AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

Working with contemporary, mixed-media textiles presents unique display challenges. Artworks are frequently created from a wide range of materials and can be extremely heavy, voluminous, and sometimes, self-destructive. Meanwhile, an artist’s vision of how their work is perceived by the world may not entirely align with the stability of the piece itself. 

Artworks at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art include such pieces as Aunty Lovey se Kombuis, 2022 by Igshaan Adams. Created from wood, plastic, glass, bone and shell beads, fabric, cotton twine, silver linked chain, and plastic-coated wire, this massive piece was originally nailed to a wall by the artist at approximately one foot intervals, causing the piece to inherently distort along its upper border. Although the distortion was intentional, the stress along these points posed long-term risks to the plethora of materials used. This was taken into consideration during preparatory and installation phases as a variety of mounting approaches were tested - with the goal of reducing stress and strain, while preserving the artist’s vision. 

Working directly with an artist during an installation can also require swift adaptability. During the installation of We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art, Porfirio Gutierrez a Latin American artist and activist added yarn sculptures and nopales, prickly pear cactus segments (phylloclades) to his installation list. Before entering the galleries, cactus spines and any cochineal insects were first removed from the phylloclades, which were then strung on hemp and suspended from a prepared rack. Since the artist mentioned that metal accelerated degradation of the cactus segments causing them to rot, the hanging mechanism was inserted with sharpened pencils. 

Installing contemporary textiles often requires collaboration between conservators, collections management teams, preparators, and often, the artists themselves, resulting in exhibitions that aim to achieve the artist’s vision, while preserving the material integrity of the artworks and maintaining gallery spaces.

Robert Rauschenberg’s Mud Muse (1969-1971) consists of a large rectangular vat filled with a mixture of water and bentonite clay. Within the vat, the mud bubbles in response to the recorded sound of its own bubbling through an audio-activated compressed-air system. Mud Muse was donated to the Moderna Museet in 1973 and remains one of the museum’s key works. Yet despite its popularity its mechanism is often misunderstood, veiled in rumor and mythology with self-fulfilling repetition, some of which originated with the artist himself.

Rauschenberg began experimenting with interactive sound artworks in the 1960s, often in collaboration with engineer Billy Klüver, in what would become known as Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Rauschenberg continued this exploration in Mud Muse together with engineers from Teledyne and sound artist Petrie Mason Robie through the Art & Technology program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Mud Muse’s initial production was characterized by a series of compromises and adjustments, both conceptual and mechanical, to create a sculpture that functioned (roughly) as Rauschenberg intended. Both the art historical record and material evidence point to its having been reconsidered and reconfigured almost continuously up until – and likely beyond – its public debut. As its own prototype, the sculpture shows evidence of several changing approaches during its creation, along with that of later repair campaigns. Fully parsing these changes, as well as the reasoning behind them, was crucial to understanding the work’s “ideal” state, and therefore to determining what interventions are appropriate to conserve and install the work as the most accurate manifestation of Rauschenberg’s idea.

For decades, Mud Muse was exclusively installed by Moderna Museet electricians and very little written documentation was created. When the latest electrician retired in 2018, no permanent museum staff-member had a complete understanding of how to install and operate the piece. To steward the work responsibly, it was crucial for the museum to re-establish this institutional knowledge.

In 2019, Tora Hederus and My Bundgaard initiated research at Moderna Museet into the construction and history of Mud Muse, hoping to better understand the functions of the technical components and their importance in relation to Rauschenberg’s ideas. Their research in the archives at both the Moderna Museet and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation focused particularly on the creation of the sound tape, the choice of tape recorder, amplifiers, and frequency dividers. In 2024, NYU graduate student Caroline Carlsmith joined the research team, bringing previous experience working with Rauschenberg’s first sound-activated E.A.T. artwork Soundings (1968) at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Working together, these conservators from different backgrounds were able to better identify systems that had been attempted and abandoned as well as later changes made as components failed over time. Their collaborative investigations suggested that the conflicting stories in literature about the work were not all accurate. A more comprehensive technical art history based on close study of the electrical and pneumatic systems enabled the most optimal installation and was necessary to understand what Mud Muse had been and how it had come to be.

