Curation and Exhibition of Digital Art in Museums: Technical Guidelines and a Conceptual Framework for Longevity
To incorporate digital art into the museum context, we must first shift the axis from the “object” to the “system,” understood here as a set of relations among work, artist, curatorship, conservation, IT, legal, production, and the public. The point is not to “own” a work but, above all, to sustain its modes of existence over time. This shift—which echoes what contemporary criticism has already acknowledged about the plurality of languages and the centrality of context—demands that museums revise curatorial gestures and institutional architectures: in digital art, passive stewardship yields to documentation, risk management, and an ethics of maintenance. After the pandemic, the acceleration of mediation via platforms, graphics engines, networks, and immersive environments ceased to be peripheral. Virtual experience is not a derivative; it has become a primary mode of encounter. The problem, therefore, is ontological: exhibiting and preserving cease to mean material stability and come to mean behavioral continuity. If digital art is defined by mutable technological dependencies, it becomes necessary to make explicit which attributes constitute the identity of the work and what margins of change may be accepted without betraying its intention.
Within this framework, the notion of authenticity must be translated into technical and curatorial criteria. Authenticity here does not coincide with fidelity to original hardware but with coherence between artistic intention and the work’s perceptible behavior. In networks, interactive installations, video art, or software-dependent works, maintenance is a constitutive part of the work, not a reparative add-on. Documentation thus becomes the primary form of preservation. The Variable Media Questionnaire¹, conceived to move description from support to function, is particularly effective because it compels artist and institution to define the work as a set of behaviors and dependencies: mode of display, code and libraries, adjustable parameters, network connections, temporalities, update cycles. By recording in advance the preferred strategies for continuity—emulation, migration, or reinterpretation—the questionnaire operates both as a clause of intention and as prospective authorization for future interventions. More than a passive archive, it is a curatorial-legal appendix to the acquisition contract, converting poetics into operational requirements. Instead of a parts list, the museum holds a map of acceptable bounds of transformation.
Such documentary policy must be born alongside the curatorial gesture—and ideally before acquisition. Curating digital art is risk management combined with conceptual mediation. The curator acts as a curator-etc., without abdicating critical judgment: delineates what the work must “do” in order to remain a work, negotiates with the artist the margins for migration and emulation, anticipates update cycles, incorporates education as technical and symbolic mediation, and balances legibility for non-specialist audiences with the medium’s inherent complexity. In the exhibition space, the relevant fidelity is behavioral. An interface, a response time, a quality of movement, a compression rate, a pattern of sonic latency, a navigation path—all of this composes the aesthetic identity. To fetishize original equipment is to misunderstand the logic of the digital; at the same time, to abstract from sensible behavior is to denature the work. Sound curatorial judgment lies in recognizing that aesthetic value is not exhausted by appearance and also resides in the way the work acts upon the visitor and the world.
Longevity further requires a multidisciplinary team operating as a continuous decision-making committee. Conservation and IT share responsibilities for storage, integrity checks, versioning, and behavioral regression testing; legal negotiates licenses and safeguards the institution’s right to intervene for preservation; production ensures timelines and schedules compatible with the medium’s technical character; education translates the apparatus into public experience without emptying its complexity. To organize the life cycle, adoption of the OAIS² reference model as an archival framework is recommended. OAIS does not, in itself, resolve the aesthetics of behavior, but it establishes a repertoire of information objects and interfaces that render auditable and transferable what is, in fact, being preserved. From this common baseline, the institution decides on an active strategy on a case-by-case basis.
