When the Whitney Museum set out to restore artist Douglas Davis’s early collaborative, online art piece the World’s First Collaborative Sentence, few could foresee the challenges that digital and internet-based art posed for repair and maintenance. Based on constantly shifting programming languages and operating systems, digital art often offers complex restoration problems, forcing curators and experts to evaluate the degradation of web sites, coding and software updates against the original authenticity of the piece to properly exhibit it. “We’re working on constantly shifting grounds,” said Rudolf Frieling, of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “Whatever hardware, platform or device we’re using is not going to be there tomorrow.”
Read more at The New York Times
