Slow Digital: LACMA Names the Problem
Published: 2026-08-01 | Morning Research | Cast: hook
The largest art museum on the US west coast just named the problem. Michael Govan, director of LACMA, called it “slow digital” — a deliberate counter-narrative to upgrade culture. The question: when everything moves this fast, how do you preserve anything at all?
The conversation happened at LACMA in February, during Frieze Los Angeles. Three panels. Museum directors, conservation specialists, an artist who builds her own AI systems, and a woman who brought a DNA data storage drive for show and tell.
The Term: “Slow Digital”
The term reframes the whole preservation problem. It is not a technical challenge. It is a cultural one. The same upgrade culture that makes your phone obsolete in three years is what makes a 2021 net art piece unviewable today. Flash is dead. CRT monitors die. Artists update their software and the previous version — the one the artwork actually ran on — ceases to exist.
The Physical Reality
Mark Ayala, LACMA’s gallery media manager, put it physically: digital art is not just software. It has a body. Hardware and software work together like a mind-body connection. LACMA maintains a robust CRT monitor inventory specifically to display early digital works on period-appropriate screens — the way they were actually meant to be seen.
Zombie Media
The practitioners use a term from media theory: zombie media. Dead technology brought back to life. Curators buying Commodore Amigas on eBay. Vintage overhead projectors gutted and fitted with Mac Minis. Hybrid machines — old shells, new brains. Andreas Korte from the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin described it as media archaeology. The museum as dig site.
The Artist’s Approach
Lauren Lee McCarthy offered a different path. She argued that work should not be defined by its platform or its specific technology. Her 2017 piece LAUREN is a custom smart device — an Alexa knockoff that undergoes constant software updates including AI voice clone versions. She documents it selectively: trailer-style videos rather than comprehensive preservation. The work is a set of guidelines, not a fixed object. Different each time. That is the point.
The Ecosystem Frame
Michael Connor from Rhizome pushed the ecosystem frame further. Digital art lives in communities that make and maintain it, not just in files. He also offered a caveat that the room clearly needed to hear: artists do not always want their work to survive. Sometimes the ephemerality is the work.
The On-Chain Angle
The on-chain angle came up directly. The consensus: blockchain is not sufficient as standalone storage. Work needs physical backup on drives, geographically distributed. One panelist suggested underground bunkers. Hard drives die too. The infrastructure you trust to last forever is the same infrastructure that fails every day.
Why It Matters
What makes this worth paying attention to is the institutional shift. LACMA is not a digital art museum. It is the largest encyclopedic art museum in the western United States, opening a new building designed by Peter Zumthor this spring. The director stood up and said that preserving digital art is not a side project. It is the problem.
The question for anyone minting work on-chain right now is not whether the blockchain will still exist in fifty years. It probably will. The question is whether anyone will know how to read what is stored on it, or whether the software ecosystem required to render it will have gone through enough upgrade cycles to make the original output unrecoverable.
“Slow digital” is not a call to stop making things. It is a call to stop assuming that the things you make will take care of themselves.
Source: “Slow Digital | The Art of Media Archaeology” — Right Click Save, February 2026