The Artwork as a Black Box: Challenges in Reconstructing Media Art

How can one reconstruct a work of art of which nothing remains except a description and a few photos? How can one determine how works created with custom-written software and tailor-made hardware functioned? How can media artworks be brought back to life when their original components are no longer manufactured?

The event »The Artwork as a Black Box: Challenges in the Reconstruction of Media Art« explores how media artworks that no longer physically exist, are based on obsolete components or computer systems, or whose internal processes are not fully documented can be preserved. These works constitute technological black boxes and therefore pose a particular challenge for restoration.

ZKM conservators Morgan Stricot, Marlies Peller, and Daniel Heiss will share insights into their fascinating work at the Laboratory for Media Art Conservation and explain innovative strategies for reconstructing media artworks. They will demonstrate how they open the »black box« and attempt to uncover how the artworks once functioned, were constructed, or were programmed, and how these can be reconstructed in collaboration with the artists or using archival materials. They will discuss the challenges, obstacles, and successes encountered in these research projects and present new forms of technical documentation, software analysis, reprogramming, and hardware emulation that they have developed themselves. 

In the discussion that follows, it will be explored how museums and collections can deal with such »artworks as a black-box« in the future in order to preserve them for future generations, and what authenticity means in this context.

The event is taking place as part of a project partnership with the Wüstenrot Foundation.