Cultivation, Not Coercion (Or, Three Movements on Maintenance)

I: Disrepair

In August of 2022, I installed my artwork Slow Response I (Drawings) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was about to begin my fifth and final year as a doctoral student. I had been invited to organize an exhibition in the building that would be on view throughout the full year. The show was to be installed on the fifth floor, in a hallway outside a room that was frequently used for classes, presentations, conferences, and other school-wide events. The hallway was brightly lit, both by lamps that were turned on and off throughout the day, but also during daylight hours by the sun. The space, in fact, faced south—the direction with the most light exposure—and had windows built to emphasize natural lighting, including some skylights on the ceiling.

Slow Response I (Drawings) is a series of 100 hand-drawn QR codes, rendered with ink and colored pencil on graph paper. The work, which examines our quick adaptation to new digital protocols and our expectations for seamless interaction with them, was begun in late 2021 as a daily practice; I began drawing QR codes out of sheer curiosity about whether or not they would scan, eventually experimenting with the pens and pencils I used, patterns and color palettes, and breaking out of the standard square shapes that make up the scannable parts of the code. Because the project was begun as a personal investigation into these ideas, I did not consider the long-term preservation of the work until about a third of the way into the process, by which point I had realized the potential for a larger piece within what I was doing. I made the switch to 80 gsm acid-free paper on January 1, 2022; before then, I had completed 24 drawings in a cheap composition book I had purchased from Staples, where the paper was so thin I often had to skip pages between days due to ink bleed. I was also working with a range of drawing implements that spanned professional calligraphy pens to metallic Sharpies I had picked up as an impulse purchase, artist-grade colored pencils to Paper Mate felt-tip pens more frequently used for taking class notes or grading papers.

The question of the work’s ability to withstand long-term exhibition—unframed, in a space bathed in ultraviolet light—was not lost on me. Before install, I spent weeks meticulously researching fixatives, UV protectants, and coatings for my artwork that would help it emerge unscathed. I spent a full afternoon stationed in a courtyard outside of the building in the blistering August heat, spraying down my artwork before mounting it on the wall, holding the drawings down with anything I could to keep the wind from blowing them away. After I finished hanging them up, I took a step back to admire my handiwork, while crossing my fingers that the measures I had taken would keep the drawings intact and vibrant when I returned in a year to take them down.

But, despite my best efforts, the ravages of both nature and time won out. Over the course of the year, about half of the drawings—mainly those that were made using water-based inks in lighter colors, usually reds or pinks—began to fade. Some of the drawings ended up smudged. One of them exhibited traces of water damage, likely due to the fact that the space was the site of many receptions involving food and drink. As summer progressed into fall—then winter, then spring—I occasionally went up to the exhibition space to check on the drawings. From afar, the installation seemed as though nothing had changed since I first put the works up on the wall. Up close, though, I could tell the difference: some of the colors slowly desaturated; the shine of the gold and bronze metallic inks faded; codes that once scanned easily started malfunctioning, simply because their contrast with the white paper they were drawn on wasn’t high enough anymore.

A few weeks before I moved from Philadelphia to Western Massachusetts in August of 2023, I spent an afternoon taking down the work from the hallway. I knew going in that some of the drawings would need some restoration, but that didn’t keep my anxiety from swelling whenever I encountered one that was noticeably lightened, or which exhibited traces of deterioration. I was dismayed to see that so many of these drawings had faded to the extent that they did. I had believed until that point that, because it took an analog, physical form, the work had essentially been completed—neglecting to account for the additional labor I would need to undertake to ensure the project’s survival into the future.

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More than most, new media artists are primed to work in the moment. As creative practitioners working with emerging technologies—spanning Web and networking tech, hardware and electronics, creative code and software art, extended reality, blockchain, artificial intelligence and more—maintenance is something that we do not often think of as we build our work. We race to deadlines, doing whatever we can to ensure that projects are functional in the short term, and frequently (and, perhaps, falsely) promising ourselves that we will make things more sustainable later. The long-term fate of our art—whether it survives well into the future or, like my drawings, rapidly breaks down, failing to keep up with the impacts of the outside world—is usually an afterthought.

