In June 2003 the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the Guggenheim Museum launched the Variable Media Questionnaire. The variable media initiative was developed in 1998 by Jon Ippolito, an associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. This concept suggests considering the description of works independently of the media used to create them. Rather than list a work’s physical components, the variable media approach is to understand the work’s behavioural characteristics and intrinsic effects.
The website includes on-line case studies that formed the ground for developing the philosophy and the Variable Media Questionnaire (e.g. Jan Dibbets, Ken Jacobs, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Morris, Mark Napier, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, and Meg Webster).
The variable media paradigm pairs artists with museum and media consultants to provoke comparison of artworks created in ephemeral mediums. The initiative aims to define each of these case studies in terms of medium-independent behaviors and to identify artist-approved strategies for preserving artwork with the help of an interactive questionnaire. The questionnaire is linked to a database and will be available in the Fall of 2003 to members of the Variable Media Network and to artists and other persons who would like to try it. The accompanying publication Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach is on-line available (pdf) at the Variable Media website.
For further information, please visit the following websites: