That's what a printer is for.....and even then paper degrades over time. Nothing is forever but it's nice to have it while it lasts.
If you just leave a piece of paper in a vault for a few hundred years, it'll degrade too :P Just as you've got a person to take care of the physical stuff, you've got someone to take care of the digital stuff.
If you ever create a masterpiece, just engrave the hex code for each pixel into solid granite or steel :P
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That's what a printer is for.....and even then paper degrades over time. Nothing is forever but it's nice to have it while it lasts.
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Well actually, acid-free paper is archival, but I don't know about the printing process. The main reason we have "old Masters" work is that they were working with pretty basic (and safe) material.
Hmm..maybe I should look into stone carving.... 
GHOST ZERO! Avenger of the helpless dead!
I'm going to laminate my computer.
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I'm going to laminate my computer.
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*laminates Foo's forehead, and then rips the laminate back off again*
This temporariness is what early adopters of laser disks discovered: disk rot. After a while, the thing just comes apart. CDs and DVDs are somewhat hardier. Video tape has the same issue. The key is to keep backing things up as you go forward in time.
Another thing you should look into is preserving the photographs you've taken. Especially those of you with photos from the 1970s. The various papers and processes used back then were truly atrocious, and some photos have almost completely sublimated into the air by now. Most have faded over time, losing their luster. Ironically, what was considered an "inferior" process back in the 1960s has allowed many photographs from that era to retain their original color.
The Alt Alphabet ~ OPC: Other People's Characters ~ Terrific Screenshots of Cool ~ Superhero Fiction
My thought... is that I'm going to switch mediums <x.x>
I can't stand the idea of losing my artwork.
Though I'll have to ask -
If I have my artwork on my hard drive - on photobucket, and on a flashdrive, and I continuously re-upload it to new computers as I get them - am I risking my work?
A Warrior's Friend: ID 335212 - Help Infernal save Valkyrie from Battle Maiden.
Above Mars Part 1: The Wellington: ID 159769 - Save Mars by destroying a monstrous battleship from the inside!
>.> My DA page, where I attempt to art.
even the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray 
Their are volumes and volumes of art that have been lost thru diasters (both man made and natural) as well as by the hand of man (witness the many hidden masterpieces that we find from time to time that have been painted over !
I only look as far as the next generation of scarfgirls and or boys , as long as my art makes it into my kids hands someday so that they can see how awesome their mom was I'll be fulfilled .
If my work becomes awesome enough to warrant archiving im sure that people will do that someday
IMHO YMMV
I've always known about this, really, but it's true of any art. Even acid-free archival paper and the stuff that the old masters painted on needs to be maintained in order to keep it in good shape over time. Places like the Louvre, the Library of Congress... they all have full-time restoration staffs to keep things like paintings, sculpture... the US Constitution... from degrading past the point of salvagable-ness. Digital media is no different, but that's okay-- every few years, the standard format changes, and you update all your old archived work to the new standard. I've got awrtwork that i originally saved on 3.5-inch floppies that are now occupying DVD space, and went through CD-Rs and Zip drives in-between. And when prices come down, I imagine all my work will be moving from DVD to Blu-ray, and so on and so forth.
I've been doing it for years, but I hadn't really thought about it til I read an article about George Lucas discussing digital film, and he mentions archival stuff and how in the end, archiving digital is not much different than actual film. In one, you have to update your movie from format to format, and the other, you occasionally have to re-print your masters because the film degrades over time.
Having worked in the business of preserving papers and books, and still keeping a hand in it, I can tell you, that while the processess are getting better, nothing lasts forever. Oh, you can make them last hundreds of years, but you have to have archives with climate control etc. Digital formatting , as Su-lin said, changes, and you just keep resaving it in the new medium/format. Also, just as old masters on display need reconditioning on occasion, so might your digital artwork.
Personally, I don't feel a need to make my pictures last that long. I'd rather make new ones instead of spending all my time preserving old ones.
Attachment can be a very nasty hinderence, I don't let myself get attached to my work if I can help it. It's alot more fun to make a new picture than it is to keep trying to keep an old one safe.
"Our own apparent intransigence is what leads us to try to leave our mark upon the world, but perhaps it is the finite nature of our existence that makes us special."
- Anonymous
Tibetan Monks do these things called sandpaintings. They, using blown sand, create huge, elaborate interwoven images that take anywhere from a week to a month to create. When they are done, everyone comes and sees the painting. Then, the Monks sweep up the sand and move on. Art that embraces impermanence. Trippy.
I have a few pictures framed. Others are placed with archival mylars and acid free boards, the same stuff used in the Library of Congress. I've got a backup drive with digital originals and several CDs stored in a safe deposit box. >.> If I lose all of that, well I tip my hat to chance.
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I've been doing it for years, but I hadn't really thought about it til I read an article about George Lucas discussing digital film, and he mentions archival stuff and how in the end, archiving digital is not much different than actual film. In one, you have to update your movie from format to format, and the other, you occasionally have to re-print your masters because the film degrades over time.
