NEW YORK, NY.- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology have formed a special partnership for the year 2002 to lay the groundwork for a future consortium of cultural heritage organizations. Entitled the Variable Media Network, this consortium would be dedicated to inventing and sharing approaches to preserving art in new media.
’This partnership comes at a time when the world is increasingly aware of the urgency of safeguarding cultural memory for future generations,’ said Thomas Krens, Director of the Guggenheim. Jean Gagnon, Director of Programs at the Langlois Foundation, added, ’Given our particular interest in research concerning the preservation of digital documents and artworks, this alliance gives us the opportunity to complement the Langlois Foundation’s expertise in archiving the history of new media art with the Guggenheim’s unparalleled experience presenting and preserving it.’
The partnership will be co-directed by Alain Depocas, Head of Langlois’ Centre for Research and Documentation, and Jon Ippolito, Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim. The philosophy underlying the partnership is based on the ’variable media’ paradigm pioneered by the Guggenheim Museum for preserving works in its collection endangered by inadequate documentation or technological obsolescence.