Emulation is preferable when the work depends on specific environments whose behavioral reproduction is decisive, especially in interactive, generative, or networked pieces. The obvious fragility lies in the emulator itself—also becoming an object of preservation—and in the demand for specialized personnel. Migration is justified when the intellectual content can survive alteration of the technical container without intolerable artistic loss; video art, digital photography, documents, and certain installations benefit from this approach, provided that critical parameters (color, luminance, bitrate, synchronies) are verified by testing protocols agreed with the artist. Technology preservation, understood as triage of original hardware and software, is useful during transitional phases, especially when reverse engineering remains uncertain; it does not, however, sustain itself as long-term policy due to costs, obsolescence, and scarcity of expertise. Reinterpretation, in turn, is only legitimate when the work is conceived with open variables and when prospective documentation clearly defines what may be updated and what constitutes the work’s non-negotiable core. In every case, what is preserved is less an object than a regime of experience, and the criterion is that of aesthetic sufficiency.
None of these paths prospers without legal governance. In digital art, code is the engine. If the museum does not hold rights of access and modification, the work is condemned to technological failure. Acquisition and exhibition contracts must contemplate a license of use with explicit preservation clauses, access to source via escrow or equivalent instrument, authorization for emulation and migration, legitimation of the VMQ as a binding annex, and the definition of institutional reuse regimes for digital collections and virtual tours. Legal, in this sense, is a preservation layer. The absence of these guarantees today constitutes a greater risk than a projector failure.
On the infrastructural plane, physical exhibitions involving VR, AR, video art, or software installations require technically designed environments and continuous maintenance. Immersive experience demands realistic budgeting for personnel, update cycles, performance monitoring, and scheduled replacement of components; there is no longer a “one-off installation cost” but an operating cost that endures as long as the work remains alive. On the virtual plane, when the institution creates autonomous cyberspaces on dedicated platforms or mass environments, the museum comes to manage hosting, security, latency, scalability, version compatibility, and layers of accessibility. What was formerly mediation is now the exhibition space itself, with full curatorial and conservation burdens.
What is recommended, in argumentative synthesis and without resorting to enumerations, is that the curatorial project begin from intention and behavior rather than support; that the institution adopt a recognized archival framework to underwrite the life cycle; that the continuity strategy balance emulation and migration in light of verifiable aesthetic criteria; that legal governance anticipate the right to intervene technically, guaranteeing access to code and the juridical validity of documentation; and that infrastructure be treated as ongoing operation rather than exception. When assumed in this register, the curation of digital art ceases to be a technological juggling act and becomes a mature critical practice capable of stabilizing, over time, what is most proper to the work: its ways of acting upon the world and of summoning the public to an experience that is no less art for being technical, nor less enduring for being variable.
1. The Variable Media Questionnaire (VMQ) is a documentation instrument devised by Jon Ippolito and collaborators within Guggenheim projects for works of “variable media”; its purpose is to describe the work not by its support but by the behaviors and dependencies that make it possible. The artist, in dialogue with curatorship and conservation, identifies essential elements, acceptable variables, and continuity strategies (emulation, migration, reinterpretation), recording whether the work is installed, interactive, generative, networked, or duplicable, as well as parameters that may be updated without violating authorial intent. By shifting the focus from “with what” to “how,” the VMQ turns documentation into a preservation policy, serving simultaneously as a map of the work’s identity and as a decision guide throughout its life cycle; when incorporated into the acquisition contract, it functions as a curatorial-legal annex that pre-authorizes interventions necessary to keep the work alive, ensuring that authenticity is measured by fidelity to aesthetic behavior rather than by a fetish for hardware.
2. Acronym for Open Archival Information System, it is a conceptual framework for long-term digital preservation, developed by the CCSDS (the standardization body of the space agencies) and codified as ISO 14721; it defines the minimum functions of a trusted repository (ingest, archival storage, data management, administration, preservation planning, and access) and the information objects that circulate among these functions—from the Submission Information Package (SIP) to the Archival Information Package (AIP) and the Dissemination Information Package (DIP). The model anchors preservation in the notion of a “Designated Community” (who must be able to understand the content over time) and in the metadata that make information intelligible and verifiable (such as Representation Information and Preservation Description Information), enabling institutions to describe, audit, and evolve their processes without binding them to specific technologies.