Over the course of the 53 interviews with artists, curators, and administrators in the art and technology space that I conducted for my doctoral dissertation¹ (Vasudevan, 2023), a majority of practitioners told me that their priority was making sure their work functioned in the immediate, rather than making longer-term contingency plans. As one of my interviewees put it, there is often a greater payoff in ensuring that artwork is working and visible now than in fretting and planning for some faraway, indeterminate future. In other words, given a choice between immediate functionality and long-term preservation, most of the artists that I spoke to would, unsurprisingly, opt for the former. I can also clearly see this tendency as I reflect on how my own practice has evolved over the years; I can think of several projects that currently exist in a liminal half-finished state, which were good enough at the time to document and put on my website but would never fly today in an exhibition context.

I argue in my research that this is a direct result of the “move fast and break things” ethos that permeates the larger technology industry. As tech-based artists, we tie ourselves to the developments and ideologies coming from Silicon Valley in myriad ways, not least of which is the endless pursuit of more, faster, newer. Within the creative technology space, so much of what we consider to be “finished” is never actually complete; we are forever in the proof of concept phase, experimenting with the latest systems to find ways to break, bend, or expand them. New media art is often positioned as a thought experiment, a speculative reimagination of what technology could be if we approached it from more experimental or unconventional perspectives. As a field, we are consistently pointed forward; there is little incentive for going back, for moving slowly, for taking our time with things or revisiting systems that are no longer thought to be novel or unique.

Artists often consider their practices a form of hacking; many artists specifically used this term when talking to me about the processes they adopt in their daily workflows. When media artists speak of hacking, they do so in a much more expansive way than the popular imagination of the term, which often focuses on security protocols and malicious actors. Hacking, in our context, is instead thought of as “an appropriate application of ingenuity” (Raymond, 2003) in the manipulation of digital technology. We thrive in loopholes, quick fixes, subverting the unwieldy infrastructure that we have come to associate with big technology companies and their monolithic dominance. I found in my research that new media artists frequently cite the act of getting a system to do something for which it was never intended as a key motivator, if not the key motivator, for their practices. As a result, if we get something to work in the moment, that is often good enough for us.

II: Revitalization

Late in the fall of 2023, once I had settled from the move and somewhat adjusted to life in new surroundings, I (grudgingly) began a quest to revive my drawings. After I finally mustered up the wherewithal to actually reopen the binder I was using to store the works, I started at the beginning, leafing through each individual piece and eyeing it closely for signs of decay or degradation. When I reached a drawing that had faded, smudged, or had otherwise deteriorated, I pulled it out of its protective plastic and painstakingly traced over the washed-out lines and shapes that I had originally created close to two years prior.

Some of the drawings were much easier to refresh than others. In my first attempts at hand drawing the codes when I began the series, I filled each square entirely with a single selected color, making the upgrade process for those works akin to painting by numbers, or filling in pre-drawn shapes in a coloring book. I could usually resuscitate the earlier drawings within about 15 to 20 minutes each, moving quickly through the first third within two short afternoons. As the codes became more complex, though, the time to refresh them increased exponentially—a reflection of the initial drawing process, where the time taken to originally create each work escalated from 45 minutes to three and a half hours over the course of 100 days.

I also found echoes of the original process appearing unexpectedly within the physical responses in my body: the muscle memory of drawing a detailed shape repeatedly in a small area; the particular ache of my hand cramping as a result of years of holding pens and pencils in a less-than-ergonomic fashion; the curvature of my spine as I hunched over a seven-inch square drawing to see the light blue grid on the page more closely. Although my brain had quickly forgotten all of these things after I completed the hundredth drawing, my body remembered, holding on to these feelings like old photographs or mementos tucked away in the back of a closet. As I re-drew, everything got pulled back out and the memories resurfaced; eventually, it began to feel as though no time had passed, that I was still back in 2022 making this work for the very first time.

