AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

In this presentation, Emma Dickson and Cass Fino-Radin explore the critical role of interdisciplinary collaboration in advancing the field of time-based media art conservation. Aligning with the conference theme "What's Your Story: The Power of Collaborations," we argue that the most innovative and effective conservation practices emerge when we blur traditional role boundaries, deconstruct established hierarchies within our field, and facilitate opportunities to exchange practical skills between practitioners.

Through years of cross-disciplinary collaboration on the treatment and migration of complex and interactive time-based media artworks, we have developed and refined new methods for assessing treatments, expanding beyond traditional visual inspection and the limits of human perception. These new methods—which are reproducible and quite accessible—will be shared by illustrating their application to two specific works of art: Tall Ships (1992) by Gary Hill and Ten Thousand Cents (2008) by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima.

These case studies will illustrate the specific tactics and methodologies used to apply two new universal principles for assessing time-based media works that have emerged from our collaboration:

1. Automation of interactivity for consistent artwork testing

2. Measurable and time-synchronized comparison of iterations

As the field of time-based media conservation continues to mature, integrating these principles into practice is essential for maintaining the integrity of time-based media artworks through successive conservation treatments. By providing conservators with replicable, objective means of assessment, these techniques help minimize unintended alterations that would otherwise inevitably accumulate over time.

The development of these new methods demonstrates how interdisciplinarity when extended beyond collaboration into individual experience and training that bridges into one's collaborator's field, can enhance conservation practice and yield the kind of innovation our specialization needs to steward the art of today and tomorrow.