Das Kunstwerk als Black Box: Herausforderungen der Rekonstruktion von Medienkunst

How can one reconstruct a work of art of which nothing remains except a description and a few photos? How can one figure out how works created with custom-written software and bespoke hardware functioned? How can media art works 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 artworksthatno longer physically exist—those 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 Digital Conservation Lab and explain innovative strategies for reconstructing media artworks. They demonstrate how they open the “black box” and attempt to determine 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. In doing so, they discuss the challenges, obstacles, and successes 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, participants will explore how museums and collections can deal with such “artworks as black boxes” in the future in order to preserve them for future generations, and what authenticity means in this context.

The event takes place as part of the project partnership with the Wüstenrot Foundation.