Mary Oliver once said that “attention is the beginning of devotion.” I want to highlight a few examples of this in practice that have recently crossed my desk.

First: the YouTube channel of Baumgartner Restoration, of which I’ve been recently obsessed. The videos feature the proprietor, Julian Baumgartner, narrating the painstaking process of restoring and conserving fine works of art.

There is some peculiar pleasure in seeing a centuries-old painting transformed under steady, gloved hands. It’s not just the ASMR crackle of varnish being carefully removed, or the delicate touch with which he inpaints a lost eyelash on a Madonna’s cheek. It’s the sense that you’re witnessing a dialogue across time: a conversation between the artist, the restorer, and the persistent materiality of the canvas itself.

As a generalist it’s incredible to see the combination of disciplines that go into this sort of work: chemistry, material science, fine arts, woodworking, history, and more. Plus it’s just really relaxing to watch!

One of the foundational principles in art restoration is reversibility: the notion that any intervention made to a work should be removable without harming the original. It’s a kind of humility encoded into the restorer’s practice, a tacit acknowledgment that today’s best solution might be tomorrow’s regrettable overstep. You see this restraint in Julian’s work: the materials he uses are chosen not just for their compatibility with the painting, but for their ability to be taken away if future conservators, armed with better tools or new information, decide to try again.

But what happens when the artwork in need of restoration isn’t made of oil and pigment, but of code and pixels?

A friend recently shared with me the Guggenheim’s ambitious digital restoration of Shu Lea Cheang’s “Brandon,” an early web-based artwork from 1998 (thanks, Celine!).

Brandon isn’t a painting hanging on a wall; it’s a sprawling, interactive digital narrative exploring gender, identity, and the malleability of self in cyberspace. The work, like much of the early web, was built on now-obsolete technologies like Java applets, deprecated HTML, and server-side scripts that no longer run on modern browsers. Restoring this piece isn’t about cleaning and repairing a surface but rather reconstructing an experience, reanimating a ghost in the machine.

Not to mention the piece is made up of 65,000 lines of code and over 4,500 files (!!).

The restoration of Brandon focused on migrating Java applets and outdated HTML to modern technologies. Java applets were replaced with GIFs, JavaScript, and new HTML, while nonfunctional HTML elements were replaced with CSS or resuscitated with JavaScript.

Don’t miss the two part interview with the conservators behind the project. (And please, if I am ever rendered unconscious, do not resuscitate me with JavaScript.)

In the physical world conservation is tactile, direct: a kind of respectful negotiation with entropy. In the digital realm it’s more like detective work, piecing together lost fragments of code, emulating vanished environments, and making decisions about what constitutes authenticity.

There’s an odd poetry in this sort of work. Just as a restorer must decide how much to intervene—when to fill in a crack, when to let the passage of time show—so too must digital conservators choose what to preserve: the look and feel of a Netscape-era interface? The original bugs and quirks? The social context of a work that once existed in the wilds of early internet culture? The restoration of Brandon becomes not just a technical project, but a philosophical one, asking what it means to keep an artwork alive when its very medium is in flux.

In both cases the act of restoration is, at heart, an act of care. A refusal to let things slip quietly into oblivion. It’s love as an active verb, the intentional transfer of energy.

And perhaps, as our lives become more entangled with the digital, we’ll find ourselves needing new ways to honor not just the objects we can touch but the experiences, stories, and communities that flicker across our screens. I personally feel very grateful that there are organizations and individuals taking on this sort of work.

Both of these examples remind us that conservation is less about freezing the past than about paying attention to it, and keeping it in conversation with the present. In that dialogue we might discover new forms of devotion: ways to care, to remember, and to imagine what else might be possible.