Gone in an Adobe Flash: Five new frameworks to preserve born-computational literary art for the future

Brown University is the source of some of the earliest, most experimental and innovative works in the field of born-digital literary arts. Faculty and students at Brown regularly produce work in a variety of experimental formats designed for digital environments, such as neural-net and model-based aesthetic text-generation programs and fully immersive three-dimensional poetry, and have done so since the early 1960s. Like many institutions, however, Brown University does not yet have models or strategies to preserve many of these works that push boundaries of electronic literature. This paper provides a case study of the university’s New Frameworks to Preserve and Publish Born-Digital Art project, which approaches preservation by focusing first on the works that are difficult to preserve in order to determine what approaches will work best for them, as well as to encourage artists working in these areas to pursue technically innovative art with the knowledge of how to go about sustaining their work for future generations. The paper outlines the preservation frameworks developed for five innovative works that rely on dependencies including Adobe Flash (a technology that recently reached its end of life), other ageing libraries, browser extensions and broken custom code. The frameworks outlined aim to provide a sustainable future for accessing these five works, as well as a guide for institutions and artists alike in how to preserve difficult, technologically innovative art for future generations.