Immaterial: Time

How do art conservators save video art from obsolescence?

If a painting on canvas rips or a marble sculpture shatters to pieces, art conservators are trained to respond accordingly and repair it. Artworks that unfold over time—like videos and software based works—are a different thing altogether. These artworks are made using cutting-edge technologies that are constantly being updated. If the “canvas” or medium an artwork is made on keeps shifting, how do art conservators protect these works from obsolescence?

Read the complete transcript below.

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Season 2 of Immaterial is made possible by Dasha Zhukova Niarchos. Additional support is provided by the Zodiac Fund.

Transcript

SAM WINKS: Make sure the time is accurate… It’s within reason.

[CLOCK WINDING]

CAMILLE DUNGY: What you’re hearing right now is a clock that is hundreds of years old being wound. Every week, a collection technician walks through The Met’s galleries and checks up on clocks like these, to make sure that they’re operating on time. Even though they are incredibly old, they still work.

WINKS: It’s a 300-year-old clock.

[CLOCK RINGING]

DUNGY: They may have stood in someone’s living room ticking away centuries ago, and to this day, they’re still ticking.

In this episode of Immaterial, we’re going to talk about a particular category of artworks in The Met that like clocks, need to be kept working: time-based media art.

[MUSIC]

These are videos, films, sound art, and software-based pieces that unfold over time. All were made with technologies that are for the most part less than one hundred years old. And all have hardware that needs to work for people to truly experience the art. If these works of art aren’t functioning, they become functionless as art.

I’m Camille Dungy. From The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this is Immaterial.

We’ll hear from artists who make some of these works, and the people responsible for keeping time-based art alive.

—

DUNGY: To start off, I want to share a piece from the time-based art collection at The Met. It’s a video work called Every Shot, Every Episode by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. The McCoys’ piece is a perfect introduction to why these kinds of artworks are so challenging to preserve. But first, one of our producers had a question… about time…

SALMAN AHAD KHAN: I’m guessing you spent years working on this project.

KEVIN MCCOY: Every Shot, Every Episode?

JENN MCCOY: No, we had a deadline! [LAUGHS]

KEVIN MCCOY: We had a deadline. It’s just, “Get that shit done.” It was like I don’t know, it was like six to nine months of just grinding it out.

JENN MCCOY: I’m Jenn McCoy, and I’ve been an artist for many years, and I work in collaboration with Kevin.

KEVIN MCCOY: I’m Kevin McCoy. I’m an artist based here in Brooklyn, and work collaboratively with my wife Jennifer. And our work has taken lots of different forms—sculpture, video, software.

DUNGY: We went to speak to the McCoys at their Brooklyn studio to get a better sense of their work. It was truly a Brooklyn artist’s dream—a warehouse converted to an art-making space.

When they were creating Every Shot, Every Episode, the McCoys were living through a transformative period for time-based media art. Technology was changing rapidly and a major transition was underway moving from analog to digital technologies.

KEVIN MCCOY: You know this is in the nineties, the late nineties. The transition from analog to digital was happening all around us and in that context, lots of discussions around the adequacy of the digital [at] that time, film versus video battles. You know, ‘Video is terrible compared to film. Film has all these other properties!’

DUNGY: Times were changing, and the way that people consumed media was changing rapidly too. That left Kevin and Jen reflecting on how they consumed media growing up, how different things were back in the seventies. Kevin remembered an experience he had with a babysitter as a child.

KEVIN MCCOY: My sister swears I’m making this up, but I really don’t think that I am.

JENN MCCOY: So, Kevin had a babysitter, back in the day that was really interested in Starsky and Hutch.

DUNGY: A popular cop show from the seventies.

JENN MCCOY: And this was before VCRs even. So she used to annotate as she watched and make these cassettes.

DUNGY: Audio cassette tape.

KEVIN MCCOY: So you’re watching TV and you’ve got a little cassette thing and a mic. And you’re sitting there recording the audio of the show in the room. And then as it’s happening, you describe the scene: “They’re at his apartment.” And then a new scene happens. “They’re in the car. There’s a car chase.” So she describes the picture simultaneous to the audio of the show, and then can listen back to it and kind of have an experience of the show without having a VCR, just with an audio recorder. It’s genius.