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My friend is a director at the Library of Congress Film Preservation Unit at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio, and his job is to literally save old movies. He tells me that over 95% of all old films are lost to time. They have snippets they've saved and some of the pieces of movies are tantalizing, because the cinematography is so interesting or the acting is so impressive, but they have almost no idea of who did these things; or if they do, they only have this small amount of work to look at.
Even the so-called "safety film" which is supposed to be more durable has its own issues and needs to be restored. Although it's not nearly as bad as the old nitrate film stock, which literally degrades into a napalm-like goo which can spontaneously combust. Now there's something which makes the workday tense -- opening a roll of film that might literally explode in your face! They do it in cold, low-oxygen rooms to minimize the risk of serious injury, but there's a reason why those films are kept inside an underground bomb shelter.
They're always getting films that have been in someone's attic/basement/shed for 65 years. Sometimes they've decomposed to the point where the bomb squad has to dispose of them, but sometimes they're in fairly decent shape. That's how we have film of the lost scene from The Wizard of Oz -- someone took home movies on the day, put the film away for decades, and it got rediscovered when he died. Since the negatives from the studio were destroyed, that's the only record of the removed scene.
Because reproduction is so easy nowadays, there's little likelihood we'll have another tragedy like the burning of the library at Alexandria, but the point is pretty clear: reproduce and distribute your work so that multiple people have it.
The Alt Alphabet ~ OPC: Other People's Characters ~ Terrific Screenshots of Cool ~ Superhero Fiction
Crap! Then maybe I should have all my favorite art tattooed on me! 
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Crap! Then maybe I should have all my favorite art tattooed on me!
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You would look like a Yakuza and that medium only lasts until your death Unless you are entombed behind glass like Lenin.
By the way, if anyone's looking for supplies to help protect/store/archive comic book art, I've been picking up my supplies here...
http://www.bluelinepro.com/
I intend to live forever. That's the deal I inked with some guy wearing red and carrying a pitch fork. Bwahaha!!
I read a newspaper article some time ago regarding the probable non-longevity of digital media - it was talking broader than just digital art, tho. (documents and other data files) One of the things that I hadn't realized was this: in 50 years, regardless of whether the digital media is itself still viable, will we still have hardware/software that understands the FORMAT that old data was written in? Will we have blithely moved on from the "bad, old" JPEG format to something "newer, better" so far that we no longer can find an application to read the files we created today?
I have some old word processing documents (for pencil & paper RPG character sheets, for instance) that I haven't been able to sucessfully resurrect. This is just from 10 years ago. I can sorta just ignore all the formatting and only use the text, but at that point, I might as well just create a new one.
The idea of constantly "copying forward" to newer storage media and/or formats (as some of you have all ready suggested) is probably the best way to surmount the problem.
But its good to think about these things!
On the idea of "intentionally unpermanent art" - wasn't the artist Christo one of those who purposefully did his art thing, photographed it, then after a short while took it down - as if it was an "event" that happened and then was gone?
(stop me if you've heard this story) I recently read a thing about artist Steve Ditko (the guy who drew the first Spiderman stories). EDIT: here's the link:
http://goodcomics.blogspot.com/2005/...vealed-17.html
Seems, several years ago, this guy was over at Mr. Ditko's apartment, interviewing him for a fan magazine or something. The guy noticed a stack of thick cutting boards leaning against a wall - but something caught his eye about them. He asked Mr. Ditko to turn one around and it was some old, original Ditko Art pages! Ditko had been just using them as cutting boards. The story went on to say that the interviewer was flabbergasted and asked about it & Mr. Ditko showed him a stack a few feet high in a closet of more such original Ditko art pages. When asked why he hadn't sold them (for the thousands of dollars they'd be worth on the open market, these days) - Mr. Ditko replied that he didn't want to be known for that old stuff - that was not what he was doing NOW. He'd moved on to other things and wanted people to focus on what he was doing NOW, not on the comics he dis so long ago.
In general, I kinda thing that we, as humans just want to leave some part of us behind, as a little attempt at immortality. (as Serengheti_Lord noted in that quote by anonymous) (side note: I also think thats part of the facination with Zombies, Vampires, Mummies, etc - the idea of somehow cheating death, even as a Zombie, speaks to some deep fear of ending) I know that sometimes it strikes me, personally, pretty hard wondering if anyone will even remember who I was 10 years after I'm dead. (heckfire, does anyboody even rememeber who I am now! 
)
I was at a conference the beginning of this week that centered on Distance Learning technologies (what..you think I make my money reading forums?
) and I attended a session on archiving digital content like word documents, pdf's and, oh yes, art.
Did you know that there's no real way to save digital artwork other than to load it up on a server and...well...maintain it forever?
That's right, CD's slowy degrade, magnetic disks fail, etc.
So here's the deal. All of us artist who work in a digital medium are essentially spending our time creating "temporary" art.....stuff that probably won't last another 20 years unless it's being continuously hosted somewhere. That means that lots of really good art is actually going to "fall off of the planet" after a few years.
Is this something that you've considered before? Does it really even matter if your work survives? I'm still pondering the topic myself, but I thought it would be interesting to hear what others have to say.
GHOST ZERO! Avenger of the helpless dead!