This short paper consists of three meditations on potentially fruitful concepts for the preservation of performance-dependent heritage derived from a study of the use of 1970s media art. The meditations cover the following topics: 1) there are aspects to ritual that can guide principles for digital preservation; 2) as a result of use, growth rings that reflect that use can be added to items as a form of enriched metadata; and 3) in literary translations, ‘clouds of meaning’ can be shared with readers by showing both the original and the translation [1]. Some future users will want to understand not just the content of item that has undergone migration or emulation, they will want to investigate that process itself, able to interrogate both the original item and its iterations.

media art, audiovisual preservation, participatory archiving, digital preservation, metadata

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