The Gift that Keeps on Giving: Preserving New Media Art for Posterity

Preserving digital art in the current era is notoriously difficult due to issues of technological obsolescence, the intangibility of dynamic media, and the interactive nature of digital art. This is of marked interest to libraries, museums, and cultural heritage institutions given the limitations of traditional forms of preservation that rely heavily on storage of physical forms. The Re-Gift, a work of new media art by Buffalo-based artist Liz Rywelski, exemplifies many of the complexities of these emerging formats. This report examines one of the potential approaches to preserving this type of work, The Variable Media Questionnaire (VMQ), with an eye toward methods that could be extrapolated to rescuing other works of new media.