Museum Studies Blog at Tufts University

Welcome to a new guest poster, Zoe Salditch, who turned her Tufts internship into a full-time job at Rhizome!

In this day and age, our cultural artifacts are increasingly born-digital. Your papers, for example, are no longer hand written, ink on paper objects but instead a .doc file saved on your computer’s hard drive. For the last twenty years, artists engage with these new technologies, push them to aesthetic ends and create some of the most salient works of art today. Yet, many of these works of art exists in intangible forms At Rhizome.org, we are challenged everyday with the realities of exhibiting and preserving these cultural artifacts. Today, I would like to share with you all two interesting reads from my colleagues at Rhizome.

In the latest issue of Frieze Magazine, Rhizome’s Executive Director Lauren Cornell’s essay, In the Nostalgia District, she shares her perspective on the divide that exists between the art world and artists who work primarily on the Internet. Cornell raises interesting points and as Museum Studies students certainly gives you something to think about. How to continue attracting visitors, when everything is seemingly available online for free?

Lastly, for those of you interested in the care and preservation of digital art objects, here is Sustainable Preservation Practices and the Rhizome ArtBase from Rhizome’s Digital Conservator Ben Fino-Radin. In his paper, Fino-Radin synthesizes years of research conducted by Rhizome and other leaders of digital preservation, in and outside of art institutions on digital art preservation best practices.