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In her influential 2000 essay “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy”, media theorist Tiziana Terranova pointed to the massive amount of labor underpinning simplistic ideas of open source technology and digital culture. Bucking then-commonplace and idealistic notions of the Internet as a sea of content generated through sheer goodwill, Terranova instead argued that “the Internet is about the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work, and it is extremely labor intensive” (2000, p. 48).

Terranova pointed to “tech support, packaging, installation software, regular upgrades, office applications, and hardware” (2000, p. 50) that are needed in order to make the open source ecosystem run—and emphasized that the labor of doing so is frequently unrecognized and uncompensated². The idea of unseen costs and labor associated with its development also underscores the idea that the job of maintaining open source technology is never truly finished. Projects are built in the heady throes of excitement about developing new tools for others to use; just as often, code repositories fall into disrepair as developers move on to new systems, enabling critical insecurities to develop and impacting commercial systems that depend on them (Vaughan-Nichols, 2020; Avelino et al, 2019). The practice is so commonplace that initiatives like Forked³ and Code Shelter have emerged over the years to allow developers to “adopt” or take on responsibility for others’ abandoned open source projects (Finley, 2013; Cabot, 2018).

It’s not just in the open source world where this becomes an issue. Technology, as we currently conceive of and understand it, necessitates constant upkeep and maintenance to continue to work at its best—but the time required to do so is often erased or eclipsed, superseded in importance by the labor of initial creation. We think of tech development as the “stroke of genius” idea, the hours of nonstop coding to build and ship a breakthrough or cutting-edge product or system that changes the world. We forget about what comes afterward: the constant tweaks and updates, the compliance with new security protocols, the adjustments necessary when other tools or products that we depend on are themselves updated or reconfigured. In other words, we forget all the maintenance needed to make the “new” eventually seem normal. But—as media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2016) argues—updating is, in fact, core to the evolution of dominant technological interests, and something built into the habituation of specific technological practices into our lives. We do it regularly, we just don’t think of it as labor; software and hardware are stealthily and steadily incorporated into our daily routines like the proverbial gradual raising of the water temperature under a pot of lobsters. Per Chun’s argument, tech adoption occurs less through the revolutionary disruption imagined by the industry, and more through frequent, incremental updates framed as routine compliance.

It follows, then, that maintenance is also a primary driver of new media practices, even though we as artists may not see it that way. Almost paradoxically (because they are often not considering the future when they initially build and ship a project), many of the fellow artists I interviewed revealed that they frequently carry anxiety with them surrounding whether their projects will continue to function as intended without continual, active upkeep. They spoke of constantly worrying about their work’s survival, even in the short term; of receiving the dreaded phone call or email that their project has suddenly broken and needs immediate repair. The affective residue that follows these artists throughout the lives of their work—exhibition to exhibition, collection to collection—demonstrates that even when a project is considered complete, it is never truly done until it is abandoned. The only way we close the door on most of our projects is to relegate them to the trash heap, to decide that whatever documentation we have is a better reflection of the work than the work itself.

It is true that all art needs to be maintained in some way. This is why conservation departments exist in both academic and museum spaces, where specialists devote their lives to ensuring the continued care of work for long periods of time; the field operates in decades, if not centuries. Among these experts, the question of maintaining tech-based artwork and staving off obsolescence is also an urgent conversation, which has offered many different approaches to preserving digital, time-based or “new” media pieces⁴. But what makes the maintenance of new media art fundamentally different from the maintenance of other forms is the degree to which artists themselves must engage with these questions, often performing yearly, monthly, or even weekly upgrades to ensure that their work might be seen by those larger institutions in the first place. Even the many creative open source toolkits out there, on which so much contemporary artistic production depends, rely in large part on the unpaid labor and devotion of individual volunteers to simply remain available for use. Without museum-caliber resources and support, many tech-based projects simply die because the labor of maintenance becomes too much to handle; it is eventually impossible, on your own, to do all the work necessary to keep your art alive.

