Barbra Latanzi, The Letter and the Fly (2002 ) Having worked in digital media conservation at both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Rhizome, in 2017 Ben Fino-Radin set up Small Data Industries, a business that supports clients, including major museums and artists or their estates, in preserving and archiving digital art and cultural heritage.While fifty years is young for an artistic medium, during that time, we have seen technologies come and go making artworks created with these tools and formats oftentimes inaccessible, obsolete and impossible to recover all with drastic stakes. He also talks about the role the collection plays in the Rhizome community as well as his unique job with the organization: Trevor Owens interviewed Rhizome Digital Conservator Ben Fino-Radin for the Library of Congress blog on digital preservation, The Signal. In the interview, he discusses Rhizome's ArtBase collection, including work like Barbara Lattanzi's The Letter and the Fly (2002) and Lev Manovich's Little Movies (1994). Trevor: Could you tell us a bit about how the collection is being used? To what extent is the audience for the collection artists in search of inspiration? To what extent is it for the general public? To what extent is it for scholars and researchers?īen: Currently the collection is used most heavily in academia, and by curators and researchers. Many professors of new media integrate the ArtBase into their lesson plan, designing research and curatorial assignments centered around the students using our members tools to curate exhibitions. Trevor: I don’t think there are many people out there with the title of digital conservator. Could you tell us a bit about how you define this role? To what extent do you think this role is similar and different to analog art conservation? Similarly, to what extent is this work similar or different to roles like digital archivist or digital curator?īen: I drew the distinction with my title for two reasons: 1) I am at the service of an institution that lives within a museum, and 2) the digital objects I am cataloging and preserving access to are not “records” by the archival definition. They are artifacts – and as such require a different kind of care. I am responsible for the stewardship of intellectual entities that are often inseparable from their digital carriers, due to the artist’s exploitation of the inherent characteristics of the material. It calls for a high degree of regard for the creator’s intent, and a thorough understanding of the subtleties of the materials. A digital archivist tasked with preserving the records of an office probably isn’t going to wonder if the use of Comic Sans in the accountant’s email signature has artifactual significance. Of course the lines are much blurrier than that and there plenty of examples of people with the title “digital archivist” or “digital curator” doing significant work on preserving the subtle artifactual quality of digital materials (not to mention the incredible people who are contributing to significant projects in their spare time). This is a new phenomenon though, where you have individuals with the title “archivist” or “curator” devoting a level of care to documents, that with paper materials would be the work of a document conservator. While I would hesitate to compare the two, I think that the conservation of digital artifacts, and the conservation of objects, documents and the like, at their essence hold many similarities. They both require an empathy for the artist, expertise with the medium, and understanding of the proper environment.
Sometimes I go to the Greek and Roman galleries at the Met, and daydream about what net art from the 90’s will look like hundreds of years from now.Recently on Inside/Out, we heard from Assistant Media Conservator Peter Oleksik about MoMA’s efforts to preserve and digitize its collection of analog video art, amassed over the course of four decades. The heroic undertaking of digitizing over 4,000 videotapes was absolutely critical for preservation and access purposes. However, when we digitize analog videotape, we have just begun a new chapter in the artwork’s life, one that is rife with grave challenges and risks that are unique to digital materials. In another recent post, we learned from Media Conservator Kate Lewis that it is increasingly common for time-based media artworks to be delivered to the Museum in digital form, due to evolving tools and artistic practices. Today I’ll describe how MoMA has faced head-on the significant challenges in digital preservation by designing a state-of-the-art digital vault for these collections.
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