From static light sculptures to found material constructions, Greek-American artist Chryssa (1933-2013) wove neon tubing throughout her sculptural practice. Her ingenuity and craft produced a collection of ambitious and unique sculptures, teeming with experimentation in glass bending, neon color theory, scale, and display technology that integrated mechanical components and aging neon sign hardware with new advances in plastics into sculptural form. Inspired by the neon signs of New York, she transformed this high-voltage signmakers’ craft into an unprecedented body of sculpture and light art. 

A traveling exhibition of Chryssa’s works in 2023-24 necessitated a large campaign to restore her neon sculptures from the 1960s, the process of which posed a series of conservation challenges surrounding obsolescent technology, hard-to-find technical expertise, and strategies for how to care for sculpturally- and mechanically-complex light art. As the coordinating conservator for the three-venue exhibition, I was in a unique position of both participating in decision-making related to the exhibition organization and serving as a liaison to conservators and neon benders engaged by our lenders to help restore her work. 

In the case of Chryssa’s neons, the challenge of restoration was magnified by the lack of research on the artist, and her general exclusion from the art historical record prevented most institutions and collectors from acquiring more than a token few of her works. The general unfamiliarity with Chryssa, compounded with her not having a recognized estate or foundation acting on her behalf, left much of her work in disrepair in storage. In order to successfully bring her works together in a cohesive, operational, and unified manner, I found that I needed to build a collaborative network of care between art conservators, neon benders, registrars, and art prep teams. 

Successful strategies in building this network of care included connecting conservators treating similar condition issues for different lenders, sharing resources broadly across the team related to materials and construction, hosting a group call for conservators treating her work and neon benders to discuss condition issues and options, hosting a public panel discussion on the conservation of Chryssa's neon, and organizing an in-person Study Day at the second exhibition venue to share research, technical skill, and reflect on the conservation treatments we carried out. Together we were able to develop collective preservation strategies that will hopefully help inform the better understanding and future conservation of Chryssa’s work.

Artworks involving live performance are now a small but not uncommon feature of contemporary museum collections. Much ink has been spilled over the last two decades around how best to keep the liveness of these works accessible for future generations. The enactment of most, if not all, live performance artworks in museum collections is achieved through delegation, whereby (re-)performances are made possible by individuals following written specifications and/or through practices of body-to-body knowledge transmission between performers. Artworks whose live performance cannot be delegated to others (e.g. those that can only be performed by their creators) have instead largely entered collections in the form of their archival traces or "supplements" that serve to stand in for the performance in a display context: photographic and audiovisual documentation; props, leftovers, or relics presented as artefacts; or a combination thereof, at times becoming installations. Using the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s recent acquisition of several performance artworks by Northern Irish artist Sandra Johnston as a case study, this talk critically examines what it means to both collect and care for a category of art that has been excluded from museum collections and consideration by conservation discourses: that of non-delegated live performance.

The live enactment of Johnston’s performance artworks cannot be delegated to others. Her performance practice is deeply personal and improvisational, a method of haptic, object- and site-responsive inquiry she often carries out in “contested spaces,” confronting traumatic memory retained in objects and sites. While some of her works have been (re)materialised for exhibition purposes in displays of audiovisual documentation of her past performances, IMMA's acquisition is notable in that these works were not subjected to the "rewriting" (Hölling 2017) that often comes with the acquisition of complex contemporary artworks and tends to transfigure them into "durable and repeatable" (Laurenson & van Saaze 2014) collection objects. Several of the works that IMMA acquired were sparsely documented and were acquired without any expectation or agreement, written or verbal, that Johnston would perform them again. The potential for their live (re-)performance instead depends entirely on Johnston's future ability and willingness to do so. Some of these performances are so site- and context-specific it is uncertain if their (re-)performance is even possible. 

Eschewing an anti-institutional critique that there is no place for these works in museum collections (beyond in the form of their documentary traces), this talk considers the value and importance of institutional collecting of non-delegated performance artworks. It examines how “external dependency” can and should be released from its negative framing, and reimagines the role of the conservator in caring for artworks whose “means of production” (Lawson et. al 2023) cannot be acquired by the museum. Significantly, this talk considers how a methodology of attunement—in this case, responsive to the logics, principles, and specificities of Johnston's artistic practice—revealed how an institutional care for these works depends not only on what conservators and collection staff do but also on what we stop ourselves from habitually and mindlessly forcing or repeating.

