cases that the Variable Media Initiative is addressing as case studies, I think the process is way more important than the object.

This issue of form versus function is really something that I would like to see more discussion about, because I think that this is, in my opinion, what the Variable Media Initiative is boiling down to. What are we trying to preserve, for what reason, and for who? If we're trying to preserve a history of cultural practice that is epitomized by process, I think that we should be careful about not fetishizing the object. And think that is really important.

IPPOLITO: Well, we've seen, as Jennifer said, how endangered something like a work of online art can be, from the many behaviors that need preserving. It's performative, it's networked, it's encoded, it's duplicated, depends on this, depends on that. And it seems like this dire prognostication for online art as a functional thing. But I take great solace in the fact that online artists, by their very medium, are forced to deal with variability the first time they ever launch a work.

One of the issues that we deal with in terms of display is resolution. Right now we're looking at a screen that's 800 by 600 dots per inch. That's a fairly standard size. But how long is it gonna take before everyone's got a three foot plasma screen on their desks? And beyond that, you can imagine million-by-million-pixel smart walls and so on. Well, to sort of provoke a question like that seems futuristic in many media, but to an artist like Mark, who has to adapt any work he makes to the fact that hey, this is gonna be seen across an Internet where some people've got tiny thirteen-inch screens, other people have huge desktop screens; some people are running Mac, which has subtle colors; some people are running Windows, which has more contrasty colors, darker colors. Some people have big fonts, some people have little fonts. Everyone's view of a project tends to be different.

When I raised this issue with you Mark of the scale of the flags - 'cause you had said you coded at 800 by 600 - you said, "Well, I think it's fairly natural for them to expand to fit whatever the future sort of browser standard is." And I think that is not something that was that hard for you to think of, because your medium already requires you to think variably.

NAPIER: Well, yeah, right. I'm thinking more and more as I go in terms of scaling work, because I've seen it go from 640 by 480 as the typical screen size now to, you know, 1024 by 768. So it's already larger. Also, just to put it in perspective, I've been working in developing software for finance. In ten years working for one financial database company, we completely rewrote about 80% of the software three times over. So it was every three years we completely discard and rewrite the software for the company in a new form. Due to things like the Web, due to things like new database tools or new processing speed in computers. So along the way, we used emulation, we used migration, we used re-creation, you know, completely recoding applications. So I'm looking at the medium and recognizing that that's just part of the deal. The technology is constantly changing, is growing very rapidly, and probably will be continuing to do that for years.

So if I don't take that into account, then I have a lotta headaches. Because I really don't wanna be coding Shredder 9.0. I'd really rather have it be somebody else can do that, --that there's enough information in the original for that idea, that concept to be taken forward, if people choose to do that.

CONCLUDING AND DISCUSSION

ROSEN: I think Benjamin's also talking about the intrinsic dilemma, in contemporary art, which is this: Art at its basis is about our desire to have something that sustains itself longer than we do. I've spent a lot of time thinking about why, for instance, we think fine art is more meaningful than fashion or film or, you know, the sort of commercial? And I think it's about this obsession that we have with a sense that the permanent object is actually somehow representing us in the future, and that we devalue the transient gesture.

And it's very intrinsic to Felix's work, as well. Past his death, the primary writing about his work doesn't even address the idea that all of these pieces can be regenerated; they only talk about the loss, the death, the transient moment of an image. He uses very transient images - you know, footprints in the snow and birds in the sky as a sense of loss, of what we can't hold onto. In fact, what Felix was interested in, and- and what I'm interested in, (Laughs) is this idea that those existed and changed and mutated the surface of, you know, either the universal mind or experience that goes on to other experience.

And I think that what Benjamin was also talking about is why we think that the transient gesture is less imperative or less transformative than holding onto the object.

WEIL: In a lot of things that we've been looking at today, the whole notion of process is way more important in how it triggers thought, and how it adapts itself. When artists made a deliberate choice to use off the shelf products rather than creating their own, I think that they engaged the obligation to think along the lines of the effect it had on their work, and the instability of the medium that they were using.

