Forging the Future, an alliance of museums, archives, and other organizations devoted to new strategies and tools for preserving new media, has just launched its own Mesh–a set of documents linked by ThoughtMesh software–on the topic of variable media and preservation. In addition to standalone documents, the Mesh includes seventeen essays from the book Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach, making this acclaimed publication accessible to even more readers, and automatically linking it to other texts on preservation published across the Web.

A co-publication of the Langlois Foundation and Guggenheim Museum, Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach is one of the first comprehensive books on the challenge of preserving artworks produced in the wide variety of media birthed in the last half-century. The book features a variety of perspectives, from former Guggenheim curator John Hanhart to emulation expert Jeff Rothenberg to science-fiction author Bruce Sterling, as well as case studies involving Web sites, film performances, and candy spills.

Permanence Through Change also introduced many artists and arts professionals to the variable media paradigm. Now all the contributions to Permanence Through Change have been republished in a richly connective way. Because they are part of a Mesh, Permanence Through Change can be navigated via keywords that relate each essay to others in the same volume or outside on the Web at large.

Leave a Reply