In 2021, the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired Joanne Leonard’s Journal of a Miscarriage (1973), a series of collages documenting the artist’s personal experience of pregnancy loss. Joanne Leonard is an American artist and scholar who uses photography and collage to explore feminist issues and visual culture through what she describes as “intimate documentary.” She taught at the University of Michigan for 31 years and is among the few photographers - and even fewer women artists - to have been included in Janson’s History of Art (1986) and Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (1990).

Journal of a Miscarriage, one of Leonard’s early photocollage works, was created in 1973 as the Roe v. Wade case and women’s reproductive healthcare were dominating public discourse. According to the artist, the Journal is “not just the story of the miscarriage but the feelings afterwards of sexuality and anger, desire, and a desire for pregnancy."

When the series of 29 collages entered the collection, two works--Death, 1973 and Condom with Stamps, 1973--incorporated 1970s latex condoms which had deteriorated significantly. Death, 1973, was deemed unexhibitable as the embrittled condom was fragmented and darkened to a blood red-brown and had discolored the adjacent collage materials. Condom with Stamps, 1973 is no longer extant and was included by the artist with an inkjet print surrogate. The inkjet print differed in size and materiality from the other 28 works in the series, presenting more of a facsimile of the work than exhibition copy.

The presentation will outline the collaborative decision-making process around these two collages by paper conservator Clara Rojas-Sebesta and objects conservator Margo Delidow, in close discussion with the artist, who provided original collage materials from her archives in addition to contextual guidance. The treatment of the original and the replica fabrication led to an exploration of 21st century condom technologies, an intimate encounter with lubricants and a confrontation with the inherent vice of degraded latex, which dovetailed with Delidow’s research on Lynda Benglis’ latex with the Detroit Institute of Art, presented at the 2024 AIC annual meeting.

Leonard sourced much of her photographic collage materials from the seminal 1965 book, A Child Is Born, by Swedish photojournalist Lennart Nilsson, as well as The Boy’s King Arthur, (1917) illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. The presentation will also touch upon the meaning in these materials and the exhibition history of this work as it reflects attitudes towards miscarriage and women’s reproductive healthcare. Through the refabrication of these collages and documentation of artist’s intent, the project results in a recovery of meaning in Joanne Leonard’s poignant Journal of a Miscarriage.

During World War II and the times of political and ethnic persecution preceding it, a part of the art world came together to protect artists at risk and rescue their work, as well as that of old masters, from burning on pyres or being trafficked by military regimes. Despite these coordinated efforts by democratic forces, many lives and heritage were lost. The recovery of lost or trafficked art remains at the center of the mission of many cultural institutions to this day. In 2024, as seventy percent of the world population lives under autocracies, and democracies erode worldwide every year, with censorship, systematic persecution and forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide as a consequence, the question arises: Should preservation professionals play an active role advocating for the protection, not only of the artworks, but of the endangered artists’ integrity as well? 

With this proposition in mind, we will present our experiences collaborating with Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, an artist imprisoned in Cuba since 2021 for his political activism, in documenting his creative processes, evacuating some of his artworks, and advocating for his release, as part of collective efforts from his close friends, supporters in the art world, and the international community.

Otero Alcantara, born in Havana in 1987, is a Cuban self-taught artist and political activist, better known for his performances and hunger strikes in defiance of the country’s Communist regime authorities. In 2018, he co founded the San Isidro Movement, to protest the imminent enactment of repressive cultural policies under Decree 349. From that moment, he was systematically persecuted by the state forces and regularly detained, until he was finally arrested in July 2021 after his attempt to participate in the unprecedentedly massive anti regime protests that took place across the country. Earlier that year, in April, the political police had broken into his studio and destroyed a group of artworks he was producing with the involvement of the San Isidro community, before sequestering him for several weeks in a hospital. 

Anamely Ramos, who was a member of the San Isidro Movement, has been interviewing Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara throughout the last five years, delving on his motives and techniques, his use of diverse media, from sculptures and drawings to performances, and his constant efforts to activate and involve communities in his work. She has also been documenting his production while in prison.

Salome Garcia had the opportunity to interview the artist days before he was imprisoned, regarding his recently destroyed series of paintings Caramelos sin saliva, with the intention to document the process of their conception and how the artist envisioned possible ways to rescue these artworks. 

Although most of these conversations have been published in different media, this is the first time they will be presented together with a focus on conservation.

