Rhizome and Google Arts & Culture Partner to Preserve Digital Art

New York-based organization Rhizome, which has spent over two decades promoting and preserving new media and net art, has announced a partnership with Google Arts & Culture. The collaboration aims to create open source, free, and user-friendly tools to facilitate digital preservation and ensure stable access to electronic artifacts. This initiative addresses the unique challenges of conserving software-based art, which combines ephemeral materials, performance-like documentation needs, and code that evolves alongside hardware. The partnership launches with several online exhibitions focused on digital art conservation, a blog post by Vint Cerf (Google's Internet Chief Evangelist and co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol), a conversation between Cerf and Rhizome's conservation head Dragan Espenschied, and a video featuring all key participants including Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor. The project seeks to systematize preservation strategies that currently rely on disparate approaches like restoring original hardware, rewriting code for compatibility, or emulation. By providing accessible tools, the partnership hopes to encourage museums hesitant to acquire software-based works due to conservation fears, and to prevent the loss of historically significant digital artworks from recent decades.