III: Care

As I progressed through the 100 drawings, I began to feel renewed care and connection to the artwork the more time I spent refreshing it. I was reminded of what was important to me in the project when I made it in the first place: the dissonance between human and computational labor, the quick and seamless integration of new technical protocols into our lives, the often-unseen impacts to physicality and embodiment when it comes to building and using digital systems. The process of redrawing reignited the excitement I initially had for the piece, and made me recall why I had embarked on the journey to begin with.

The unanticipated need to update work that I had considered to be complete also reminded me of the necessity of care when it comes to ensuring its survival. Perhaps naïvely, I had assumed that the analog nature of these works—the emphasis on handicraft, the use of drawing as the primary modality—meant that it would be a while, if ever, before I would need to consider their longer-term upkeep. I had imagined that the corresponding Web-based component (a series of websites that were activated by 70 functioning codes) would need to be upgraded long before the drawings. In the initial thrill I felt around this project, I had even envisioned that I could potentially leave the drawings’ care to the institution that would eventually collect them; I could bring the work into the world and hand off the bulk of the preservation efforts, and any corresponding frustrations, to others.

As I finished updating Slow Response I early in 2024, I felt a strange mixture of emotions. I had expected to feel relieved when the process was over—this now meant that I would be able to continue to show the work, after all—but I also found myself consumed with worry about how I might be able to preserve the project going forward, so I wouldn’t have to go through this ordeal again. Suddenly, maintenance became the primary issue I thought about, not something that was left on the back burner. I needed a way to make sure that the piece, and my initial aims in making it, were still able to be experienced regardless of whether an institution found the artwork worth preserving.

In an effort to account for this issue, I began scanning the drawings into high-resolution digital formats. The scans will ensure that there is a record of the work as it is supposed to look—to enable potential re-creation down the line—but I have also been inspired to create an artist’s book version of the project, composed of the drawings, the websites, and the Instagram stories I posted during the initial creation process. While I will continue to exhibit the original drawings, I am hopeful that, through this new work, their life will be prolonged regardless of whether anyone else takes on the challenge of actively caring for them.

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On the occasion that we do actively consider it, technological maintenance often carries a corresponding sense of coercion—it’s labor we grudgingly perform, something we avoid until we absolutely must deal with it. It’s not something we necessarily choose to do for its own merit. Indeed, Chun (2016) positions the act of updating as a response to moments of manufactured crisis, grounded in compulsion and playing to our innate fear of being suddenly left behind. Although it may not be apparent at first glance, this might explain why we are more inclined to let old projects fall into oblivion, rather than take the time to resurrect them. Whether it comes from a place of defiance, overwhelm, or loss of interest, the path of least resistance is often simply to discard when we’ve had enough—to desert old projects and tools in favor of what seems to be relevant in the current moment.

Or, at least, that’s how it seems. Framed differently, we can start to reimagine maintenance as something essential, something it becomes vitally important to attend to on a voluntary basis. Widening the lens beyond technology, we can see that human life itself requires constant maintenance and attunement to proactive changes. Having a child comes along with years of commitment to providing daily care, protection, and support; in our later lives, disaster often follows when we wait until the last minute to see a doctor, to speak to someone about our anxieties and fears, to tend to our social relationships and connections to others. We can certainly argue that this type of maintenance, too, is something that we are disinclined to prioritize for ourselves⁵—but when lack of attention will inevitably mean death, doing the routine upkeep suddenly becomes far more appealing than its opposite. 