We highlight the need to create bridges and trust when discussing interviews and long-term relationships with artists. Trust is the base of most of the deep relations we make in our lives and in a professional capacity. Interviews, when conducted from a trusted perspective, are “a place of shared vulnerability” (Daniela Rivera, 2024). Still, this vulnerability becomes complicated or different when we add language to the equation of trust and vulnerability. 

When conducting the research and the pre-interview contact with the Cuban artist Gladys Triana for the CALL/VoCA series back in 2019, I noticed how different it was to talk and interact with Gladys when we were speaking Spanish versus when speaking English. Spanish was our commonplace language, but we also agreed it was the language of love and rage. Emotions were better expressed in our mother tongue. Even though we speak different Spanish versions, the connection was more natural, and her memories came from a feelings perspective.

Curator Leah Triplett Harrington interviewed artist Daniela Rivera for the VoCA Talk series during the pandemic. Her experience with all the uncertainties and the imposed distance made her reflect on many aspects of the interview from the artist's point of view. While presenting this experience in one of the Spanish VoCA workshops, the issue related to the language arose, and it captured the interest of both the artist and the conservator to dive into the experiences and conduct a new interview in Spanish.

In this presentation, Chilean artist Daniela Rivera and Spanish conservator Ruth del Fresno-Guillem want to expose the shared vulnerabilities that have been lost in translation. We want to expose the experience, the results and the research conducted from the perspective of a language of love and a language of work. The difference between using language to communicate concepts and the use of language to communicate emotions and how to reach the desired outcome of integrating them. Ultimately, the interview as an act of love and kindness in a double direction. Language as a possible enhanced channel of connections or a political contradiction. As a Spanish-born professional, working with Latin American artists can be a position of connection by language and some cultural aspects. Still, it can also be a separation by historical colonialism and misunderstandings. We want to explore the language and cultural limitations and possibilities and question our biases and strengths. 

This presentation wants to be a reflection/experience-based to enhance the reflection about how we conduct and receive an interview.

In 2004, construction was completed on Kraus Campo, a large-scale outdoor art installation functioning as a green roof and sculpture garden on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Consisting of over 2,000 individual plants and over 1,000 feet of painted concrete pathways that converge upon a 25” x 60” x 3” tiled interactive sculpture in the form of a large French Curve, the garden is a collaborative work by the artist Mel Bochner and Landscape Architect Michael Van Valkenburgh. Conceived as a single integrated work combining art and landscape design, the diverse materials and components of the living artwork has required the care and input from a wide variety of specialists and contractors to maintain it over the past 20 years.  

 A critical moment was encountered in 2023 when one of the primary plants of the artwork was classified as an invasive species in Pennsylvania. The conversations that ensued triggered an in-depth revisiting of the meaning and importance of the work as a whole, and resulted in the development of a comprehensive Conservation Management Plan that would look beyond the seasonal, routine maintenance requirements to the long-term considerations of an artwork that literally grows and evolves over time. To create this document, the Preservation team at UAP (Urban Art Projects) collaborated with the artists, collecting institution, donor and the individuals on the CMU facilities maintenance team by conducting interviews, reviewing archives, and capturing the stories from those who were present throughout the artwork’s creation and life up to the present. The process raised critical questions about differing perspectives, transference of knowledge, and resulted in a proposal for a full reset and replanting of the garden. This project explores the importance of collaboration in revising, reviewing, and updating living artworks while considering the priorities and resources of those charged with its care.

When Glenstone opened to the public in 2006, it was a small private foundation in Potomac, Maryland. The process of interviewing artists began organically, as significant site-specific outdoor sculptures were being installed across the landscape. Glenstone’s founders had the forethought hire a film crew to document the installation process, which led to filming the artists when they visited for the installation. This in turn triggered the founders to pull the artists aside to speak to them in a more focused way about their work. The practice developed into a desire to approach interviews systematically, recording formal conversations with as many of the artists whose works are represented in the collection as possible. In 2009, a curatorial staff position was created with the intention of expanding the oral history program to include not just artists, but also those who could lend special insights into their work, such as collectors, estate directors, installers, family members, curators, etc. Glenstone established an in-house conservation department in 2014, which resulted in collaborative discussions merging curatorial and preservation perspectives to document a more holistic view of what it means to care for and exhibit works the way their creators intended. As Glenstone has matured from a small foundation to an expansive museum, much of the audio and video production has moved in-house and the pool of collections staff able to conduct interviews has grown and diversified. A curriculum is now being developed to train staff on oral history best practices. This has allowed for thoughtful pairing of interviewers and narrators and resulted in conversations that vary in formality. It is hoped that tailoring of the interview experience to each participant will foster meaningful dialogues and help build enduring relationships that are an essential component of being responsible stewards of an artist’s legacy.