JENN MCCOY: And so this idea of thinking about a found repository or a found database like the entirety of the Starsky and Hutch season one seemed like it would be kind of funny and weird. And like, let’s test out those ideas.

DUNGY: Thinking about all of these things—the transition from film to digital and the way that we consume culture—led them to an idea.

[MUSIC]

Jen and Kevin would create a database of their own, one that used digital technologies to categorize every scene and image in Starsky and Hutch.

The artwork has two key components: the data, and a way to display the data. If you look at the piece hanging on the wall, you’ll see a huge array of video CDs, or VCDs, the precursor to DVD and successor to the classic CD. At the time, VCDs were the way to go for burning and storing huge files.

So the McCoys made 277 of these VCDs and lined them up side by side on three white floating shelves. Simple white spines of each jewel case reveal each VCD’s descriptive title in bold, black, all-cap, sans serif font. Up close you have all these category names.

JENN MCCOY: So we’re looking at ‘Every Car Chase,’ ‘Every Bomb,’ ‘Every Money,’ ‘Every Prostitute,’ ‘Every Girlfriend,’ ‘Every Leather Jacket.’ And we’re reshuffling a bunch of episodes from Starsky and Hutch to look at in this new way.

DUNGY: The idea was that each time you would insert one of those VCDs, like say the one titled ‘Every Car Chase,’ you would basically get a compilation of every single car chase in the series playing on the tiny TV. That’s the second and crucial component of the art piece. A steel briefcase, like the kind you’d see in old spy movies, is splayed open on the wall. A tiny screen is mounted in the case’s upper compartment for viewing. And at the bottom of the briefcase, the McCoys nestled a portable clamshell VCD player.

KEVIN MCCOY: The production process for doing this was very arduous. We have to digitize the episode, we have to isolate each shot, and then we have to create the database ourselves in which we classify it. And then we have to retrieve each of those individual files, put them all together, save that as a video file.

DUNGY: After all of this work, they presented it to the public.

KEVIN MCCOY: We were showing it with our gallery and they were at the Armory Art Fair. And then the first preview of the fair—someone from The Met just came and they want to buy the piece.

DUNGY: This was one of their first works…and they had interest from The Met.

KEVIN MCCOY: And you know, it was kind of a shock.

DUNGY: So the work came into The Met’s collection. But the technologies used to make the piece, like video CDs, quickly became outdated.

JENN MCCOY: I mean, the project was made with consumer electronics available at the time, and then the technology quickly outstripped it. I think for every artist, you don’t know when you’re working on it, if it’s an important project, you know?

DUNGY: They hadn’t thought about the longevity of the piece or how it would survive for an extended period in a museum collection.

Once artists like Jennifer and Kevin hand over their works to museums, this responsibility of keeping the piece alive then falls into the hands of the art conservators there. When its initial exhibition period ended, the piece went into storage until the next time a curator decided to exhibit the work. As with most time-based art, it was incredibly fragile and technology evolved drastically in the years that it sat in storage.

[Sound of producers arriving in the studio]

So we went to talk to one of the conservators responsible for keeping the McCoys’ piece alive, two decades after they first created it. On our way to his office though, we ran into Nora Kennedy, the head of Photograph Conservation. She helped us understand the unique challenges of conserving time-based media work compared to the artworks museums like The Met have historically acquired.

Nora has an easy example to help us understand. She goes into her office. Grabs a Post-It, holds it in front of us, and then…

[RIPPING PAPER]

NORA KENNEDY: So, right?

DUNGY: Rips it into pieces.

KENNEDY: You have a photograph that is torn in half. You can easily explain, I’m gonna stick this back together again and I’m gonna make where it’s joined up invisible.

DUNGY: If a photograph is ripped like this or a sculpture shatters into pieces, you know what to do as a conservator: you figure out a way to stick the pieces back together.

KENNEDY: So that’s a very physical thing that people can comprehend. You can show examples of that.

