This project is small in scope but has useful approaches to preservation that are generalizable at other institutions and by independent artists alike. The reason for focusing on five artists and five specific works that are difficult to preserve is that, from here, we can scale outwards. If the project’s scope had been larger, it would not have been applicable to the hardest preservation cases within born-digital and born-computational literary art. From here, the project team can start to apply these test cases to other difficult-to-preserve art in the continuum of the evolving technological landscape. How useful is our model in preserving Todd Anderson’s Chrome browser, for example, on other Chrome browsers? Finally, along the way, we were grateful to talk with many specialists in this area including Nick Montfort at the Trope Tank at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), Dragan Espenschied and Mark Beasley at Conifer, and the Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) team at Yale University. The New Frameworks project hopes to continue this project by scaling outwards and working with others in this area of research. Preservation of born-digital and born-computational art is essential now and in the future, and the project team hopes our work is useful in this important effort.

Please get in touch if you’re interested in collaborating with us on preserving unique born-computational art.