ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS AND FLOPPY DISK
How can artists contribute to an archive in progress? The problems software art archives have to deal with are immense, and are often linked to digital preservation problems faced on a global level: storage media change and age, and formats, operating systems, and software and hardware are updated or discontinued… Digital technology is evolving extremely rapidly and very few strategies have been developed to help preserve data for future generations.1 Solving these global problems is well beyond the reach of the individual artist, but there are strategies worth considering that prolong Anne Laforet the life of an artwork and aid in the developAymeric Mansoux ment of long-term solutions to these problems. Marloes de Valk Using Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) to create work and publishing it using a copyleft license is one of those. 2 It seems simple: having access to an artwork’s source code and the source code of the software it depends on greatly increases the possibilities of maintaining it and keeping it operational. But the choices an artist faces when producing a work, the choices an archivist faces when maintaining it, and the tendencies within the world of software development – corporate and FLOSS alike – all impact on the eventual lifespan of a work. Are those artworks created using FLOSS and published with their source code better suited for preservation than other software art? Or is it best to forget about digital media all together and stick to rock, paper and scissors? Hard software Digital art is stored and developed on an extremely short-lived medium, and requires a constant migration process to avoid losing data.3 This can be said of any medium, of course, but in the digital realm, a single fragment of corrupted or missing data (bit rot) results in the entire file becoming unreadable. This is a major difference with analogue media. The race for new digital storage solutions keeps on accelerating. Every week new progress is made, making the previous medium obsolete. Though a very attractive commercial strategy, it is lethal for the conservation of data. It makes one wonder, not without irony, if writing down source code on paper, even in the age of so-called cloud storage, is not one of the most secure ways to safely preserve information. 1 Such as the International Re-
search on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) project. http://www.interpares.org.
2 Copyleft is a form of licens-
ing that gives others the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve a work, and requires all modified versions of a work to grant the same rights. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft.
3 Data migration is needed when
computer systems are upgraded, changed or merged, and involves transferring data from one storage type, system or format to another.
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