Talking to artists - learning about their materials, practices, and desires for how their artwork should live, age, and be treated- was, thirty years ago, a novel concept.  In 1990, faced with the unique challenges presented by the care of contemporary art, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, then the Chief Conservator at the Menil Collection, initiated what evolved into the Artists Documentation Program (ADP).  The program grew with time, developing into a partnership with the Whitney Museum of American Art after Mancusi-Ungaro relocated there in 2001, at which point Brad Epley was appointed Chief Conservator at the Menil.  Until their departures in 2023, the program continued under their co-direction. At this juncture Matthew Skopek, the Melva Bucksbaum Director of Conservation at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Dr. Corina Rogge, Director of Conservation at the Menil Collection assumed co-directorship. 

This transition offered an opportunity to reevaluate the program, redefine its mission and values, and outline a three-year strategic plan.  Rather than siloing the decision-making at the director level, this process, conducted over a 2-day retreat, was opened to archivists and conservators working at the Menil and Whitney to leverage their broad expertise. 

To figure out where ADP was going, the group first had to evaluate the past, assessing how the program evolved from its inception and looking critically at why some interviews were more successful than others and how that could inform practices moving forward. The group then collaboratively developed mission and vision statements and outlined a core set of values that can be used to inform the project's future. The mission and vision statements confirm Mancusi-Ungaro's foundational precepts that the purpose of the interviews is to document, at that particular point in time, the subject’s memories and thoughts about their artwork, and that the interviews should be minimally edited to ensure the integrity of the interview, respect the artist’s voice, and best facilitate seeing and hearing the artist in the presence of their work. With these guiding principles the group then determined strategic goals, each of which were designated as short-, middle- and long-term action items. 

As one of the longest running artist interview programs, this reevaluation may strike some as heretical, but just as artistic practices change, so must interview practices.  Especially important to all participants were the issues of accessibility and diversity, and we are currently engaged in exploring how to most effectively provide English and Spanish closed-captioning and transcripts.  The value of this effort was made evident by Irene Esteves-Amador's 2021 interview with Daniel Lind-Ramos in Spanish, which was the first ADP interview conducted in a language other than English.  

A periodic re-evaluation is critical to ensure long-running programs remain relevant; successes and disappointments are lessons that need to be evaluated and learned from. Change and adaptation can be nurtured.  We hope that by sharing our process and the thoughts and motivation behind these actions and changes, we will help others engaged in their own evolutionary process.

The artist interview is one of the most valuable tools in the contemporary art conservator’s toolbelt, and it’s been over two decades since the field began to critically examine and formalize the practice. To close this session, co-hosted by Voices in Contemporary Art and the Contemporary Art Network, we'll ask contributing authors and the audience to reflect on how their approach to eliciting, analyzing, and sharing information from these dialogues has evolved over the years.

Nam June Paik's Who's Your Tree is a monumental, site-specific video installation that has been a centerpiece of the Indianapolis Museum of Art's contemporary collection since its creation in 1996. The artwork is a large-scale tree-shaped video installation composed of 31 thirteen-inch cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs to make up “leaves and branches” and three twenty-five-inch CRT TVs for the “trunk.” The video contents feature iconic symbols and representations of Indiana including drag races, the state flag, native wildlife, and residents of the Hoosier state. The videos mirror the Indiana state flag with 19 stars and torch images and provides a familiar entry for Hoosier audiences to engage with TBM.  

Despite its significance, Who's Your Tree was entombed in a walled-off gallery for more than thirteen years due to frequent breakdowns of the TVs and limited spaces where the fifteen-foot-tall installation can fit within the galleries. Without thorough documentation, institutional lore about the condition and functionality teemed with contradictions. But, in the autumn of 2021, the artwork was selected as a high-priority inclusion for an exhibition of contemporary art at the museum. With less than two years to undertake the needed preparations, and scarce monetary resources, it was clear that collaboration with colleagues throughout the IMA and beyond would be critical to successfully treating this important work for the collection. 