DUNGY: Time-based media is different. “Breaking” is much more abstract—a video file gets corrupted, or there’s an issue running an artwork’s software, or the format you produced the work on—like the VCDs the McCoys used—goes extinct. Dealing with that… is slightly more complicated.

The Met currently has about three hundred pieces of time-based media art. Reels of film, hard drives filled with gigabytes of digital videos, five-channel multimedia installations, and more. The collection is still in its infancy. There will likely be lots more additions in years to come.

For a long time, there were no conservators at the Museum who could actually answer questions about how to care for works that cover such a wide spectrum. There were art conservators in adjacent specializations—like Nora in Photograph Conservation. But no full-time staff specialized in the technical side of time-based media works.

[MUSIC]

That all changed when they hired conservator Jonathan Farbowitz.

Jonathan’s career followed a slightly less conventional path than most museum conservators, and that strange career path almost perfectly mirrored the evolution time-based media was undergoing. It started when he was in college as a film student.

JONATHAN FARBOWITZ: I did my undergrad at a time where celluloid film, analog video, digital video, those were all viable formats for production and distribution.

DUNGY: The year was 2004. At the time, film was in the midst of a format war.

FARBOWITZ: It was a very weird transitional time where digital video had just come on the scene and you had all of these formats.

DUNGY: Digital video was becoming increasingly popular and threatened to relegate film to the past. Jonathan had a job on campus in the film department. He was responsible for transferring tapes and film from one format to another. Film to Umatic, Umatic to VHS, VHS to Digital Betacam.

FARBOWITZ: I felt like, at the time, I have to learn all of these formats because if I’m going to be a filmmaker, I have to know about all the technical characteristics of these formats to make the right choices about how I might shoot my movie.

DUNGY: Jonathan eventually graduated into a world that had become increasingly digital. He worked a series of odd jobs in film and TV. He worked as a production assistant.

FARBOWITZ: Mostly running around New York, you know, jumping in taxis, taking tapes to places.

DUNGY: He worked on reality TV shows.

FARBOWITZ: Project Runway, Making the Band. Shalom in the Home.

DUNGY: He edited for festivals.

FARBOWITZ: One of the editing jobs that was great was working for the Tribeca Film Festival.

DUNGY: But he grew disillusioned.

FARBOWITZ: It’s all freelance. It’s very unstable. You’re always hustling. It’s just not necessarily the life I wanted to lead.

DUNGY: So he decided to change things completely and pivoted to working with computers. He had always been interested in computers when he was a kid, and thought I might as well try that for a bit. He learned a bit of programming, worked at a tax software company, and even made a website with some programmer friends that was basically Yelp for vegan restaurants.

FARBOWITZ: We called it VegPhilly, so it was like a vegan guide to Philadelphia.

DUNGY: And all this time, without knowing it, he was slowly gaining the tools needed to become the perfect conservator for time-based media.

FARBOWITZ: I mean, sure [LAUGHS]. I mean, I agree somewhat that somehow I was building the skills without knowing what I was doing, because I was, you know, involved in film, I was involved in technology and all these different things. It was a strange sort of training program, yeah.

DUNGY: Eventually, Jonathan settled back into the video world and got one last gig helping with film screenings at a local community video center called Scribe. It’s the job that would eventually lead to him finding his true-calling as a time-based media conservator.

At Scribe, Jonathan became interested in their collection of old archival video cassettes. He realized how quickly technology had evolved within his own lifetime. These cassettes were all the rage when he was growing up, and now, in 2013 all these recordings on cassettes would possibly be lost forever if they did not get digitized. It reminded him of stories he heard about the beginning of film, in the early 1900s.

FARBOWITZ: When film initially hit the scene, you know, it was like dirty theaters that were very inexpensive and it was considered a very coarse medium where like, you might go to a theater and people would be throwing stuff at the screen. That’s come a long way to like now where we do consider some films to be art.

DUNGY: He said the vast majority of silent films were never preserved and subsequently ‘lost.’ And so he got interested in thinking about what types of new media might be considered the silent films of today.

Video conservation and the conservation of cutting-edge software art are relatively new fields. As fine artists increasingly use innovative technologies to create their work, they may be at risk of being ‘lost’ if there are not museum conservators who know how to shepherd these works through time.

