A painting requires a stable temperature; a digital work requires a running computer.
That difference turns from a physical discipline into a technical one.
Works made in the nineteen-nineties are already unplayable on current .
Museums have three options and each changes the work in a different way.
Keeping the original machine preserves everything until the machine fails, which it will.
reproduces the old system on new and usually alters timing and colour.
rewrites the work for current technology and produces something the artist did not make.
now interview artists while they are alive, which is the cheapest measure available.
The question asked is not how the work runs but what must survive if something has to change.
An artist may accept a different screen and refuse a change in response time.
Those answers become the instructions, and they are recorded with the files.
Works that depend on a live service are the hardest case of all.
A piece that reads a social platform stops existing when that platform closes its access.
Some museums now such works knowing they are collecting a performance rather than an object.
the performance well is then the whole job, and it is a job archives already know.