As TBM ages, conservation teams without TBM specialists may be tasked with addressing the issues posed by these multifaceted objects. This talk will explain how, with few resources and little time, the IMA built a team to address these challenges and ultimately succeeded in getting this important work back on view. The talk will address the essential nature of collaboration to this effort and the complex stories of the artwork’s place in the IMA’s collection for nearly 3 decades.  Lastly, this talk will discuss the many possible futures for this work include digitizing the three video files to be able to play them on media players instead of DVD players as well as continue researching and testing possibilities for the eventual retrofitting of the original CRT technology with updated screens within the current monitor based on precedents from several other ground-breaking Nam June Paik treatments at other institutions.

This presentation explores the power of collaboration in preserving and understanding three seminal electronic artworks by Alan Rath in the Denver Art Museum's collection: "Looker II" (1990), "Family" (1994), and "Sky Watcher" (1990-91). These complex pieces, incorporating Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitors, custom circuitry, and Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EPROM) chips, embody not just technological innovation but also the artist's unique vision. Our conservation approach demonstrates how engaging a range of voices and expertise can enrich our understanding of an artwork's history, meaning, and preservation needs.

At the heart of these artworks lie the EPROM chips, a now-obsolete technology that poses unique conservation challenges. These chips store custom software and image data essential to the artworks' functionality. However, their UV-sensitive nature renders the data vulnerable to erasure if exposed to light, making them a fragile link to the artist's original programming and intent.

Our preservation efforts centered on two key collaborations. Joshua Eveland of Nolara Conservation Services LLC, who worked closely with Rath in his later years, provided crucial insights into the artist's philosophy and technical practices. Eveland shared valuable information about the artworks' construction and potential emulation strategies, offering guidance on CRT preservation and circuit board documentation.

Equally vital to our efforts has been the expertise of the artist Jim Campbell, a contemporary and friend of Rath. Campbell's deep understanding of EPROM technology and its use in electronic artworks has been crucial in addressing the technical challenges we face. He shared his extensive experience with EPROM technology, discussing the types of chips used in Rath's work and explaining the risks associated with data loss.

This collaboration will culminate in a planned visit by Campbell to the museum in October 2024, where he will use an EPROM reader to access and migrate the fragile data to the museum's cloud storage, ensuring long-term preservation of Rath's original programming and image files. Campbell's expertise has also been crucial in navigating the potential pitfalls of data recovery, including the possibility of "uncopyable" chips made by the artist.

In recognition of Eveland’s and Campbell's significant contributions to this project, we plan to invite them to be co-authors of this presentation and any subsequent publications. This co-authorship acknowledges the vital role that artists and technicians can play in the conservation of their peers' work, bringing unique insights and technical expertise that complement traditional conservation approaches, as well as the indispensable nature of interdisciplinary collaboration in the field of electronic art conservation.

By engaging with those who knew Rath and his work intimately, we gained insights into his creative process and the intended viewer experience that inform our preservation strategies. Collaborating with another artist  not only enhanced our technical understanding but also deepened our appreciation of the artworks' cultural and historical significance in seeing it through Campbell’s eyes. Our presentation will highlight how these collaborations shaped our conservation methodology, from documentation and maintenance planning to the ethical considerations of component replacement and potential future emulation. In addition to the successes, we will  discuss the practical challenges of this collaborative model and how we navigated them.

Sam Owens and Cass Fino-Radin present the outcome of the latest collaboration between Glenstone and Small Data Industries: the debut of a new user-friendly app for automating and managing fixity checks and uploading incoming acquisitions in media collections. This ambitious project was only possible thanks to a foundation of many years of collaboration. It exemplifies what is possible when trust between conservation, IT, and outside consultants has been actively cultivated.

Small Data developed the app to meet the specific needs of Glenstone's team. As with many art museums, Glenstone faced challenges in identifying tools that were both easy for collections staff to use and cost-effective. Existing tools in the digital preservation field were designed mainly for libraries and archives. As such, they are often either too complex, requiring advanced technical expertise, or prohibitively expensive because they were intended for large-scale institutional use. Glenstone needed a solution that would be accessible, capable of handling the specific needs of its collections staff, and scalable for future growth. 

