This text is from the publication Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach, published in 2003 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology.

Richard Rinehardt discusses the work of new media artist Ken Goldberg and outlines a variety of tactics necessary to keep new media art alive into the future.

As I think about the variable media art in the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive collection, I ask, "Do we want to preserve this art or keep it alive?" The former approach treats a work of variable media like a musical recording, locking in time some masterful performance. The latter approach treats the work more as a musical score, the same piece open to future iterations. Because these works don't self-record, self-document, or exist in a stable medium, preservation is an interpretive act. Both recordings and scores are valuable resources for the future: recordings keep the radical performative intentionality intact for future exhibitions, and scores keep the patina of history and provenance intact for future research.

There is no longer one monolithic original artifact, and there is no longer one silver-jacketed preservation method. Instead, we need a layered preservation strategy that admits fragments and traces, emulation software, re-creation, and reassemblage. Although artworks are unique cultural artifacts, they are part of the larger body of intellectual and cultural production. Art preservation, which necessitates specific expertise, should be part of a general and international strategy for preserving culture that includes government records, published knowledge, as well as industrial and scientific artifacts. This would mean the implementation of standards that could provide links between multiple preservation strategies. And of course we need a way for preservation methods themselves to be long-lived.

The Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive accessioned Ouija2000 (2000) by Ken Goldberg into its permanent collection. This telerobotic and Net art project invites Internet users to control a robotic arm that moves a planchette across a standard Ouija game board. Visitors monitor their movements via Web camera placed above the Ouija board. Many visitors can control the robotic arm simultaneously. Software averages out the motion commands and sends the planchette into an averaged direction, creating a motion that no one (except perhaps the spirits) intended. The work was exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum on a computer terminal placed on an antique table inside a candle-lit fortune-teller's tent.

Ouija2000 represents many aspects of Net art that challenge traditional notions of preservation, including physical installation components, machinery, custom software, use of an external network (Internet), and performance or participation. Ouija2000 demands a layered preservation strategy that takes all of these elements into account and allows each fragment to be preserved in the best possible manner while also allowing future regrouping for exhibition or research. Even if it were possible to preserve all of the discrete components of this installation in a traditional, static manner, one could never preserve the Internet circa 2000, for which this is a "site-specific" installation.

Future networks may alter subtle aspects of the work such as the feedback-delay time between a sent command and the robot's reaction. This change could have a significant effect on Ouija2000, which questions the veracity of the visitor's agency. To mock up a feedback-delay time in a future exhibition would also change the work. It appears the preservation solution for this work will look more like a scatter-plot than a bulls-eye.