Museums of the Unfinished to Ephemeral Memories: notes on net art conservation

Abstract

This paper discusses the conservation of net art works. It describes the overdose situation of documentary production fostered by social networks and its impact on the traditional forms of storage and the contemporary memory culture. It situates the specificity of net art in its connection to dynamic and systemic environments of flow, over which there is no control, implying new conservation parameters and investigates the particular aesthetics in this context. It problematizes the political instances that have turned the Internet into a surveillance environment, denying access to older sites and evidencing how they affect the preservation of the history of online art. In the end, it presents how we are working with Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Sao Paulo (MAC-USP), in the development of a methodology to deal with net art pieces in the museological universe. The discussion is made based on the particular case of The Book after the Book website (1999), which required a series of updates and reprogramming of codes in the process of migration to the museum collection. Based on this experience, we suggest a reflection about net art museums as museums of the unfinished, unrepaired and unrecovered. This strategy may allow dealing with irreversible losses, without counting on the following process of disappearance of the artworks.