It was interesting to see, for instance, the Nam June Paik exhibition staged here at the Guggenheim, and this whole discussion about, do we use vintage televisions, or do we just go to the store and buy new televisions? To me, it made completely sense to buy new ones because, I mean, why fetishize the television as object? It's not very interesting. And it's not what the point of the work is.

As long as it's no longer the artist crushing pigments in her or his studio and painting on a canvas that almost, she or he has woven themselves- (Laughter) but seriously, the moment you input the whole notion of readymade, you have to accept the perishable nature of the object or of the representation of what I would refer to as a process. And I think that in most cases, the process is way more important than the resulting object, as art.

ROSEN: And what's the intrinsic value of the net? On a conceptual level, for instance.

ROTHENBERG: I think there is a subtle point here, which is that for the objects that we're talking about - and not just software objects, but things like the candy spill, as well - the object itself embodies a process. The distinction is not so simple as worrying about a fetish of an object; what we're talking about is preserving an original process. Because the objects in these cases are objects that embody and describe and enable processes to unfold. Preserving the original process is actually what fascinates me as a computer scientist. I'm not interested in preserving the text of a program; that's fairly straightforward. And, you know, we could preserve the Java text or the Java script of Mark's Net Flag, but presumably that isn't of tremendous interest. What we're interested in is preserving the behavior of that thing, which is the process that that object creates.

So I think the fetish here is maybe a little different. Traditionally, certainly, we have had in human existence, a fetish over particular objects, like the Rosetta Stone or, you know, or the cave paintings, or whatever. But here, we're interested in an object because it embodies a process. And we are interested in seeing how that process unfolded, perhaps, in the past, as well as being able to recreate it in the present.

There's a different kind of transience involved. There's a transience of the original process, in that it unfolded over time, and therefore produced ephemeral behavior; and there is the transience of the fact that the process of the past is not the same as the process we would recreate in the future.

DIETZ: But I think that goes back to the question this morning about what's the notation for Web-based art. Most museums are visual arts oriented; for people come out of performing arts background, many of these issues are not problematic in the same way. And you accept the idea that your score, your original notation, your process will be reinterpreted, as rap Shakespeare or something like that. It's a mindset that I think is harder coming though a visual arts idiom.

And I think the other part that's hard about this, Jeff - and I don't know what you what you would say about this - is this open-ended part. 'Cause there's two things we're trying to preserve, potentially, to some extent. One is the artist's intent; but the other is it's an open-ended system that many artists are creating. And how do you notate, how do you preserve that other- that sort of response back?

ROSEN: Exactly. And what makes these parallel is that there's also the participant that changes the process.

ROTHENBERG: Well presumably, you can't preserve the participants (Laughter) in a meaningful sense. To the extent that they are human and not avatars or embodiments of people. And we probably wouldn't even want to. But so the best we can presumably do is to preserve the ability that the original participants had to participate in the process, from which we can sort of infer what it must've been like to be in the original process.

But I agree that the system is open. Even for the Net Flag, if it involves people using a system today, and using existing flags, and using existing social context, and existing network infrastructure, it's impossible to capture all of that.

ROSEN: I don't wanna speak for Mark, but if there is a sense of permanence, it's in the changing response of future participants. And that's something that, of course, you can't document. That's the starting point from Felix, which is what he realizes, the only thing that was permanent was to make it change continuously, based on new responses and new interaction.

IPPOLITO: In all this discussion about making it change due to responses from new participants, I feel we have to give five minutes to questions from the audience.

MAN IN AUDIENCE: Regarding this idea of distributed networks and the artwork being preserved in multiple places. And commodification and acquisition by museums. It seems like the process of museums supporting net artworks is a tremendous opportunity to have some financial, as well as some committed artistic backing to the process of perhaps having to emulate artworks in the future in some new way. But I'm wondering if the process of having to own the work and what that involves is going to lower the ability of the work to be distributed. And maybe in the case of, Mark, of your work Net Flag, we know that when I go and see it when it's up online, if I take a look at everything that's been done so far, it's all gonna be in the cache of my Web browser.

