Collecting and Preserving New Media and Performance Art (with Pip and Libby)

Pip Laurenson with film scanner
Pip Laurenson at UCL with the high-tech celluloid film scanner

While in England, I (Lucas) was lucky enough to visit Pip Laurenson and Libby Ireland at University College London. They have a whole program which tackles the philosophical and practical challenges of conserving media art and performative art. In the photo above, you can see Pip showing me a very fancy celluloid film scanning device, used for transferring 35mm or 16mm films to high-resolution digital video files.

In the same room (I wish I had taken a photo!) there was a pile of sample video formats – ranging from U-Matic, Beta, VHS, mini-DV, DVD etc. One of the big questions for the conservation of moving image work is when and how to transfer from one format to another – and the aesthetic considerations of such transfers.

With conservation decisions about media artworks, there aren’t really any right or wrong answers – much of this is done on a case-by-case basis. A lot depends on the artists’ stated intentions, alongside experienced judgements about the most important things to prioritise about a particular artwork (Louise and I refer to these as the work’s “DNA”).

Libby Ireland with artwork undergoing conservation
Conservator Libby Ireland with artwork undergoing conservation

In the conservation lab at UCL, Libby showed me this artwork by pioneering kinetic artist Liliane Lijn. It’s called Cosmic Flares III (1966).

cosmic flares iii
Liliane Lijn, Cosmic Flares III, 1966.
Courtesy Liliane Lijn, Rodeo London, Piraeus. © Liliane Lijn. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2021. Photo: Stephen Weiss/ Liliane Lijn

The work consists of a painted timber frame, a perspex panel with a pattern of dots made of small polymer lenses (a bit like contact lenses for your eyes), and a set of incandescent light bulbs set into the frame edge. The light bulbs turn on and off in different combinations to create an ever changing kinetic light sculpture.

The light bulbs were very specifically chosen for the work, which was made in the 1960s. Of course, these bulbs are no longer commercially available, so the challenge for the conservator is to work with the artist (who is still alive), the collector who owns the work, and various lightbulb manufacturers to come up with a solution. Possible solutions could include:

  • to commission the fabrication of bespoke incandescent lightbulbs to match the originals;
  • to reverse engineer the bulbs so that they have the same outer shell but with an LED insert;
  • to start from scratch and remake the whole artwork with new bulbs;
  • to try out some other solution.

In the end, what decision is made will depend on a range of overlapping factors:

  • how flexible the artist is in allowing the work to evolve into new technological formats;
  • how expensive the new lightbulbs are (and how much the artwork’s owner is prepared to stump up);
  • the quality of light that any replacement bulbs have, relative to the originals;
  • and what “meaning” those specific bulbs had in the original work.

There are a lot of factors and the solution is always going to be an experiment, and an opportunity for learning.

While we (Pip, Libby, and I) were talking, we reflected on the fact that the practice-based research processes underpinning conservation are dialogical – they involve a lot of conversations, and these conversations can generate fascinating stories which, if shared with an audience, can enrich our experience of the work. That’s why it’s great that Pip and Libby are so diligent in publishing the stories of their work in collecting and conserving new media and performance art. You can see some of their articles here and here.

Proposition for the museum acquisition of Horror Film 1

Museums find it difficult to collect works of media and performance art, compared with traditional art objects like paintings, drawings, and sculpture. This makes sense. A media artwork might consist of a combination of software and hardware, as well as data-storage components (digital files, audio tapes, celluloid films, etc) all of which can be volatile – they decay, software goes out of date, etc.

And performative works are often made to be experienced “live” – they don’t exist as durable objects. So collecting media and live art is tricky. But it should be done! If not, museums are not honouring their responsibility to store and transmit significant cultural works into the future.

I (Lucas) have always struggled with the poor historicisation of conceptual and performance art. It’s difficult for younger generations of artists to access and build upon the work of our predecessors if we never get to experience those works for ourselves. So I believe it behooves museums to put in the effort, and skill up their staff on the best ways to collect and care for ephemeral / experience-based art.
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Making connections in France and England

I (Lucas) am on a trip to Europe, mainly for family reasons. While I’m here, I decided to take the opportunity to visit some folks TLC has been working with for a while.

This is Raja Appuswamy, a data scientist who’s been leading the “synthetic DNA” component of our collaboration. Raja lives in the south of France, and it so happened that my family was passing close to his town, so we met up for a gelato in Nice.

Raja and Lucas meet in Nice

In this photo, Raja hands over a plastic vial containing four tiny stainless steel capsules of synthetic DNA. The DNA in these capsules houses a prototype version of our Horror Film 1 Users Manual.

four tiny stainless steel capsules

The proposition is this: synthetic DNA can store vast amounts of data, without loss or degradation, at room temperature, for 1000 years. For this reason, Raja argues, synthetic DNA may be a good candidate for archiving items of cultural significance. It’s early days for this technology – using synthetic DNA is still too expensive to be properly useful – so really, our collaboration thus far stands as a ‘proof of concept’ and a provocation.