Jonathan eventually went to graduate school to hone these skills. Fast forward to a couple of years after he graduated. Nora Kennedy and The Met were also hoping to solve their time-based media conservation woes.

KENNEDY: It was more like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do with all this time-based media art? We need a specialist.

DUNGY: When Jonathan applied for the job, with his experience in the worlds of film and TV, software programming, and media conservation, they knew they had to hire him.

So… back to Every Shot, Every Episode. How do you get a piece made using 2001 technology to run in 2021?

FARBOWITZ: We were dealing with obsolete technologies… and we were dealing with custom hardware.

DUNGY: The Met started an initiative to revive the work. Initially, a fellow at The Met Alex Nichols and contract conservator sasha arden, began working on the revival. When the team was asked to revive the work, the VCD was all but extinct. And the VCD player the McCoys originally used for the piece… was incredibly fragile. The manufacturer wasn’t even making them anymore.

So one of the conservation team’s first questions was how important was it to display the videos on a functioning VCD player from the 2000s?

FARBOWITZ: This is really fragile equipment and this artwork is going to be in an exhibition for several months.

DUNGY: Did it make sense to use such an obsolete and delicate piece of tech to display the work?

FARBOWITZ: Sometimes time-based media artworks require very creative solutions to these sorts of things.

DUNGY: The team—sasha arden in particular—had an idea. They could bypass the archaic VCD player altogether. Use this player as a prop to stay true to the original aesthetic of the piece, but then… put a hidden media player in the back to play the actual videos.

FARBOWITZ: If you’re facing the work, you’re seeing a tiny LCD screen. And in the bottom half, there’s a VCD player. That’s what you’re seeing as a visitor. But what you’re not seeing is that behind the case into the wall is this digital media player and that’s what’s feeding the video and the audio signal into those elements of the case that you’re seeing and hearing.

DUNGY: This was a compromise, but one that would help the work to live on. For The Met, the priority was preserving this work. And the McCoys were on board. These pieces require a specific kind of constant care to remain alive.

[MUSIC]

FARBOWITZ: These artworks, they can be a bit like people. There’s the baby artwork, and then there’s the toddler, and then the child, and then the teenager, and they often go through different stages as they’re exhibited more. Where sometimes the artist’s opinions on what’s necessary and how to show the piece, you know, they change a little bit.

So it’s not like showing a time-based media artwork, it’s not always a case of, oh, we just go back to the instructions and we install it exactly how the instructions say. Like these are sometimes dynamic things over time.

DUNGY: Conserving Every Shot, Every Episode was a process of adaptation. But it was still a work rooted in the physical world. Today, there are other time-based media works that pose an even greater challenge to people like Jonathan—software-based works.

Software-based works rely on technologies developed by corporations that are constantly changing and being updated. How do conservators preserve works like these that don’t have a fixed state?

Artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s work provokes these kinds of questions. Meet him… after the break…

[MUSIC]

—

HO TZU NYEN: My name is Ho Tzu Nyen. I’m an artist. I live and work in Singapore. I work, I would say, mostly with moving images.

DUNGY: In 2012, Tzu had an idea for an extended video piece—a collage of clips that responded to words and labels that he felt defined Southeast Asia as a region. It took the form of a dictionary of terms in alphabetical order.

HO TZU NYEN: So using the structure of A to Z, right? And there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. So there are twenty-six different concepts and different ways of reimagining Southeast Asia.

DUNGY: He would call it: The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia. And in this dictionary, A was not for apple…

HO TZU NYEN: But A was for anarchy. And A was for altitude. So, for example, the first term thinks about the relationship between altitudes and anarchism in Southeast Asia. So, traditionally in Southeast Asia, anarchism survives in very high altitudes, which are areas that are far away from the lowland empires. So there’s a saying that armies run out of breath on high altitudes.

DUNGY: He looked at movies, home videos, and animations that evoked high altitude anarchism: An old clip panning through misty mountain ranges. A movie excerpt of a giant titanium hand descending from the heavens towards children at a hilltop temple. Images of men with guns moving through tall grasses. But as he put the pieces together, Tzu had a problem.

