What if one day your favorite music artist were to suddenly remove all of their songs from every streaming service? Or your favorite video game suddenly ended its service and is no longer playable? Maybe this is something that’s happened to you before; things disappear from the internet all the time, just like they disappear in real life as well. It’s actually far more common for digital media to vanish, and it can be extremely difficult to recover it when it does! But when people talk about art restoration and preservation, you might be picturing the big old Renaissance paintings in museums, and that’s true, but admittedly pretty boring. However, even though restoration is something that’s been around for thousands of years, it’s actually way more modern than you’d think! It changes just as fast as the art scene, and knowing how your favorite paintings, movies, music, books, and even video games are going to hold up in the future is definitely something worth learning about.
Before diving into the nitty gritty of how things are restored, we must ask ourselves the question: what is restoration? Maybe you’re familiar with the term “lost media”, which refers to any media that has been either completely destroyed, forgotten, or otherwise damaged beyond recognition. Restoration aims to reverse this! Turning “lost” media into “found” media using various methods of repair to return the artwork to its earliest original state. Not to be confused with conservation of course, which is the act of protecting existing work in its current state, however damaged it may be, for historical value. A simple way to remember this? Restoration is done for aesthetic or entertainment purposes, conservation is done for historical purposes.
The first step in any restoration process is to assess the damage. This ranges from environmental damage to vandalism. Vandalism is common in digital media especially since a lot of old technology was used with expensive materials; people gut and sell any expensive metals they can get their hands on. This process can be pretty boring, but it’s important in order to figure out what actually needs to be restored. Speaking of— once damage is assessed, the cleaning and recovery process can begin! Art restoration actually isn’t just a job about art and history, it’s also about science. Most canvas paintings are finished with a layer of glossy paint called varnish, and over time this varnish will start to turn a gross yellow color. This is a natural process, and it happens because varnish is made of organic materials that change color with age. Removing old varnish is a chemical process that requires detergents and solvents to scrape off layers without damaging the paint underneath, and art restorers do this by hand! There have been developments over the years to make this process easier though. In 1994, NASA developed a machine that can separate the organic varnish from the inorganic paint using oxygen to cause a reaction between the two substances. It’s still nerve-wracking, but at least it doesn’t have to be done by hand! After that, any damages to the canvas itself (like punctures or tears) are repaired, and then the painting can finally start being repainted! Repainting is done using advanced color matching techniques that require magnifying glasses and ultra fine brushes for perfect accuracy. For digital art, as long as someone can fix the device, or someone has a backup of the data somewhere, it can be recovered.
Restoration isn’t all sunshine and rainbows though. The process itself is already difficult, but the controversies that come with it are even more of a pain. Maybe you’ve stumbled upon a piece of found or recovered media that you remember, but it’s not the same as it once was. That can be upsetting since you really want to see, hear, or play the media exactly how you remembered it before it was lost. Professional art critics have this same issue; a lot of them frown upon restoring old art because it ruins the artist’s intent. Some artwork has been restored countless times, meaning the restorers are doing restorations on art that was already restored! This doesn’t really apply to art in the digital age, but we are actually still having the same conversations. Generative AI can be used to alter artwork, usually without the original artist’s consent. You may even see that sometimes AI art is fed back into an AI and it produces an even worse result. This is more or less how critics view restoration. Whether or not you enjoy restoration, or AI art I guess, is purely subjective though. Regardless of what the future has in store for this craft, what’s most important is to archive and preserve art as it is now so maybe it won’t ever have to be restored!