It would be possible for me to save that and, you know, not think anything about it, that it wasn't that important; but maybe in a future time somewhere down the line, where there was a flood or locusts, that you know, like both candy and servers, somehow we'd lost the original version on the Guggenheim server, that there might be at least a preservation of the artwork up to a point, not the interaction process, but the individual iterations up to that point, in many people's computers.

I might address this to you, Jon. Do you feel like the fact that there might be, at the very least, individual images or parts of that artwork that belongs to, in some way, the Guggenheim, and yet is on other people's computers, is that a problem? Is that an asset? And if somebody actually wanted to copy the entire work, including somehow figuring out what the, say, database system was - much in the same way that net artists in the past have copied over other people's net artwork and reserved it as their own artwork - is that also continuing to preserve the work, even if maybe it's at odds with the process of owning.

IPPOLITO: There're particular problems with Net Flag that have to do with its technology and its centralized server. It's amenable to something like that via the faithful clone sort of dataloop model. But there are other artworks where there's no question that there are gonna be copies cached on everyone's server who ever looks at the damn thing. I have no interest personally in the museum somehow policing that and making people, you know, clean up their cache - (Laughter)

I'm much more interested, however, in the long term of those projects. As Jeff has noted, the illusion is that by saving the ones and zeroes, we save the piece. Well, there's this whole interpretive infrastructure, you know, from the Pentium to Windows to Netscape to the plug-ins that's required to view that again. I may not be particularly happy with the idea that the museum ends up with the only copy of a particular online artwork; but it may end up being the case that the museum ends up the only place with the wherewithal and the knowledge to recreate it when it no longer works on all of those cached copies.

ROTHENBERG: I think there's really a fascinating cost model implied here that hadn't really occurred to me before this meeting, which is from the artist's point of view, selling a piece of software as a work of art to a museum is sort of the ultimate in selling software. Because the big problem with selling software usually is that you sell it one copy at a time, and if somebody rips it off, you lose potential income. But if you sell one single copy of it to a museum for an amount of money that you feel is commensurate with the effort that went into it, then you're done with it, from your point of view. You don't expect to get further income from it.

And therefore, if people copy it from the museum, you don't really lose anything. Now, the museum may lose something, in terms of the value that it has invested in the work that it paid for. But this is wonderful from the artist's point of view. It's what every software engineer wishes they could do; (Laughter) you know, sell one copy of work for a large sum of money and be done with it, and never have to worry.

WEIL: And can the museum license it then? (Laughter)

ROTHENBERG: What the museum chooses to do to try to preserve their investment is presumably their business.

NAPIER: Yeah, it's definitely the reverse of the usual, where you wanna sell millions and millions of copies at fifty cents apiece; here you're selling one.

IPPOLITO: At fifty cents apiece. (Laughter)

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: I have a question about the database part of the flag, Mark. It seems like there's a lot of research that goes into creating the materials that we can then manipulate and create our flags with. Is that something that you take sort of an authorship to? I mean, is that part of the creative process, beyond the conceptual software element?

NAPIER: It's part of that process, but the database itself, I think, will be information that's generally available. You know, it's like Encyclopedia Britannica kind of stuff. The main thing is to make people aware of the language of visual forms, the language of flags, which is actually a very rich language. So that they understand, when they put these elements together, what meaning that might have to the people who come from that country. So it's not simply geometry.

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: Well, is there source material then that make up the information that tells what the flags mean? is that your own research, or where does that come from?

NAPIER: It's a good question, how do you define "my own?" I mean, if I go to the Encyclopedia Britannica, then it's not really my own, though I went there to get it; but they went somewhere else to get it, and... I don't think I could claim any ownership to that information; that's public domain.

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: You're creating a, you know, a visual representation of the flag that's also something distinctive perhaps to the Web site, the materials that we're drawing from.

NAPIER: They're just thumbnails taken from specs. It's an interesting kind of sidebar to the whole project that flags also have a whole description about them. They are, in effect, almost like algorithms. You take a rectangle that's one by three, and you divide it according to these ratios, and put in these colors, and they define the Pantone colors, you know, the CMYK breakdown, for people that know graphic arts. So you can apply almost an algorithm to generating a flag. And the countries provide you with this information. So the flag itself is almost like a kind of software, even in its current incarnation as a seemingly physical object in the world.