HO TZU NYEN: I was stuck for three years at least. Back in 2011, basically, I was still very much a video maker right? You shoot videos and you have many different shots. And there’s always this notion that there is only one best of all possible versions that this work can take. So I was working always with one single timeline.

DUNGY: To make any video, artists edit footage together in an editing software, stringing different shots in a particular order.

HO TZU NYEN: And that is the timeline, right? Like, it’s literally called a timeline on our editing software, right? And that was the problem of why I couldn’t finish this work. I found it very violent to reduce the work into one single timeline, you know, because my whole conception of Southeast Asia was that it was a region that couldn’t be defined in a simplistic way. Southeast Asia is a region that has not been unified by any religion or political systems. Even the term Southeast Asia, I would say, was not indigenous to the region itself. This term kind of came from outside forces. So I would say for me, Southeast Asia is a kind of a paradox. It’s a region which is not one. It is simultaneously a region and it’s simultaneously not a region.

So, that immediately forms a contradiction with the notion of a single editing timeline, right, where everything is forced into one timeline and it has to be clearly resolved. So I was stuck with that for three years.

DUNGY: Until…

HO TZU NYEN: I had a chance meeting with a programmer in Helsinki. And we had a conversation, and then everything kind of clicked.

DUNGY: Tzu and this programmer—Sebastian Lutgurt—talked about the idea of making a software-based artwork.

HO TZU NYEN: And, you know, thinking about how we could use algorithmic systems to constantly generate new versions of the video, so that there’s not one single version, but endless, multiple versions of the video.

DUNGY: So rather than edit the video on one single timeline, Tzu and a few programmers—Sebastian and his collaborator Jan Gerber—could code an algorithm that edited the video in an infinite number of ways. Tzu could present infinite ways of understanding Southeast Asia.

HO TZU NYEN: It was almost an immediate kind of like, click for me, that the project finally found its form after three years of wondering. We started on that in 2015, and we presented it in 2017.

DUNGY: They created a website to host the work: cdosea.org. If you go to the website, you’ll encounter a solid black screen with an index of the alphabet at the bottom. And then, images and videos flash across the screen—

HO TZU NYEN: The images, they range from snippets of movies to home videos, to videos that tourists shoot in Southeast Asia, to documentaries, to animation that are cut up and rearranged. And at the same time, you will hear a voice over track sometimes sung, sometimes spoken, sometimes whispered, describing certain concepts related to Southeast Asia in combination with this footage.

DUNGY: Everytime you refresh the website, you see new videos in a different order responding to these terms that Tzu has set. All generated by this algorithm that his programmers coded.

HO TZU NYEN: So it just keeps generating new versions and new renders. Sometimes it fits perfectly. Sometimes it is, I would say, it’s strange. Sometimes it’s strange in a beautiful way, and sometimes it’s just strange. And you would have to live with the just strange if you want also those moments of unpredictable beauty that can happen.

DUNGY: So exactly how many versions of the work are there?

HO TZU NYEN: I have thought about that but the mathematics of it would be beyond me. Instinctively I was going to say it's probably infinites but then infinity is such a strong word, so I hesitate to use that, but I would say that the combinations are already a lot.

DUNGY: There’s 5,066 video clips, 277 sound clips, and 260 voice tracks. Multiply those and you get a number that would take way too much time to recite out loud. And Tzu regularly adds new videos for the algorithm to draw upon for the dictionary.

[MUSIC]

HO TZU NYEN: So I remember a discussion with a museum and they were, this was maybe six, seven years ago, and they were basically just quite disturbed by the fact that there is no one single video that they are purchasing and entering into their collection, right?

DUNGY: For Tzu, creating a work using technology solved a problem. But when a work like this enters a museum collection, the idea of caring for something that is constantly changing is a huge challenge. When museums contacted Tzu to ask about purchasing the work about seven years back…

HO TZU NYEN: Many of these conversations always were tinged with some kind of a fear. So the fact that this video is mutable, that it changes, disturbed the museum and they couldn’t quite deal with this. And then also in the end, they mentioned that they probably didn’t have the adequate staff who could deal with this, even if it entered their collection. And that’s when the conversation ended.

