This paper critically examines the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ archival document for David Rokeby’s Seen (2002) in order to justify “that collecting and archiving can be the beginning, rather than at the end for the critical life of an artwork,” as argued by Graham Beryl in his book Redefi...

Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet presents an interesting study for the preservation of new media artworks from both theoretical positions of reproduction and technological and/or actual physical methods of preservation. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Ages of Its Technolog...

  The glossary contained in Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach (2003) states: “To emulate a work is to devise a way of imitating the original look of the piece by completely different means. The term emulation can be applied generally to any refabrication or substitution o...

  “To migrate an artwork involves upgrading equipment and source material.” [1]   For example, migrating the televisions used in Nam June Paik’s artwork Royal Canadian Mounted Police consisted of replacing them with LCD or plasma screens. “The major disadvantage of migration is that...

Migration is a current strategy applied in the effort to preserve media artworks. Certain technologies at risk due to obsolescence can be replaced by new technologies that are both more efficient and available. However, in some cases, conducting such migrations can by dangerous, as technologies t...

“The most conservative collecting strategy—the default strategy for most museums—is to store a work physically.” [1]   The principle generally applied in long-term preservation is to secure many duplicates of a given piece of equipment if its condition can be maintained in a storage env...

“The most radical preservation strategy is to reinterpret the work each time it is re-created.” [1] The reinterpretation of UNEX Sign No. 2 by Jenny Holzer required deciding which medium would have the same metaphoric value as the 1980s-era electronic UNEX sign in the work. With Holzer having ch...

  Reconstruction consists of reproducing the behaviours and effects of a work using few or no components from the original piece. This is possible, for example, in highly specific cases where a technological work includes a software program in which the artist has created objects accompanied ...

Day 2, Group 2 Ainsley Walton, Claudia De Hueck scholar – National Gallery of Canada The National Gallery of Canada holds numerous 35mm slide-based artworks in its permanent collection. The use of slides as a presentation method for projecting photographic images holds an integral po...

Day 1, Group 1 Richard Gagnier, Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), chair of the DOCAM Conservation & Preservation Committee, Montréal The term ‘time-based media’ encompasses works of art that deploy their effects within a certain notion of mobility or changes that occur in...

Day 1, Group 2 Howard Schubert, Ivanka Iordanova, and Alexis Lenk, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), DOCAM Conservation & Preservation Committee, Montréal Preserving and cataloguing digitally born architectural projects is a challenge that should be met quickly in order to...

Day 1, Group 3 Caitlin Jones, New York, Researcher in Residence, FDL Paul Kuranko, New York, Researcher in Residence, FDL During their residency, Caitlin Jones and Paul Kuranko will undertake three case studies of artwork and will survey and assess the considerable amount of activity ...

Day 2, Group 2 Michal Masa, International Centre for Art and New Technologies (CIANT), Prague CIANT will present complex data sets they are dealing with through several projects like V.I.R.U.S., AMA&NT and ‘Old Town Square‘, and the challenge they represent for the CASPAR proj...

Day 2, Group 2 Guillaume Labelle, Université de Montréal Lawrence Bird, McGill University – CCA The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is in the process of acquiring several digital archives. These include Greg Lynn’s Embryological House (1997-2002), an early example of the d...

January 14, 2008 Will Straw, McGill University Will Straw © DOCAM 2008 seminaire2008_straw.xml 1) Introduction; “Archiving is not where you look for it”. 2) “The criteria of ‘perfect’ reproduction is not an absolute one”; “The migration ...

Day 1, Group 5 Luciana Duranti, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver This paper will present the preliminary findings of InterPARES 2, an international multi-disciplinary research project that aims to develop theory and methods...

Day 1, Group 1 Richard Gagnier, Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and DOCAM Conservation & Preservation Committee, Montréal Émilie Boudrias, DOCAM Conservation & Preservation Committee, Montréal This presentation focuses on an analysis of two interviews with artists. It ...

Day 1, Group 1 Richard Gagnier, Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), chair of the DOCAM Conservation & Preservation Committee, Montréal Conservation and Preservation Committee presentation. The term ‘time-based media’ encompasses works of art that deploy their effects within a c...

Day 1, Group 4 Rolf Wolfensberger, Museum of Communication, Berne Against the background of current preservation strategies for electronic artworks, this presentation discusses the methodological shift towards a focus on documenting user experience and contextual impacts. The paper w...

Day 1, Group 4 Gaby Wijers, Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk), Amsterdam The focus of this case study, within the scope of the Inside Installations project, was to establish what was important for the preservation of Jeffrey Shaw’s computer-based interactive installation and how...

Introduction One of the major issues surrounding the preservation and conservation of media artworks is assuring the stability of the media and the smooth functioning of the equipment involved. With technology constantly changing and equipment and media often fragile and their materials subject to...

Day 1, Group 2 Mona Jimenez, Tisch School for the Arts, New York University The presentation will begin with an overview of the goals and scope of the seminar “Handling New Media”, a required course in the graduate program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation at New York Univ...

January 7, 2008 Alain Depocas, Director of the DOCAM Research Alliance, Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology Alain Depocas © DOCAM 2008 seminaire2008_depocas.xml 1) Introduction to The Variable Media Network; The "Seeing Doub...

Day 1, Group 2 Caitlin Jones, Guggenheim Museum, New York Conservators have explored many traditional and experimental strategies for dealing with works of an ephemeral nature. Among these strategies is a way to replicate obsolete or unavailable materials or hardware – emulation. To emu...

Day 1, Group 4 Pip Laurenson, Tate, London This talk reflects on “where we are now” in the conservation of time-based media works of art and the challenges we face over the next few years... Pip Laurenson © DOCAM 2006 2006/sommet2006_41_laurenson ...

En 2001, l’artiste canadien David Rokeby a reçu une commande des Oakville Galleries pour réaliser une oeuvre qui établirait un rapport avec le jardin adjacent à l’un des pavillons des galeries. L’artiste a alors créé une oeuvre in situ, Machine for Taking Time. Au printemps 2006, le comm...

April 6, 2009 Alain Depocas, Director of the DOCAM Research Alliance, Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology * Please note that this presentation is in French Alain Depocas © DOCAM 2009 seminaire2009_depocas.xml 1) Introduction...

January 19, 2009 Louise Poissant, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, UQAM, and Director of the Groupe de recherche en arts médiatiques (GRAM)   * Please note that this presentation is in French Louise Poissant © DOCAM 2009 seminaire2009_poissant.xml 1) Cons...

March 9, 2009 Richard Gagnier, Head of the Conservation Department, Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA)   * Please note that this presentation is in French Richard Gagnier © DOCAM 2009 seminaire2009_gagnier.xml 1) Préservation de l'équipement (Royal...

January 17, 2006 Caitlin Jones, Guggenheim Museum, New York Caitlin Jones © DOCAM 2006 seminaire2006_Jones.xml 1) Introduction to the Variable Media Network, description of variable media behaviours, and strategies for preservation / Introduction au Réseau ...