so that’s why we don’t need assistants. Life is simplified, we know where everything is; we never have to look for things. George: So even if we lose something very unimportant, which is extremely rare, we are disturbed for days until we find it. Because we feel that that could be the beginning of the end.’ 11
objective is to guarantee the preservation of such an important part of computer gaming history.’ 12
‘Just by the passage of time these games are affected by the gradual deterioration of the media that stores them. These classics risk being lost forever in the near future, a tragedy that must be prevented. Our main
Recognizing that their particular passion is at risk these gamers have fostered ad hoc and successful preservation strategies for an undeniably important element of contemporary culture. A viable system of self-archiving requires that one must trust in ideals of ‘the commons’ to preserve and document. Future models, including the viability of self-archiving in a media art context, have recently been the subject of debate on the CRUMB (Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss) list – a curatorial resource dedicated to issues specific to media art. Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito (both founding members of the Variable Media Network) have both long suggested that the responsibility for preservation of media art should not be trusted to institutes but decentralized and distributed.13 Their proposed concept of The Open Museum is a self-archiving strategy in which artists deposit their work at a central locale where the source code and files can be copied and downloaded by other users. Whether institutionally based or a more open access model, as with the early years of video art, professional and artistic networks remain vital; collective understanding and knowledge bases raise the level of
11 Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Interview with Gilbert
12 http://www.softpres.org.
& George’, in Interarchive. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2002.
13 http://still-water.net.
The work of Gilbert and George is represented in almost every major institute in the world, yet it is this self-determined archive that has the potential to tell us the most about these artists. Another example of selfarchiving in a network context can be seen in gaming culture. Subject to the same hardware and software obsolescence issues as media art, very few classic games have been lost. Individuals and groups of dedicated gamers have taken up the cause of sustaining these classic games, continually writing the software and emulators necessary to keep old games running on contemporary computers. A quote from The Software Preservation Society echoes sentiments so often expressed by those in the field of media art:
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