DUNGY: Some museums didn’t have the bandwidth to care for software-based work. And again, most conservators just don’t have the expertise to deal with these challenges.

HO TZU NYEN: But I would say in the last three to five years, I would say there’s been a kind of a shift in attitude. So rather than complications and complexities being a conversation ender, you know, now I think there is a kind of interest and a willingness to explore together what is the best way to preserve these works.

[MUSIC]

DUNGY: Thanks to people like Jonathan, these kinds of acquisitions are more possible in museums now. What does that process even look like though?

It’s a matter of documenting exactly how the work was created.

HO TZU NYEN: So, really going through every single component of the hardware required to run it, but also the software part of it. So, for example, the language that it was written in, the coding language, and what kind of operating systems, etc.

But I would say the conversation after this would have to go one layer deeper, actually, which is, when one starts to imagine that these operating systems are no longer in existence.

DUNGY: What happens to the piece in the future? When new technologies no longer support Tzu’s code?

HO TZU NYEN: Probably there are two possible answers. The first would be we have to try to ensure that they can be migrated to different systems. But the other strand of the conversation, which is interesting, it goes back to the intention of why you programmed these systems in this specific way.

DUNGY: In other words, your conceptual goals for the piece. What do you want the piece to do?

HO TZU NYEN: And the only way to describe this is in a non technical way. So we go back into concepts and intentions. And I would say these kind of instructions, in the end, they could be just as important as the technical ones, right? So hopefully with this second set of conceptual parameters or directions, I imagine that if one could describe them so precisely, maybe it’s possible to reconstruct your work just based on those sets of instructions with entirely different systems.

[MUSIC]

HO TZU NYEN: This is kind of quite speculative, but I would say we are doing both of these things at the same time. Actually with all the different museums interested in The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, this is where I see the conversations finally heading to.

DUNGY: When The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia is acquired by a museum, Tzu hands over the algorithm and all of the video assets that the piece uses. But the museum only receives the video assets from the moment in time that it is acquired—not the videos that Tzu adds to the repository thereafter. So when the work enters a museum collection, it becomes only one version of itself. In the context of a museum, does the work lose its ever-changing quality? Does the piece stop living?

HO TZU NYEN: I would say there is an interesting tension there, and I’m not sure if this tension can ever go away. We are talking about whether the artwork goes into the collection to live or to die, right? And to choose either life or death seems very extreme.

To me, I would rather have a state in which it is both alive and dead at the same time. So I suppose a slightly negative way of looking at that would be a zombie. But maybe a more interesting way to think of it is like Schrödinger’s cat.

So Schrödinger’s cat before the experimenter lifts the lid to see whether the cat is dead, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. So I would like to imagine my works in the storage of all the different museums as being Schrödinger’s cats before the experimenter lifts the lid. So refusing this either or choice and being both at the same time.

—

DUNGY: Immaterial is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise.

Our production staff includes Salman Ahad Khan, Ann Collins, Samantha Henig, Eric Nuzum, Emma Vecchione, Sarah Wambold, and Jamie York.

Additional staff includes Julia Bordelon, Skyla Choi, Maria Kozanecka, and Rachel Smith.

This season would not be possible without Andrea Bayer, Inka Drögemüller, and Douglas Hegley.

Sound design by Ariana Martinez and Kristin Mueller.

This episode includes original music composed by Austin Fisher.

Fact-checking by Mary Mathis and Claire Hyman.

Special thanks to Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong and Avery Trufelman.

Immaterial is made possible by Dasha Zhukova Niarchos. Additional support is provided by the Zodiac Fund.

This episode would not have been possible without Associate Conservator Jonathan Farbowitz, Conservator in Charge Nora Kennedy, Collections technician Sam Winks, Kevin and Jennifer McCoy, and Ho Tzu Nyen.

And special thanks to Associate Curator Lesley Ma and Associate Curator Lauren Rosati.

To learn more about this episode and see pictures of the artworks featured, visit The Met’s website at metmuseum.org/immaterialtime.

I’m your host, Camille Dungy.

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