Models of Preservation for Net Art in Museums

... by Anne Laforet.
She is currently writing her PhD thesis at the University of Avignon (France). Her research is focused on Internet-specific artworks and the way museum institutions approach, collect and preserve them.
Artists have appropriated the Internet as soon as it became public to experiment new artistic. The museums have to reconsider the way they commission, exhibit, collect and preserve artworks, as they already did with other forms of ephemeral or process-based art. Archeological museums should be solution for net art preservation.
By combining museum and archival approaches, it is possible to keep traces of the net-based artworks' context by taking into account interrelations within a dynamic environment. Net archiving tools allow to follow very closely how an art work evolves, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the capture of works are functioning similarly to the works themselves.