Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Gift That Keeps On Giving: Preserving New Media Art For Posterity, Jennifer Bonnet

Library Staff Publications

Preserving works of creative expression in the digital age is notoriously difficult due to issues of technological obsolescence, the intangibility of dynamic media, and the interactive nature of digital art. This is of marked interest to libraries, museums, and cultural heritage institutions given the limitations of traditional forms of preservation that rely heavily on the storage of physical forms. The Re-Gift, a work of new media art by Buffalo-based artist Liz Rywelski, exemplifies many of the complexities of these emerging formats. This essay examines one of the potential approaches to preserving this type of work, with an eye toward …