When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired "Video Flag Z" in 1986, the piece by video artist Nam June Paik canonized a culture driven by technology.
A 6-foot-high grid of 84 white Quasar monitors flashed a changing mosaic of images that together formed an American flag in pulsating red, white and blue.
Today, the screens of "Video Flag Z" are dark, victims of the very modernity to which they paid tribute. The artwork's parts, including the 84 defunct television sets, are packed in the museum's warehouse.
"We can't find replacement parts anymore," said LACMA conservator John Hirx. "We're a museum. We're not a TV manufacturing plant."
Museums all over the world face similar problems. After decades of amassing avant-garde works on video, laser discs and other technology-based media, conservators are plagued with failing disk drives, burned-out bulbs, scorched wires, indecipherable bits and a host of moving parts that no longer move.
The collections grew from a movement that began in the 1950s, led by artists such as Paik, John Cage, Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman. These artists seized upon the notion that people felt disconnected by the onslaught of technology-driven media.
Many of them sought to demystify technology by taking it apart and introducing human interaction by having people tinker with the pieces. Cage in 1951, for example, created a piece that involved 12 people twiddling with the knobs of radios to create a composition. Paik expanded on the theme in 1963 with a famous piece called "Random Access" in which viewers can take random bits of magnetic tape and play them on a dismantled player.
Decades later, countless works like this "are decaying badly, on life support or turning to dust in a warehouse," said Jon Ippolito, associate curator of media arts at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. "There's a looming threat of mass extinction on the media arts landscape. And there's great debate right now over what to do about it."
Traditionally, museums have kept objects in their original condition for as long as possible. But with technology, several factors conspire against the conservator -- from equipment that becomes obsolete because companies no longer make it to fragile discs and tapes that degrade with each use.
"In my first investigations, I was concerned with making this physical videotape last," said Roni Polisar, conservation specialist at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. "What temperature should I keep it in? What level of humidity? What materials can be in contact with it?
