Philadelphia Museum of Art: Planning for Time-Based Media Artwork Preservation NDSR Art Resident: Elise Tanner Project Mentors: Marge Huang – Digital Archivist, Library & Archives Department Rose Chiango – Associate Archivist and Records Manager,, Library & Archives Department Allison McLaughlin – Collections Assistant, Contemporary Art Department #NDSRArt

Philadelphia Museum of Art Founded in 1876, we are Philadelphia’s art museum and strive to be a place that welcomes everyone. We are home to an encyclopedic art collection including the world’s largest collection of works by Marcel Duchamp, the greatest collection of sculpture by Constantin Brancusi outside of Europe, and of course, a vibrant and growing time-based media collection of about 100 artworks. It includes works by Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, and Fiona Tan. It is one of the fastest growing areas of our collection with 70% having been acquired since 2007.

Project Background 2014: Launch of the Contemporary Caucus 2014-2015: Seven workshops involving outside guest lecturers on the themes of Collection, Conservation, Development, Marketing, and Performance & Public Programs 2015: Contemporary Caucus white paper outlines recommendation to perform a conservation assessment of the Museum’s time-based media artworks 2016: Contemporary Conservation Working Group formed Spring 2017: Conservation assessment of time based media artworks Summer 2017: Elise started her residency! In 2014, the Museum launched an internal cross-departmental project and working group named the Contemporary Caucus as a way to develop a unified vision for departments collecting contemporary art as well as to contemporize the Museum’s historical collections for present day audiences. The Contemporary Caucus is comprised of 25 representatives across 16 departments and an eight person Steering Committee. The goal of the workshops was to facilitate discussion between staff and develop recommendations for the institution. A conservation assessment of the Museum’s time-based media artworks was one of those recommendations. This assessment was conducted in Spring 2017. In 2016, a Conservation Working Group including members from the Conservation, Contemporary Art, Information & Interpretive Technologies, Registrars, and Library & Archives Department was formed and has begun its monthly meetings. One of its focus is next steps for our time based media art collection. The Conservation Working Group collaborated on our NDSR Art project proposal and we were fortunate enough to be chosen as a host institution, with Elise starting her residency this past summer.

Project Overview The Resident will help create a foundational roadmap to inform Museum staff of best practices, standards, tools, equipment, software, hardware, metadata and other technical needs which are imperative for the preservation of time-based media art in a sustainable and accessible way. create documentation of standards and best practices, background and context research for TBM tms/metadata recommendations equipment list workflow/procedural recommendations such as iteration report creating back ups - refining disk imaging workflow Fiona Tan, Inventory, 2012, six-channel color HD and color video installation, with sound

Challenges, Successes, Lessons Learned Being a supervisor and a mentor can be challenging Fitting everything into a year Acclimating to institutional culture Deep dive into TBM Interdepartmental collaboration Initiating important conversations Creating TBM backups The power of combining specialized knowledge distributed across an institution Take advantage of the cultural heritage community I hope this wasn’t case but what if you don’t get along with your boss and want to talk to your mentor but they are the same person?! Time - of course, something we all need more of Learning organization culture or even practices like how do i make a space reservation takes time and so that is being balanced with an ambitious work plan I’m sure everyone in the room has known the feeling of that you’re juggling a million things at once and putting out daily faire so it’s wonderful to have a person on your team with the unique opportunity to focus on one project and really take a deep dive. This project has many facets and so has involved meeting with people across several departments so the opportunities for collaboration and conversation that Elise has helped to initiate have been really valuable. Another great success was that we were able to move beyond the research focus of the original proposal and actually begin the backing up process. To me the most powerful lesson was the power of combining specialized knowledge distributed across an institution. I love the energy from being in the same room with people from different departments because you can see issues being tackled from all sides from many different perspectives. I really appreciate being able to gain insight outside of my digital archivist framework and try to see a bigger picture. And this energy extends beyond the PMA. With this project and others I’ve worked on, the share out nature of the cultural heritage community is really encouraging and vibrant for which I am grateful.