IPPOLITO: Thank you. I think what we've seen especially today is the variety of choices. Sometimes choices for different strategies by the same artist for different aspects of their work. So emulation may be good for Nam June Paik's monitors, may seem hokey to Ken Jacobs' work. Migration may be good for the flags, in terms of updating a future flag of Zimbabwe or a country that has changed, but not necessarily for the software, as Jeff Rothenberg's pointed out. Reinterpretation may be good for Jan Dibbets' negatives, but not good for his prints. He doesn't want us rephotographing white walls, but he's happy to touch up his negatives.

I think that speaks to the necessity of, again, the artist playing a role here, and the artist really making a whole matrix of judgments, rather than opting for one overall strategy over another, or certainly, being told by technicians or museum staff that one strategy's always better. Hence the need for variable media guidelines, in my mind.

I also have come away from this conference thinking about all the things that are left to do. And I have a little quick punchlist. Steve Dietz mentioned, and it came up again in conversation, whether museums are the right place to do this sort of work, whether there aren't a lot of different kinds of cultural heritage organizations, from dance companies to theater technicians, who have a whole panoply of instruments that might be useful and ways of sharing and preserving culture.

And one of the things we've been talking about doing is taking the structure that we have here - literally, the data set of the questionnaire - and under the guidance of Rick Rinehart, who represents the Conceptual and Intermedia Arts Online, creating a kind of testbed project, where a number of institutions try out this data structure and see if it works, improve it if they can. Several different museums have expressed interest in having this system to use, and I'm interested in making it a kind of open source project; you can have it for free, as long as you let us know if you improve it.

I'm also interested in what you have to decide as an infrastructure, not just in terms of, you know, the collection database, but in terms of the budget. What do you do when you acquire a work? How do you foresee the costs and the resources that are gonna be required to reinterpret and reprogram a work of online art in the future? Or conceivably, even, remake candies, or at least put enough heads together so they can figure out whether the candies should be remade.

And as one gesture in that direction, for the budget for the online art commissions, of which Net Flag is an example, the Guggenheim has taken 15% and put it in a variable media endowment. The interest from that endowment over time will build up and supply a fund to pay programmers to recreate the Flash version of Shredder, or the version of the flags in the year 2050. And I'd like to propose that as a model for other organizations.

Another thing, last thing, that I am a little confused about myself, and I think is something worth pondering, is what to do about those innocuous little museum labels and captions that show up in catalogues; the way that we're used to categorizing and cataloguing artworks. Ok, we got to the point where we could say, "dimensions variable," or "dimensions vary with installation." Hurray. We're no longer tied down to describing Meg Webster's Stick Spiral by saying it's 10.5 inches by 13.26 centimeters. I mean, obviously, that's a meaningless notation to the artwork as a whole; it may only describe its instance in one particular version.

But we haven't done the same thing for medium lines. Should we say "media variable" for a work that was originally in 16 millimeter film and now on DVD? Should we indicate all of the media that it has existed in, along with dates and semicolons? How about the date itself? Should we even indicate date of the original one? Or should we indicate all of the dates of the refabrications? Or should there just be version numbers: Untitled (Public Opinion), version 1.6.

And as long as we're talking about that, once the artist is dead and a person comes in to reinterpret a work, reinterpretation, as we've pointed out, is sort of an act of performance. Should the performer get credit? Glenn Gould does for playing Bach. What if one of Mark Napier's sons grows up and becomes the SuperFlash 10 (Laughter) reprogrammer of Shredder? Would the artist be Napier Senior-slash-Napier Junior?

How about credit lines, in the case of collections? Would it matter, for example, if we model something along the line that Rick mentioned, that different institutions could co-own, jointly collect a work? Do you put both credit lines? Do you put only one credit line, by the institution that you're looking at it in? And would the institutions perhaps even vie for who reinterpreted the piece better, in two completely different versions?

I don't know all the answers to these questions, but I do know that labels make a difference; they matter to art history, and ultimately to artists. And I think there is plenty of room for discussing and coming to some conclusions about these and the other unanswered questions at the second conference on variable media. So thank you all for attending, (Applause) and thanks especially to our participants.

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