Maybe we should start to look at technology in the same way. Ruha Benjamin (2019) writes on behalf of a “slower and more socially conscious innovation” that “require[s] prioritizing equity over efficiency” (p. 121): methodically building on top of achieved progress instead of switching gears rapidly based on hype or whims. Rather than ignoring it or considering it to be an afterthought, acknowledging maintenance as labor and positioning it as a central tenet of technological practice may offer avenues into more considered, thoughtful, and sustainable approaches to its implementation. We might make choices that prioritize the long-term survival and accessibility of a tool or artwork over its short-term impact; we might slow down and imagine the effects of our work over a greater span of time; we might even think about the compensation (financial or otherwise) that those volunteer laborers and digital support staff deserve. Thinking of maintenance as the act of nurturing instead of something that is forced upon us—of watching and supporting nuanced evolution instead of rushing to keep up at an unhealthy pace—could be a key to the fairer, more equitable futures that new media artists often present as our goal. Maybe the secret is simply slowing down, looking at what’s already there, and validating its continued right to exist.

1. The project, as a whole, investigates the ties between new media artists and the technology industry, making the case that artists who work with emerging technology are fundamentally tied to industrial priorities, protocols, and best practices—even if they may not see themselves in this light. ↩︎
2. Drawing in part from Terranova’s work, I have elsewhere (Vasudevan, 2021) written about how Big Tech mines the goodwill and sharing inherent to what I term the “open source ethos” to spur new innovation, often directly and harmfully taking advantage of individual developers and small start-ups in the process. ↩︎
3. Forked itself seems to have been abandoned as a project; a July 2019 crawl by the Wayback Machine points to the project’s domain name as having expired, and a visit to the site today launches an array of spam content and interminable popup windows. ↩︎
4. For a thorough overview of different institutional approaches to this question, see works such as those by Rinehart and Ippolito (2014), Dekker (2018), and Espenschied (2023). ↩︎
5. It should also be mentioned that this type of maintenance is often made inaccessible through social power dynamics and financial interests, leading to its de-prioritization in daily life. ↩︎

References

Avelino, G., Constantinou, E., Valenti, M.T., & Serebrenik, A. (2019). On the abandonment and survival of open source projects: An empirical investigation. 2019 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), Porto de Galinhas, Recife, Brazil, pp. 1-12. DOI: 10.1109/ESEM.2019.8870181.

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code. Medford, MA: Polity.

Cabot, J. (September 21, 2018). Adopt an open source project. Livable Software. Retrieved from https://livablesoftware.com/adopt-abandoned-open-source-project/.

Chun, W.H.K. (2016). Updating to remain the same: Habitual new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dekker, A. (2018). Collecting and conserving Net art: Moving beyond conventional methods. Abingdon & New York, NY: Routledge.

Espenschied, D. (2023). In between performance and documentation. Rhizome. Retrieved from https://rhizome.org/editorial/2023/may/05/in-between-performance-and-documentation/.

Finley, K. (December 9, 2013). Out in the open: How to resurrect a dead open source project. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2013/12/forked/.

Raymond, E. (Ed.) (December 2003). The meaning of hack. In The Jargon File (version 4.4.7). Retrieved from http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html.

Rinehart, R. & Ippolito, J. (2014). Re-collection: Art, new media and social memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Terranova, T. (2000). Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text 63, 18(2), 33-58. DOI: 10.1215/01642472-18-2_63-33.

Vasudevan, R. (2021). Share and share unlike: Reciprocity, corporate control, and the open source ethos. New Media & Society, 25(11), 2981-3001. DOI: 10.1177/14614448211038350.

Vasudevan, R. (2023). High-level creativity: New media art and the priorities of the tech industry (Publication no. 30529471) [Doctoral dissertation]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Vaughan-Nichols, S. (May 12, 2020). Out-of-date, insecure open-source software is everywhere. ZDNet. Retrieved from https://www.zdnet.com/article/out-of-date-insecure-open-source-software-is-everywhere/.