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Vale Malcolm Le Grice (1940-2024)

We, Lucas and I, are so saddened by the passing of Malcolm Le Grice. Lucas and Malcolm first met in 2003. Reconnecting in Sydney in 2010, Malcolm told Lucas he felt it was time ‘hang up his boots’ on performing Horror Film 1. Since then, we’ve been in intermittent contact with Malcolm, lots in the past couple of years. 

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What’s in the DNA capsule for ‘Horror Film 1’?

Raja and I (Louise) met back in 2021 when I chaired a panel he was in at iPRES. Our session was online and we had time to chat beforehand. I’d read up about his paper on DNA storage. I knew something about this because I saw a great presentation about it from former National Film and Sound Archive director Jan Muller. Muller loved DNA storage and he organised for Cathy Freeman’s Olympic win to be stored on DNA and then decoded from that source for display on the Opera House sails in Sydney. I don’t have specific dates for this work but it was in the period around 2016.

Somehow I discovered Raja was looking for a “use case” from cultural heritage to show the potential of DNA storage and that’s how we began a dialogue about the work Lucas and I have been doing with Malcolm Le Grice to make a user’s manual for Horror Film 1 (building on our project Wo(Man) with Mirror with Guy Sherwin, and lessons from work with Lynn Loo on Autumn Fog). 

Fast forward to Feb 2023 and Raja was ready to actually encode some content on DNA. What went in there? Here’s a screenshot from the Dropbox that Raja used to store all the final content:
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The Provocation of Synthetic DNA

raja with synthetic dna capsule
Raja Appuswamy shows capsule of synthetic DNA

I (Lucas) am thinking about the provocation of sending info 1000 years into the future in the synthetic DNA capsule.

This provocation emerges from our collaboration with Raja Appuswamy, a data scientist at Eurecom in France, who is storing our Horror Film 1 Users Manual and associated documentation materials on synthetic DNA.

Raja is working with our project as a demonstration of a ‘use case’ for synthetic DNA storage – the idea is that items of intangible cultural heritage (like Horror Film 1) can be sent into the future as an act of preservation, or archiving.
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Re-enactment, Users Manuals and DNA Storage: methods for media art preservation

Here’s a paper that we recently presented in Meanjin Brisbane for the 2024 ISEA conference (International Symposium on Electronic Art). We presented as part of the 4th Summit on Media Art Archiving.

It’s called “Re-enactment, Users Manuals and DNA Storage: methods for media art preservation”, co-authored by Louise Curham, Lucas Ihlein, Raja Appuswamy.

About the authors:
Louise and Lucas are Teaching and Learning Cinema (TLC), and Raja is a data scientist in France at Eurecom.

The paper is really just a brief intro to the project we’re working on at the moment.

Abstract

This paper discusses a novel approach to media art preservation led by Australian artist-archivist group Teaching and Learning Cinema, using the field of expanded cinema as a case study.Works of 1970s expanded cinema (which combine celluloid film projection with live performance) are typical of the inherent “lossiness” of much 20th and 21st century media art. While offering richly embodied experiences in their moment of enactment, expanded cinema’s ephemerality means that it risks falling out of circulation and thus becoming unavailable for future experience. Teaching and Learning Cinema, over the past 20 years, has evolved a methodology for preserving works of expanded cinema, featuring three overlapping approaches. First, intergenerational transfer is attempted: in this phase, younger artists learn about the work from its originators, and produce live re-enactments. During the second phase, a users manual is assembled, encoding the artwork as a set of instructions with the intention of making it available for future generations of performers and audiences. Thirdly, the archived material from phases one and two is stored on synthetic DNA, with a view to transmission into the deep future (perhaps 1000 years). While the first two phases are urgent, preventing the work’s immediate extinction, the third phase is speculative, broadening the enquiry to explore the question of cultural heritage across much longer
timeframes.

Keywords

Media art preservation; time-based art preservation; archival practice; preservation; DNA storage; manual making; expanded cinema; re-enactment; media art history.

Farewell Peter Mudie

Peter Mudie working with Buwantaro and Albie Thoms, processing 16mm film – photo by Martin Heine, 1999.
Peter Mudie working with Buwantaro and Albie Thoms, processing 16mm film – photo by Martin Heine, 1999. (Click on the photo to go to Peter’s article about Albie Thoms.)

This week we lost a VIP in the experimental cinema community. Peter Mudie was a teacher at University of Western Australia, where I studied fine arts in the mid-1990s. Shortly after he arrived in Perth (from Canada via London) he set up a Super-VHS editing suite, and began teaching the history and practice of experimental film and video. It was a revelation.

Each week we would watch films from the canon, dating back 100 years, right up to the present. Often Peter had obtained celluloid prints on 16mm, and he would lace the projector up in front of us, cigarette dangling from his lips. His drawling, chuckling style of teaching, infused with marxist politics, was infectious.
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