Time’s Up: Conserving Media Art and the Inevitability of Change

Time-based media conservation has existed as a discipline for over 20 years. Over this time, aims, guidelines and strategies for preservation have been established and are now widely used in collecting institutions, artist studios, commercial galleries and private collections.

This panel brings together experts who will provide an overview of how to approach and analyse a time-based media artwork, the key considerations for preservation and the specificities of the media involved. They will share about the risks and signs of degradation with analogue media—the predominant distribution format for video art since its beginning in the 1960s—and conservation insights into Nam June Paik’s dynamic video sculpture, TV Crown (1965/1999).

This programme is made possible with the support of U.S. Embassy Singapore.

About the Speakers

Joshua Churchill is the Assistant Manager of the Collections Technical team at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He supports the Collections Technical team in the installation and documentation of a wide variety of media-based artworks and exhibitions, with a focus on the technical aspects of incoming media-based acquisitions and the preservation of media-based works in the museum’s collection. Most recently, he led the technical installation and conservation of media-based collection works for the international touring retrospective exhibition Nam June Paik. Churchill is also a practicing media artist and musician, and his artistic practice and work within Collections Technical constantly overlap and inform one another.

Patricia Falcao is a Time-Based Media Conservator at Tate, where she researches and develops strategies for the preservation of software-based artworks. In the context of the Reshaping the Collectible research project at Tate, this role has broadened to include the acquisition and preservation of web-based artworks. She is also a researcher in the Collaborative Doctoral Program of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, in a collaboration between Tate and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her most recent publication is Conserving Digital Art. In the past eight years, she has consistently published on the theme of preservation of time-based media, digital and software-based art, in the conservation and digital preservation communities.

Andreas Weisser has been a Conservator and Consultant for Time-Based Media, audio-visual collections and contemporary art since 2003. His focuses on consulting on public and private collections for analogue and digital long-term preservation and storage projects. In 2015, he joined Doerner Institute at the Bavarian State Paintings Collection, Munich in a part time position. Since 2019, he collaboratively runs Preservation as a Service with Anna Schaeffler.