New media art runs a unique risk when it comes to longevity that has resulted in the development of new and different preservation and restoration strategies and tools.
To preserve and restore these pieces of new media art, there are a variety of strategies including storage, migration, emulation, and reinterpretation.
[1] To migrate a work of art is to upgrade its format from an aged medium to a more current one, such as from VHS to DVD, accepting that some changes in quality may occur while still maintaining the integrity of the original.
[1] This strategy assumes that preserving the content or information of an artwork, despite its change in media, trumps concerns over fidelity to the original look and feel.
[2] Migration is especially important when the file is saved on proprietary software like Microsoft Word, Prezi, Archives Space, etc.
[2] The process of simulating an older operating system (or by extension, other supporting infrastructure) on a newer software or hardware platform is called emulation.
Emulation software allows users and researchers to view complex pieces of art like video games, virtual reality, etc.
In 1998, Rothenberg had published "Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation".
[8] It allows repositories to store their documents there for the long-term while also keeping up to date with current industry standards such as Dublin Core, AIPs, etc.
[13] They utilize the four main preservation strategies while recommending the specific mediums and software and work for different types of art.
This is particularly useful for conservation because it allows future users to examine the document in a system that works for multiple different pieces of art.
[20] The catchall term sometimes applied to such genres, variable media, suggests that it is possible to recapture the experience of these works independently of the specific physical material and equipment used to display them in a given exhibition or performance.
[1] Nevertheless, many new media preservationists work to integrate new preservation strategies with existing documentation techniques and metadata standards.
Whereas scientific data and legal records may be easily migrated from one platform to another without losing their essential function, artworks are often sensitive to the look and feel of the media in which they are embedded.
[3] On the other hand, artists who are invited to help imagine a long-term plan for their work often respond with creative solutions.
[21] Director of Collections & Conservation at SFMOMA, Sterret is an avid collector and preserver of artworks made by contemporary artists.
The variable media concept was developed in 1998, first as a creative strategy Ippolito brought to the adversarial collaborations produced with artists Janet Cohen and Keith Frank, and later as a preservation strategy called the Variable Media Initiative that he applied to endangered artworks in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's collection.
Apart from Stringari and Ippolito, other key members of the Variable Media Network included Alain Depocas, Director of the Centre for Research and Documentation, Daniel Langlois Foundation; and Caitlin Jones, former Daniel Langlois Variable Media Preservation Fellow at the Guggenheim Museum.
Around this time similar investigations into the preservation of digital/media art were being led on the West Coast by Richard Rinehart, who published an article on the subject, "The Straw that Broke the Museum's Back?
Members of the Variable Media Network and CIAO subsequently joined forces with other organizations, including Rhizome.org, an affiliate of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, for collective preservation endeavors such as Archiving the Avant Garde.
Named after the pioneering critic of the commercialization of mass media, the late Professor Rose Goldsen of Cornell University.
The Archive hosts international art work produced on CD-Rom, DVD-Rom, video, digital interfaces, and the internet.
Its collection of supporting materials includes unpublished manuscripts and designs, catalogues, monographs, and resource guides to new media art.
[27] Other important initiatives include DOCAM, an international research alliance on the documentation and the conservation of the media arts heritage organized by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, and the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA), organized by the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (ICN).