Conservation of Time-Based Media Art

Conservation of Time-based Media Art is the first book to take stock of the current practices and conceptual frameworks that define the emerging field of time-based media conservation, which focuses on contemporary artworks that contain video, audio, film, slides or software components.

Written and compiled by a diverse group of time-based media practitioners around the world, including conservators, curators, registrars and technicians among others, this volume offers a comprehensive survey of specialized practices that have developed around the collection, preservation and display of time-based media art. Divided into 23 chapters with contributions from 36 authors and 85 additional voices, the narrative of this book provides both an overview and detailed guidance on critical topics, including the acquisition, examination, documentation and installation of time-based media art; cross-medium and medium-specific treatment approaches and methods; the registration, storage, and management of digital and physical artwork components; collection surveys and project advocacy; lab infrastructures, staffing and the institutional implementation of time-based media conservation.

Conservation of Time-based Media Art serves as a critical resource for conservation students and for a diverse professional audience who engage with time-based media art, including conservation practitioners and other collection caretakers, curators, art historians, collectors, gallerists, artists, scholars and academics.

Deena Engel, Clinical Professor Emerita of the Department of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, focuses her research on contemporary art. The winner of four teaching awards, she has experience teaching undergraduate computer science courses on web and database technologies, as well as Digital Humanities courses for graduate students. Deena is the Co-Director along with Prof. Glenn Wharton of the Artist Archives Initiative and she also works with major museums on projects which address the challenges involved in the conservation of time-based media art. She has an M.A. from SUNY-Binghamton in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation and an M.S. in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.

Joanna Phillips is a Time-based Media Conservator and Director of the Düsseldorf Conservation Center in Germany. She was previously the Senior Conservator of Time-based Media at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008-2019), where she launched the first media conservation lab in a US museum, implemented time-based media conservation practices and headed the Conserving Computer-based Art (CCBA) initiative. She co-founded the AIC conference series TechFocus and lectures and publishes on TBM topics internationally. As a researcher in the Swiss project AktiveArchive, she co-authored the Compendium of Image Errors in Analog Video (2013). Phillips earned her M.A. in Paintings Conservation from the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, Germany (2002).