WireTap Magazine has a great interview with my friend Rick Rinehart about being a “digital media curator.” He has this to say about Open Sourcing artowork and making an Open Museum:
Digital artifacts, unlike even film and photography, are infinitely reproducible and that reproduction does not diminish quality or authenticity. So, one can both preserve a copy of a digital artwork and at the same time provide global access to another copy from anywhere in the world at any time. In fact with digital art (or digital anything), having multiple copies helps preservation.
Furthermore, this access need not be limited to just an image of the artwork, or a presentation version, but one could provide access to the full artwork, all the materials (code) and everything under the hood. This kind of “open-source” access would only further both research and spur new artistic creation and it’s a kind of mashing up of the raw materials that is not possible with traditional art forms.
My idea is to create the OpenMuseum; a repository for both preserving and providing access to digital art in this broadest possible sense. Of course there are other concerns, artworks are not just technical objects, but also social, economic, and legal artifacts, so the OpenMuseum is a prototype to experiment with those issues and provide a new model for access to the world’s digital culture.
I’m involved with these efforts as part of the Berkeley Museum’s Vanguard including some notable individuals from the area led by Jane Metcalfe (co-founder of wired) and Rick Rinehart, as well as Larissa Mann, aka, DJ Ripley who I blogged about previously:
Larisa Mann writes about technology, media and law for WireTap, studies Jurisprudence and Social Policy at U.C. Berkeley and djs under the name Ripley. She is a resident DJ at Surya Dub, San Francisco, and collaborates with the Riddim Method blog-DJ-academic crew, Havocsound sound system, and various other cross-fertilizing organisms in the Bay Area and worldwide.
If you are in the SF/Berkeley area tomorrow (Monday, June 2nd, 2008) and Tuesday, then come check out the Berkeley Big Bang 08 which will include all the above participants on the topics of digital culture and art. I’ll be there for part of the day tomorrow and also onto 01sj festival later in the week June 4 - 8 in San Jose.
Anyone interested in coming to this and/or presenting? Let us/me know! If I talk about anything, it will be the anti-max/msp/jitter called 
