Material-Code-Stack: Conserving Born-Digital Objects and their Infrastructures

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How can museums maintain the infrastructures supporting born-digital objects in their collectionsand, in turn, conserve these objects considering their external dependencies? In the conservation ofborn-digital objects such as web artefacts, software and other computer-based media, substantialefforts have been made to mitigate the risks of obsolescence (Falcão 2011-12) and manage changeonce these industrial components do, inevitably, become unsupported (Engel & Phillips 2019;Laurenson 2006). However, the conservation of various infrastructures that underpin, but arefundamentally external to, these objects remains poorly understood, making their inter-relationalidentity difficult to sustain in the museum environment. My research project fills this gap byaddressing the conservation needs of born-digital objects not only in terms of their material bodyand encoded environment, components which are most often subject to intervention (Guez et al.2017; Rechert et al. 2013-2017), but also their technological and knowledge infrastructures, or their"stack"-a term originally used in computing to denote the infrastructural layers supporting theexecution of software. Operating at the intersection of technical art history, conservation and mediaarchaeology, my research will (1) develop a theoretical framework on the "stack" as a supportsystem that combines proprietary technology and its communities of users; (2) expand on existingsoftware-based art conservation techniques-including code migration, reverse engineering,decompilation, disk imaging and emulation/virtualisation-using the above framework; (3) applyand evaluate these critically informed techniques based on four case studies from the Victoria &