This app offers a streamlined approach to collections staff interaction with, and oversight, of digital collections storage. It is manageable for institutions of all sizes and requires minimal technical expertise to implement while offering robust, scalable features for those who need it. 

Key aspects of the presentation will include discussion and exploration of:

1. The context of the project at Glenstone and the needs that were to be addressed
2. The collaborative process including the importance of long-standing professional relationships and effective communication in the design and software development projects.
3. The challenges and rewards of such collaborations within the context of art museums, including insights for institutions considering similar projects.
4. Live demonstration of the app, providing an overview of its functionality and user interface.
5. Reflection on the history and sustainability of software development in cultural heritage contexts.

Our presentation will share insights into how this project has met Glenstone's specific needs, providing solutions for accessible digital preservation in an art museum context. We will reflect on the collaborative design and software development process, the history of solving similar challenges in the cultural heritage space, and details on the public release.

By sharing this experience, we hope to introduce this new tool to attendees and also inspire institutions that may be considering collaborative projects involving software development in the context of collections management. We'll emphasize how such projects can lead to solutions that not only solve immediate problems but also contribute to the broader field of digital preservation in art collections.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) formed the Architecture and Design curatorial department in 1988, focusing on works of graphic design, product design, furniture and architecture. In the context of modern and contemporary art museums, SFMOMA has adopted the shared practices to collect and display design objects as aesthetic objects without its functionality. In 2014, SFMOMA, along with support from the Adrew W. Mellon Foundation, launched four-year Artist Initiative to develop a series of interdisciplinary research projects. Acknowledging the limitation of traditional display methods, SFMOMA investigated new approaches to collect, display and conserve design in the 21st century. In-use video was one of the strategies responding to the transformation of design with complex digital elements and interface. By producing in-use videos for two exhibitions (2015 & 2018), SFMOMA was able to present various functions in use that could not be understood by static display formats, and helped make the hidden world accessible without turning on the object while on display.   

During the two-year preparation for Art of Noise (2024), an exhibition dedicated to audio technologies, we have observed an interest shift to actively acquire and present design object's functionality. To show playback functions of media players in the exhibitions, incoming accessions and selected collection objects were studied, tested, serviced and repaired for the filming of in-use videos. To address the emerging interests and challenges, we have been revisiting our institutional policies and lay out our mission, resources, and timelines it may require to care for functional design objects. Additionally, we spoke to our colleagues in the other institutions to learn if they have experienced a similar shift to present the full lifecycle of object functions and provided insights into the potential landscape change in collections care. 

The aims of our endeavor are two-fold––addressing the evolving focus and the additional expertise and workload for ongoing and future activations. We started by asking the following questions: what happens if functionality becomes an element to be acquired? How can we test and keep track of its maintenance requirement? How does the desire to show functionality influence our conservation practice and what’s the proper scope?  Through collaborative whiteboard exercises, we worked on disentangling layers of decision-making by different stakeholders and defined several sets of categories for design objects with electronic functions. As modern devices are often designed to be multi-purpose, we further identified groups of functions and their needs of care. Starting from the pre-accession process, we continue to reshape the process by introducing the in-take form and activation record which led to defining a terminology that can be agreed upon. In this paper, we would like to share our efforts to construct a holistic approach and initiate conversations with the community as we continue to refine our practices to care for functional design objects.

In recent years, image-based 3D reconstruction has become an important tool for documenting heritage objects. In the case of time-based media artworks (TBMA), the inherent complexities of their ephemeral and technological nature present unique challenges in their documentation. These artworks only exist in their installed state, meaning their components and configurations may change with each iteration. In this context, 3D reconstruction can complement current documentation systems and provide an innovative way to capture detailed information and process the interaction between audiovisual, sculptural, and equipment elements. 

As part of my conservation fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, specifically within the Time-based Media and Digital Art Working Group (SI-TBMA), my research focused on the exploration and application of 3D models to document and reconstruct TBMA. The goal was to assess both the potential benefits for conservation processes and the limitations of these techniques. The research methodology involved selecting four case studies from three Smithsonian museums and proposing a workflow for the digital reconstruction of each artwork. I utilized photogrammetry and solid geometric modeling techniques to create accurate and detailed models. 

