[ISEA2011] Panel: Jon Ip­polito – Pro­lif­er­a­tive Preser­va­tion

Panel Statement

Panel: New Media Archives- New Intelligent Ambiances

You can’t save the spirit of a new media work by fix­ing it in time or place, any­more than you can save a life of a but­ter­fly by pin­ning it to a wall. An­i­mated be­ings per­se­vere not by sta­sis but by mu­ta­tion and repli­ca­tion, so this talk ex­plores such “pro­lif­er­a­tive preser­va­tion” as a strat­egy for pre­serv­ing the no­to­ri­ously mer­cu­r­ial ar­ti­facts of new media. The cur­rent state of pro­lif­er­a­tive preser­va­tion in­cludes such mod­els as the Vari­able Media Ques­tion­naire; the fu­ture may hold more spec­u­la­tive evo­lu­tion­ary par­a­digms such as al­go­rith­mic and eco­log­i­cal archives. Gen­er­ally con­sid­ered a cul­prit in the de­struc­tion of tra­di­tional human ar­ti­facts, na­ture may end up serv­ing as the in­spi­ra­tion for such new au­to­mated par­a­digms for the per­se­ver­ance of cul­ture. Yet, as suc­cess­ful as ge­netic al­go­rithms have been in pre­serv­ing the petaBytes of in­for­ma­tion stored in the DNA of liv­ing crea­tures, har­ness­ing ge­netic al­go­rithms to prop­a­gate human ar­ti­facts would breed a new host of eth­i­cal ques­tions about au­then­tic­ity and re­spon­si­bil­ity.

  • Jon Ip­polito, the re­cip­i­ent of Tiffany, Lan­nan, and Amer­i­can Foun­da­tion awards, Jon Ip­polito ex­hib­ited art­work with col­lab­o­ra­tive team­mates Janet Cohen and Keith Frank at venues such as the Walker Art Cen­ter (USA) and ZKM/Cen­ter for Art and Media Karl­sruhe (Germany). As As­so­ci­ate Cu­ra­tor of Media Arts at the Guggen­heim Mu­seum, he cu­rated Vir­tual Re­al­ity: An Emerg­ing Medium and, with John G. Han­hardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik. Ip­polito’s crit­i­cal writ­ing has ap­peared in pe­ri­od­i­cals rang­ing from Flash Art and the Art Jour­nal to the Wash­ing­ton Post. At the Still Water lab co-founded with Jo­line Blais, Ip­polito has been at work on three pro­jects–the Vari­able Media Net­work, ThoughtMesh, and the book At the Edge of Art–that aim to ex­pand the art world be­yond its tra­di­tional con­fines.

Full text (PDF) p. 1267-1272    [Title slightly different]