乐生活For a while, curators at the Butler Institute of American Art in Butler, Ohio, brushed eBay every day to find an old Panasonic TV tube made in 1993.
It’s not that museums are looking for antique collections, but that their "TV wall" is in big trouble.
The so-called "TV wall" is an artwork called "Ars Electronica" (Fig. 1). Twenty Panasonic small televisions are stacked together, and the screen keeps flickering, changing colorful and sometimes distorted images. It was born in 1994 and is the work of Nam June Paik, a Korean modern artist keen on Pioneer video technology.
However, with the passage of time, these small TV tubes began to aging and damage. The TV screen began to change color and collapse one by one. This is normal. The lifetime of the TV tube is about 20,000 hours. However, as a work of art, how to repair has become a big problem.
Collection curators were able to find the same type of second-hand TV from eBay in the beginning and replace some broken parts, but this is becoming more and more difficult.
Unfortunately, the curator replaced some completely irreparable screens with the original shell on the LCD screen cover. However, the texture of CRT TV and LCD TV varies greatly, and the curved surface of CRT screen gives the viewer different charm from different angles. Although it can be simulated by a retro curved lens, will it change what the work of art was meant to express?
Perhaps the author can answer, but Bai Nanjun died in 2006. In the same year, Panasonic’s CRT TV was completely shut down.
This is the case.
The rapid decay of technology is beyond our imagination. This is not so much a problem faced by a single work as a problem faced by everything in the electronic medium. In the face of fast-decaying technology, the "constancy" of art has become very luxurious.
In the field of art, video, photography, performance and so on are called "time-based media". The content of the display depends on the technical means of display and the technical media stored – from film, disk, to LED light array, etc. However, when the creators use these advanced media to realize their artistic conception, they seldom consider that the life span of these technologies is often too short to be imagined.
One is the lifetime of the medium itself. The life of ordinary hard disk is about 30,000-60,000 hours. Even if it is used very carefully, it will almost die in 6 or 7 years. The life of U disk (flash memory) is longer, and it can be erased thousands of times. In theory, it is not a problem to use it for 20 years, but as a work of art, 20 years is only a flash in a long river.
Cloud storage needs to face more complex problems – where does data exist? Who is in charge of custody? How safe is it? Perhaps a server is powered off, and all content will vanish in an instant. Data backup and maintenance, etc., are problems that the art field has never faced. Even if the technology and management means based on cloud storage are perfect, the amount of storage is even less important. However, when the time span is extended, everything is uncertain. Five years and ten years are easy, but what about fifty, one hundred, and five hundred years?
Compared with the new technology, it is CD, disk, black rubber and other "old technology" more durable. However, these old technologies will face another problem: being eliminated and incompatible. CD players and video recorders can be kept, but CD players and video opportunities are bad; some images and videos can exist, but the format can not be read; or even, the bankruptcy of a company will bring incalculable losses to the survival of art works – Kodak’s withdrawal from the historical stage, "photo-washing" can be a thorny matter.
Those old movies and golden records can still be preserved by people relying on their identity in the digital age. However, the vast majority of the shelved works of art, but it is hard to escape the fate of rapid decay. Imagine when we discovered a 1950 video in 2050. Although the creator was unknown, he recorded an important history or told a unique story. However, people can no longer read it. Perhaps the gap of one hundred years will make later generations strangle it.
Is it true that modern art, which is based on modern technology, is fast-decaying in itself, and it is only a reflection of the honesty, acuteness and helplessness of our fast-decaying world, which advocates technology?
I hope we can finally avoid this cruel conclusion.
(Fig. 2 is another TV wall work of Bai Nanjun, hidden in Smithsonian Art Museum; Fig. 3 is hidden in MOMA; Fig. 4 is Bai Nanjun himself and his work "Buddha Watches TV".)