By collaborating with different museums of the Smithsonian Institution, I was able to implement 3D documentation methods across these four case studies: Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii by Nam June Paik (1995), Cloud Music by Robert Watts, David Behrman, and Bob Diamond (1974–1979) from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Four Talks by Laurie Anderson from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and An Atlas by Es Devlin from the Cooper Hewitt Museum. Each of these artworks presents distinct challenges, from their creation and exhibition to their installation and long-term preservation, providing a diverse range of technical insights. 

Based on the analysis of these case studies, I developed a guide that compiles strategies and workflows for 3D documentation of TBMA. The guide addresses the selection of scanning tools, image-based 3D reconstructions tools, the processing of 3D models, metadata management, and key questions to adapt these techniques to different types of installations. It also includes recommendations for implementing this type of documentation in other settings and for other artworks that share complex technological features. 

3D documentation complements existing traditional methods and is especially useful in installations that integrate multiple components, both audiovisual and sculptural. It also provides a deeper technical understanding of specialized equipment and complex systems, facilitating decision-making during installation, iteration, and technological change during the artwork's life. Adding animations to the 3D models offers a visual and interactive experience that can be helpful for preserving and restoring TBMA.

The Transfer Data Trust project exemplifies the power of collaboration in addressing the critical challenge of preserving born-digital artworks. This innovative initiative brings together six time-based media conservators, two developers, five pioneering digital artists, and the founder of TRANSFER Gallery to create an open-source system architecture and toolkit for a webring of artist-owned repositories. Initially focused on a decade of digital art exhibitions from TRANSFER Gallery (2013-2023), the project aims to develop a scalable model that any artist, institution, or collective can adopt to establish private networks of redundant storage for the long-term preservation of digital cultural heritage.

The importance of this project lies in its novel approach to tackling persistent problems in digital art conservation: obsolescence and long-term sustainability through distributed storage. By involving artist studios directly in the preservation process and combining the knowledge of conservators, technologists, and curators, we're exploring how interdisciplinary collaborations and cooperative stewardship can reshape our approach to media art preservation in the 21st century. This project is particularly significant as it addresses the urgent need for innovative preservation strategies outside of museums. 

Our methodology, co-designed by this diverse team, combines conservation practices with innovative technology. The first year will include condition assessment and documentation of 15+ international art series, development of a redundant storage network across international artist studios, implementation of content-addressed versioned file storage, creation of detailed metadata schemas, and establishment of a time-banking system for pooling conservation expertise. The project's initial phase focuses on the works of five pioneering digital artists: Carla Gannis, Lorna Mills, Huntrezz Janos, Eva Papamargariti, and Rosa Menkman. Their diverse practices, ranging from glitch art to complex virtual environments, offer a rich testbed for our collaborative preservation strategies. Artists have been paired with many conservators involved in the Electronic Media Group at AIC including Sasha Arden (Guggenheim Museum), Eddy Colloton (previously Denver Art Museum and Hirshhorn Museum), Taylor Healy (The Art Institute of Chicago), Regina Harsanyi (Museum of the Moving Image), and Claudia Roeck (Haus der Elektronischen Künste).

Preliminary results from our prototype phase are promising. We have successfully set up a private network between network-attached storage drives in each artist studio and organized artist projects into artist information packages stored redundantly across the network. We've developed a standardized condition reporting template for born-digital artworks that is adaptable to various media types. A user-friendly interface for artists to manage their repositories has been created by Ryan Betts and Andrew Vivash, empowering them in the preservation process. Additionally, we've established partnerships with organizations like Gray Area Foundation and NYU Tandon School of Engineering, expanding our collaborative network. The project's significance has been recognized with funding from the Knight Foundation's Tech Expansion Fund, supporting our ongoing research and development.

Our findings suggest that this collaborative, distributed network approach can significantly extend the lifespan of digital artworks by reducing reliance on centralized storage and starting the documentation process much earlier in the lifecycle of these artworks. It empowers artists to participate actively in the long-term preservation of their work, facilitates more efficient sharing of conservation resources and expertise across institutions, and provides a scalable, open-source model for others to establish their own distributed repositories. Importantly, it has the potential to shift the artist's relationship to equity in their work, reminiscent of the historic Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement of the 1970s, but updated for the digital age.

This project contributes to the field of conservation by demonstrating how collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts can produce practical, scalable solutions for digital art preservation. By open-sourcing our methodologies and tools, we aim to benefit the broader artistic community and advance the field of time-based media art conservation. It challenges us to rethink traditional conservation roles and institutional boundaries.